political cycles and economic performance in oecd countries empirical evidence from 1951 2006 this paper examines whether electoral motives and government ideology influence short term economic performance i employ data on annual gdp growth in 21 oecd countries over the 1951 2006 period and provide a battery of empirical tests in countries with two party systems gdp growth is boosted before elections and under leftwing governments in the first two years of a legislative period these findings indicate that political cycles are more prevalent in two party systems because voters can clearly punish or reward political parties for governmental performance my findings imply that we need more elaborate theories of how government ideology and electoral motives influence short term economic performance

racing to the bottom and racing to the top the crucial role of firm characteristics in foreign direct investment choices this study builds on the pollution haven and induced innovation arguments as explanations for firm behavior with regard to international environmental management and argues both need to be integrated this implies that foreign direct investment is capable of facilitating a race to the bottom and a race to the top simultaneously using novel and detailed data we test whether environmental capabilities and weaknesses and other characteristics affect us firms foreign direct investment choices in chinese provinces with more or less stringent environmental regulation this enables a more detailed analysis by allowing country regulation to vary spatially and over time our study finds that heterogeneity in capabilities and firm size jointly determine foreign direct investment and in doing so shows the simultaneity of a race to the bottom and to the top specifically firms with environmental capabilities invest in more stringently regulated regions and firms with weaknesses are less likely to target such regions these diverging effects are both moderated by firm size which further amplifies each of them our findings underscore the need to integrate pollution haven and induced innovation arguments in a joint analysis they furthermore show the relevance of methodological choices when testing hypotheses integrating the above arguments empirically

technology international trade and pollution from us manufacturing pollution emitted by us manufacturers declined markedly over the past several decades even as real manufacturing output increased i first show that most of the decline in us manufacturing pollution has resulted from changing production processes technology rather than changes in the mix of goods produced i then show that increased net imports of polluting goods international trade accounts for only a small portion of the pollution reductions from the changing mix of goods together these two findings demonstrate that shifting polluting industries overseas explains only a minor part less than 10 percent of the cleanup of us manufacturing jel f18 l23 l60 o30 q52 q53

cointegration analysis of german and british tourism demand for greece abstract germany and great britain are traditionally two of the most important sources of tourism for greece the purpose of this paper is to investigate changes in the long run demand for tourism to greece by these two countries in order to explain the demand for tourism we are using a number of leading macroeconomic variables including income in origin countries germany and great britain tourism prices in greece and transportation cost and exchanges rates between the three countries annual data from the three countries covering the period from 1960 to 2000 are employed augmented dickey fuller test for unit root is examined in the univariate framework and johansen s maximum likelihood procedure is used to test the cointegration method and to estimate the number of cointegrating vectors of var model error correction models are estimated to explain german and british demand for tourism to greece

tall paper walls the political economy of visas and cross border travel cross border travel for business personal and tourism purposes is an important component of trade in services in 2013 travel accounted for 25 of services export in the world trade in services accounted for 12 of gdp in the world hence the role of travel in many economies is substantial the current paper studies the determinants of cross border flows of people with a particular emphasis on the role of visa policies we adopt the un general assembly affinity index a measure of the quality of bilateral relations between nations to instrument for bilateral visa policy we find that ceteris paribus imposing visa restrictions on a country reduces travel from that country by about 73 in 2010 implying restrictive visa policies discourage cross border travel significantly this implies an adverse impact of restrictive visa policies on trade in services

underlying causal factors of the european union energy intensity econometric evidence abstract the aim of the research is to determine the main factors that define the level of energy intensity in the countries of the european union the research was conducted by estimation of six baseline and six auxiliary regressions with and without time lags in form of one way fixed and random effects error component models on different unbalanced panel data samples covering the period 1995 2015 the obtained baseline regressions results generate three sets of findings the first set consists of extremely robust findings relating to the positive influence of gross fixed capital formation and industrial gross value added and negative effects of real per capita gross domestic product and oil products retail price these variables are statistically significant in all 36 baseline empirical models the second set of results consists of quite robust findings relating to insignificant influence of foreign direct investment and negative influence of coal price according to the results it cannot be confirm the hypothesis of energy saving technology transfer via foreign direct investments in european union member states the third set of results shows that the research has failed to generate any robust findings for economic openness import ratio urbanization and natural gas price which means that the effect of these determinants on energy intensity in european union member states is unspecified finally auxiliary regressions estimation results show that changes in the sectorial composition within the european union member states economies have not enhanced energy saving technological transfer via foreign direct investments

simple solutions to the initial conditions problem in dynamic nonlinear panel data models with unobserved heterogeneity i study a simple widely applicable approach to handling the initial conditions problem in dynamic nonlinear unobserved effects models rather than attempting to obtain the joint distribution of all outcomes of the endogenous variables i propose finding the distribution conditional on the initial value and the observed history of strictly exogenous explanatory variables the approach is flexible and results in simple estimation strategies for at least three leading dynamic nonlinear models probit tobit and poisson regression i treat the general problem of estimating average partial effects and show that simple estimators exist for important special cases copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

tourism demand modelling and forecasting a review of recent research abstract this paper reviews the published studies on tourism demand modelling and forecasting since 2000 one of the key findings of this review is that the methods used in analysing and forecasting the demand for tourism have been more diverse than those identified by other review articles in addition to the most popular time series and econometric models a number of new techniques have emerged in the literature however as far as the forecasting accuracy is concerned the study shows that there is no single model that consistently outperforms other models in all situations furthermore this study identifies some new research directions which include improving the forecasting accuracy through forecast combination integrating both qualitative and quantitative forecasting approaches tourism cycles and seasonality analysis events impact assessment and risk forecasting

a rejoinder to a commentary on does the fed contribute to a political business cycle jerry tempelman public choice 132 433 436 2007 claims that advances in macroeconomic theory and in the implementation of monetary policy make discretionary monetary policy preferable to a rules based system his supporting evidence is based on the performance of the fed during the volcker greenspan regimes his evidence is inappropriate and his conclusion supporting discretion over rules unwarranted

an empirical investigation of the pollution haven effect with strategic environment and trade policy abstract using a new dataset on the stringency and enforcement of environmental policy this study is the first to find robust confirmation of a pollution haven effect in a cross country context by accounting for strategically determined environment trade and intellectual property right ipr policies a simple game theoretic approach to policy determination is described which suggests an identification strategy based on other country characteristics it is found that for the top 20th percentile of countries in terms of growth in u s multinational affiliate value added as much as 8 6 of that growth between 1999 and 2003 can be attributed to declining relative stringency and enforcement of environmental policy the results are robust to a number of identification tests weak iv tests and third country spatial effects further evidence is found that relatively footloose industries are more likely to be affected by environmental policy than more traditionally dirty industries and enforcement of environmental policies tends to be a more important deterrent than the stringency of the policy set

footloose and pollution free in numerous studies economists have found little empirical evidence that environmental regulations affect trade flows in this paper we propose and test several common explanations for why the effect of environmental regulations on trade may be difficult to detect we demonstrate that whereas most trade occurs among industrialized economies environmental regulations have stronger effects on trade between industrialized and developing economies we find that for most industries pollution abatement costs are a small component of total costs and are unrelated to trade flows in addition we show that those industries with the largest pollution abatement costs also happen to be the least geographically mobile or footloose after accounting for these distinctions we measure a significant effect of pollution abatement costs on imports from developing countries and in pollution intensive footloose industries

a commentary on does the fed contribute to a political business cycle abrams and iossifov 2006 find that during 1957 2004 monetary policy turned significantly more expansionary prior to u s presidential elections when the federal reserve chairman and the incumbent president belonged to the same political party however their long sample period obscures changes in trends during the period stemming from advances in macroeconomic theory and in the implementation of monetary policy indeed when one considers only the volcker greenspan era 1979 2004 there is insufficient evidence to accept the notion of a political business cycle effect

leading indicator tourism forecasts leading indicators have been widely used in general business forecasting situations but only rarely in a tourism context in this study leading indicator transfer function tf models are developed to generate forecasts of international tourism demand from the uk to six major destinations the out of sample forecasting accuracy is compared with the accuracy of forecasts generated by univariate arima and error correction models ecms the inclusion of a causal input within an arima time series framework tf model does not result in an improvement in forecasting performance the time series models outperform the ecm for short term forecasting but the ecm generates more accurate longer term forecasts

multinationals multi plant economies and the gains from trade a general equilibrium model of a multinational enterprise based on economies of multi plant operation is developed these economies are modelled as arising from the existence of a joint input whose productivity in each production facility is independent of the number of facilities maintained by a firm the multinational thus offers the world increased technical efficiency by eliminating the duplication of the joint input that would occur with independent national firms since this technical efficiency may come at the expense of increased market power the full determinants of home country host country and world welfare are considered

incomplete contracts and the boundaries of the multinational firm a b s t r a c t using data on u s intra firm and arm s length imports for 5705 products imported from 220 countries we examine the determinants of the share of u s imports that are intra firm we examine two predictions that arise from antras 2003 antras and helpman 2008 and antras and helpman 2004 first we find that consistent with the implicit logic of antras 2003 and the explicit predictions of antras and helpman 2008 vertical inte gration is increasing in the importance of non contractible headquarter inputs relative to non contractible supplier inputs in other words we show that only non contractible head quarter inputs affect the firm s make or buy decision second we also provide empirical support for the antras and helpman 2004 prediction that intra firm trade is largest where non contractible headquarter inputs are important and productivity is high

does the fed contribute to a political business cycle in contrast to findings of other studies evidence is presented to support the existence of a federal reserve induced political monetary cycle that corresponds to the u s presidential election cycle using various taylor rules we find support for the view that fed policy turns significantly more expansionary in the seven quarters prior to the election but only when the fed chair and incumbent presidential party have partisan affiliations

the economic impact of on screen tourism the case of the lord of the rings and the hobbit the economic impacts of on screen tourism are particularly interesting and research in this area can provide useful information to governments making decisions regarding subsidising film production and forming relevant marketing strategies no reliable and systematic approach for measuring the economic impacts of on screen tourism currently exists and this study is the first to evaluate the overall economic impacts of on screen tourism by comparing the impacts of two series of films the lord of the rings and the hobbit both filmed in new zealand a new approach combining econometric and computable general equilibrium modelling techniques is used in the assessment the results show that the lord of the rings did not significantly impact on the tourism and economy of new zealand while the hobbit trilogy had a significant positive impact which may be due to effective marketing strategies and media convergence

the performance of periodic autoregressive models in forecasting seasonal u k consumption the parameters of a periodic model are allowed to vary according to the time at which observations are made periodic autoregressive models are fitted to the quarterly values of seasonally unadjusted real nondurable consumers expenditure for the united kingdom and its components the periodic model offers no improvement over conventional specifications if the aggregate is modeled directly on the other hand periodic models generally perform well for the components which contain additional seasonal information the choice between a periodic or nonperiodic specification is also shown to have an important influence on the resulting dynamic properties

predicting tourism demand using fuzzy time series and hybrid grey theory abstract forecasting tourism demand in a capacity constrained service industry has been a major theme in this field this study presents two models that can be used to predict tourism demand both two models are based on artificial intelligent ai neural network theory was first applied to tourism demand forecasting in 2000 and empirically tested using the raw data from hong kong this work provides empirical evidence using grey theory and fuzzy time series which do not need large sample and long past time series these ai models are estimated for tourist arrivals to taiwan from hong kong united states and germany during the period of 1989 2000 gm 1 1 model achieves an accurate forecast when the sample data show a stable increase trend nevertheless the markov modification model can efficiently improved the gm 1 1 model when the sample data show significant fluctuations

the short term price effect of a tourist tax through a dynamic demand model the case of the balearic islands abstract tourist taxes have become an important source of revenue for many tourist destinations taxes on accommodation are upheld by their proponents as a way of shifting the local tax burden on to non residents while the travel industry claims that these levies do significant damage to their level of competitiveness the objective of this paper is to identify the market s sensitivity to price changes in travel related services or groups of services assuming that one of the main factors that influences travel decisions is the information on the destination that consumers receive in order to include this effect the study applies a combination of a diffusion model and a traditional economic utility theory model to tourists visiting the balearic islands spain from the united kingdom germany france and the netherlands

does environmental regulation drive away inbound foreign direct investment evidence from a quasi natural experiment in china abstract this paper investigates whether environmental regulation affects inbound foreign direct investment the identification uses the two control zones tcz policy implemented by the chinese government in 1998 in which tougher environmental regulations were imposed in tcz cities but not others our difference in difference in differences estimation explores three dimension variations specifically city i e tcz versus non tcz cities industry i e more polluting industries relative to less polluting ones and year i e before and after the tcz policy we find that tougher environmental regulation leads to less foreign direct investment meanwhile we find that foreign multinationals from countries with better environmental protections than china are insensitive to the toughening environmental regulation while those from countries with worse environmental protections than china show strong negative responses

does tourism support supply side structural reform in china abstract a supply side structural reform ssr has been carried out in china since late 2015 with a view to reducing overproduction in selected products such as coal iron and steel this paper examines whether the development of international tourism in china could support ssr using an multi methods approach that combines an econometric model and a computable general equilibrium model it finds that the development of tourism can reduce the outputs of overcapacity industries and reallocate surplus labour to tourism related industries the calibration of 30 provincial cge models demonstrates that the impact of tourism on reform in provinces with severer industry overcapacities is much stronger this study contributes to the literature on the spillover effects of tourism on non tourism sectors through its combination of econometric and cge models practical implications are also presented

agglomeration effects in foreign direct investment and the pollution haven hypothesis does environmental regulation impair international competitiveness of pollution intensive industries to the extent that they relocate to countries with less stringent regulation turning those countries into pollution havens we test this hypothesis using panel data on outward foreign direct investment fdi flows of various industries in the german manufacturing sector and account for several econometric issues that have been ignored in previous studies most importantly we demonstrate that externalities associated with fdi agglomeration can bias estimates away from finding a pollution haven effect if omitted from the analysis we include the stock of inward fdi as a proxy for agglomeration and employ a gmm estimator to control for endogenous time varying determinants of fdi flows furthermore we propose a difference estimator based on the least polluting industry to break the possible correlation between environmental regulatory stringency and unobservable attributes of fdi recipients in the cross section when accounting for these issues we find robust evidence of a pollution haven effect for the chemical industry

environmental regulation and foreign direct investment evidence from south korea abstract this paper studies how environmental regulation shapes the pattern of foreign direct investment fdi and thereby assesses the pollution haven hypothesis conflicting results exist in the case studies examining the most advanced countries partly due to the deterrent effect of clean technology adoptions on industry migration to minimize the clean technology effect we examine the pattern of south korean fdi over 2000 2007 the period that korean firms relied on old production technologies despite facing rapidly strengthened environmental standards a difference in differences type identification strategy circumvents other potential confounders we find strong evidence that polluting industries tend to invest more in countries with laxer environmental regulations in terms of both the amount of investment intensive margin and the number of new foreign affiliates extensive margin a similar finding is obtained when imports are analyzed

visa restrictions and their adverse economic and marketing implications evidence from china abstract governments spend considerable public resources including tax dollars on marketing their cities or countries in order to become a strong brand attractive for exports foreign direct investment and tourism ironically at the same time self imposed and strict visa regulations that can potentially hamper the productivity of marketing and branding are fairly common there are valid reasons for imposing strict visa regulations two of the most important being national and economic security although strict visa regulations are a common phenomenon around the world the tourism academia have yet to argue against strict visa regulations by providing empirical evidence on their potential impact on tourism demand and hence the economy the current study is a pioneer attempt to generate awareness about the potential detrimental impacts of visa restrictions on a country s economy by using the case of people s republic of china one of the countries known to have a history of strict visa regulations the research reported in this paper was based on the standard tourism demand function which models the causal relationship between tourism demand and a number of macroeconomic variables the autoregressive distributed lag model adlm was used since it has a dynamic specification that takes the time path of the tourist decision making process into consideration by using both current and lagged values of variables results show the negative effect of visa regulations on both country level and prefecture level economies implications are discussed and recommendations provided

an analysis of tourism policy development in modern china abstract tourism in china has rapidly developed since the adoption of open door economic reform policy in 1978 there is still little understanding about the role played by the chinese government in the development of tourism this paper represents a first attempt to identify the roles played by the chinese government in developing its international inbound tourism the period examined is from 1978 a turning point for china s development to the present generally the chinese government has played the following roles operator involving ownership and provision of the infrastructure for tourism development and operation of tourism business activities regulator formulating and implementing regulations to control tourism business investment stimulator stimulating tourism investment through the provision of financial incentives promoter spending money on the promotion of tourism in the international market coordinator coordinating activities of different government departments with respect to tourism and educator establishing a system of tourism education institutions and providing tourism education and training programs analysis of the policies and government roles in china was examined systematically in terms of demands decisions outputs and impacts for each of the three historical periods identified namely 1978 1985 1986 1991 and 1992 to the present the framework adopted for examining the policies in terms of demands decisions etc represents the specific policy issue components of the tourism policy making process suggested by hall s model 1994 based on china s experiences some implications of the governmental roles for other developing countries are suggested

on the sustainability of the economic growth path of turkey 1995 2009 abstract this paper aims to bring afront the economical and the ecological consequences of the growth path of turkey with the help of a sectoral dataset provided by the world input output database available for the period of 1995 2009 by simple input output accounting it is found that the economic growth path taken in the 2003 2009 period has gradually become both more energy and pollution intensive as compared to the 1995 2002 period moreover the gradual deterioration in environmental as well as labor standards so as to gain competitive edge in export markets led to a rapid increase in environmental degradation and deadly workplace accidents during the post 2002 period from the viewpoint of the long term development plans i e vizyon 2023 which targets to bring turkey among the 10th biggest economy in the world by 2023 past experiences therefore hint that the insistence on an unsustainable and dependent economic growth path which has been re designed under the neoliberal framework of deregulation flexibilization and privatization will aggravate not only social and ecological problems but also the current account imbalance it is concluded that the economic growth path towards the ambitious targets set by vizyon 2023 should be redefined in accordance with the economic social and environmental sustainability principles the existing subsidies to fossil fuels should be channelled to support renewable energy production