beyond gdp the quest for a measure of social welfare this paper critically examines the various approaches to the measurement of individual well being and social welfare that have been considered for the construction of alternatives to gdp special attention is devoted to recent developments in the analysis of sustainability in the study of happiness in the theory of social choice and fair allocation and in the capability approach it is suggested in the conclusion that although convergence toward a consensual approach is not impossible for the moment not one but three alternatives to gdp are worth developing jel i31 e23 e01

real exchange rate volatility and economic openness theory and evidence this paper relates the volatility of the trade weighted effective real exchange rate to the degree of trade openness of an economy the theoretical part presents an intertemporal monetary model of a small open economy with nominal rigidities both monetary and aggregate supply shocks are shown to produce ceteris paribus smaller real exchange rate movements if the country is more open to foreign trade empirical evidence on a cross section of forty eight countries confirms this relationship differences in trade openness explain a large part of the cross country variation in the volatility of the effective real exchange rate

marginal commodity tax reforms a survey as noted 30 years ago by martin feldstein optimal taxes may be useless for practical purposes and emphasis should instead be placed on the possibility of enhancing welfare by reforming existing tax rates in this perspective marginal commodity tax reforms are gaining increasing attention due to political and economic constraints on large reforms of direct or indirect taxation in this paper we summarize the main features and results of the literature on marginal commodity tax reforms pioneered by ahmad and stern further developed by yitzhaki and thirsk and recently reinterpreted by makdissi and wodon we establish new links to other fields of research namely the literature on the use of equivalence scales and on poverty measurement we also critically examine some issues associated with the implementation of marginal tax reforms with special reference to the calculation of welfare weights and revenue effects finally we suggest directions for future research on poverty reducing commodity tax reforms

capital flows and gdp in emerging economies and the role of global spillovers abstract this paper provides a global analysis of capital flow impacts on gdp for selected emerging economies as additional control variables we also include currency reserves and effective exchange rates in our analysis we distinguish between gross and net capital flows and also assess the impact of both fdi and portfolio flows accounting for the fact that common factors have been the main drivers of capital flows while country specific determinants pull factors drive the response to such shocks we analyze shocks to country groups but consider country specific responses based on a bayesian time varying panel var framework in the spirit of canova and ciccarelli 2009 based on a sample of 24 economies our results show a robust positive effect of capital flows on gdp except for korea both gross and net capital flows display a positive impact for around two quarters the impact of effective exchange rates on gdp hardly offers an explanation for a possible transmission of capital flow effects with effective depreciations both positively and negatively linked to gdp we also find that the effect of net portfolio flows is even more positive compared to net fdi flows for emerging economies finally we provide evidence that the importance of global factors increases in times of crises

the optimal linear income tax revisited abstract this paper shows that the mirrlees seade conditions of agent monotonicity and noninferiority of leisure imply the positivity of the optimal marginal income tax rate in sheshinski s model of linear income taxation as well as in the general model the optimal marginal tax rate is bounded above by the rawlsian rate which in turn is bounded by the revenue maximizing rate the optimal marginal tax rate may be arbitrarily close to the rawlsian rate however the optimal marginal tax rate is bounded away from the revenue maximizing rate whenever the individual with the lowest ability works

welfare analysis of tax reforms using household data abstract this paper discusses a methodology for calculating the distribution of gains and losses from a policy change using data for a large sample of households estimates are based on the equivalent income function which is money metric utility defined over observable variables this enables calculations to be standardised and a computer program to compute the statistics presented in the paper is available for a general demand system equivalent income is related to measures of deadweight loss and standard errors are computed for each of the welfare measures an application to u k data for 5 895 households is given which simulates a reform that involves eliminating housing subsidies

a new approach to decomposition of economic time series into permanent and transitory components with particular attention to measurement of the business cycle abstract this paper introduces a general procedure for decomposition of non stationary time series into a permanent and transitory component allowing both components to be stochastic the permanent component is shown to be a random walk with drift and the transitory or cyclical component is a stationary process with mean zero the decomposition methodology which depends only on past data and therefore is computable in real time is applied to the problem of measuring and dating business cycles in the portwar u s economy we find that measured expansions and contractions are of roughly equivalent duration and that our dating of cyclical episodes tends to lead the traditional nber dating and to a lesser extent the growth cycle chronology of zarnowitz and boschan 1977

some important properties of the social marginal utility of income this paper contains an analysis of how the social marginal utilities of income assigned to different persons change in response to changes in prices the provision of public goods and other parameters faced by the individual the effect of a parameter change is interpreted as composed of a change in the real value of marginal income and a change in total real income or utility level it is implied that even if utility levels are kept constant social marginal utilities of income remain unaltered only under special conditions which are exposed and interpreted the results are useful in applied welfare economics

exchange rate misalignment and growth old and new econometric evidence several studies have tried to identify the relationship between growth and misaligned or overvalued currencies many works easterly 2001 and fajnzylber et alii 2002 find negative correlations between exchange rate misalignment and growth for a long list of developing countries since the seventies the more overvalued the currency the smaller the per capita growth rates even after controlling the regressions for several types of variables the studies cannot reject the statistical significance of overvalued exchange rates in explaining growth this paper presents new econometric evidence for the exchange rate levels and growth relation based on a panel data study for 58 developing countries from 1960 until 1999 using ppp deviation measures our main contribution here is to estimate growth regressions with a real exchange rate index that deals with changes in real gdp per capita levels we use a new overvaluation index that takes into account variations in real per capita incomes adjusting thus our exchange rate estimates for the so called balassa samuelson effect by correcting traditional real exchange rate annual estimates for gdp per capita increases we intend to control our whole series for appreciations due to productivity increases as many authors do for some specific years

government investment and fiscal stimulus effects of government investment are studied in an estimated neoclassical growth model the analysis focuses on two dimensions that are critical for understanding government investment as a fiscal stimulus implementation delays for building public capital and expected fiscal adjustments to deficit financed spending implementation delays can produce small or even negative labor and output responses to increases in government investment in the short run anticipated fiscal adjustments matter both quantitatively and qualitatively for long run growth effects when public capital is insufficiently productive distorting financing can make government investment contractionary at longer horizons

the theory of reform and indian indirect taxes abstract given a set of value judgements an initial state and a model of the economy one can ask whether some feasible tax change would increase welfare we do this by defining the marginal cost in terms of welfare of raising an extra rupee from the i th good the inverse optimum problem is the calculation of non negative welfare weights on households which imply that the initial state is optimum if no such welfare weights exist then a pareto improvement is possible we illustrate the concepts and results using data from the indian economy for 1979 1980 directions of tax reform for a number of specific social welfare functions and for pareto improvements are presented

real exchange rate behavior and economic performance in ldcs in recent years policy discussions have included increasing references to real exchange rate rer stability and correct exchange rate alignment as crucial conditions to improve economic performance in less developed countries ldcs 1 evidence from latin american asian and african countries is often quoted to support the view that the link between rer behavior and economic performance is strong it is argued that while unstable rers inhibited export growth in some of latin america their stability was fundamental in promoting east asian expansion in many african countries on the other hand persistently misaligned local currencies harmed the development of agriculture reducing domestic food supply 2 but in spite of its importance no empirical work has been attempted either to test the relationship between rer behavior and performance indicators at a broad multicountry level or to investigate the sources of rer variability and misalignment in ldcs the theoretical literature on rer determinants has been recently surveyed by sebastian edwards 3 he distinguishes between equilibrium and disequilibrium rers and between external and domestic rer determinants although domestic policies are often said to account for significant rer variations empirical work has only concentrated on the effect of nominal devaluations4 or speculative crises arising from expansionary monetary policies in a system of fixed ex

sensitivity of optimal commodity tax rates to alternative demand functional forms an econometric case study of india this study investigates on a nine commodity disaggregation of indian budget data nss 28th round the sensitivity of optimal commodity tax rates to alternative demand systems les and rnlps optimality is used here in the very special sense of being conditional on observed expenditure and fixed consumer prices the alternative sets of tax rates agree at low levels of inequality aversion but disagree widely at rawlsian levels les is heavily rejected in favour of its one parameter generalisation rnlps the results suggest that les price elasticities should not be used in optimal tax calculations the optimal tax rates imply only a modest redistribution

a computational procedure for calculating optimal commodity taxes with illustrative evidence from indian budget data a simple procedure for calculating optimal commodity taxes is proposed which takes into account the simultaneous interdependence of taxes expenditure and price levels responses the method also allows for the social marginal utility of income to depend on prices besides expenditures in a manner implied by the assumed preference functional form illustrative calculations on indian budget data provide evidence not only in favor of the procedure but of considerable sensitivity of directions of marginal tax reforms to the data set rural or urban used and of optimal tax estimates to demand functional form copyright 1989 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

dutch disease real effective exchange rate misalignments and their effect on gdp growth in eu abstract in this article we study the impact of real effective exchange rate misalignments based on determinants including different types of foreign capital inflows on gdp growth in the eu for this analysis we use a panel of 27 eu countries for the period 1994 2012 with annual frequency core countries have been only slightly undervalued from the crisis onwards while the periphery was overvalued however the gap for the periphery has reduced in the last two years as regards the new member states these were overvalued for the entire time span the results seem to be generally driven by the inflows of bank loans the misalignments are associated with lower long run growth the exchange rate volatilities are not robust in affecting gdp growth while spillovers and global factors seem to matter in all the specifications both in the short and long run

beyond gdp an analysis of the socio economic diversity of european regions abstractthis paper aims to analyze the socioeconomic diversity of the european union eu 28 regions from a dynamic perspective for that purpose we combine a series of exploratory space time anal

structural breaks in consumption patterns india 1952 1991 this study improves upon the econometric modelling for testing and incorporating structural breaks for a study on indian consumption patterns covering a period of four decades and also explores the causes of such breaks the tests for structural breaks in consumption patterns indicate multiple break points which are not uniform across the population groups and also across commodity groups further the results indicate for the first time that the breaks could often be induced by the changes in the data collection methodology of the survey and not due to changes in consumer behaviour alone apart from this there is a shift in the consumption pattern during the mid 1980s in both the rural and the urban sectors for the lowest expenditure class the shift is away from food items with the rural sector showing a change in the price response and the urban sector showing a change in the total expenditure coefficient for the middle and the upper expenditure classes the shifts are not only from the food items to

external wealth the trade balance and the real exchange rate abstract we examine the link between the net foreign asset position the trade balance and the real exchange rate in particular we decompose the impact of a country s net foreign asset position external wealth on its long run real exchange rate into two mechanisms the relation between external wealth and the trade balance and holding fixed other determinants a negative relation between the trade balance and the real exchange rate we also provide additional evidence that the relative price of nontradables is an important channel linking the trade balance and the real exchange rate

regional welfare weights for the uk england scotland wales and northern ireland evans d kula e and sezer h 2005 regional welfare weights for the uk england scotland wales and northern ireland regional studies 39 923 937 in relation to public spending and regional policy the importance of distributional issues is stressed and regional welfare weights are derived from an appropriate underlying social welfare function estimates of these weights are then provided for the four countries comprising the uk welfare weights now have a very high policy profile following the special emphasis placed by the uk treasury in its recently revised guidance on appraisal and evaluation in government on the assessment of the distributional impacts of social projects and policies from an empirical perspective the critical component of each welfare weight measure is the elasticity of marginal utility of income e alternative estimation approaches based on demand analysis and income tax data are used to determine e and a preferred measure of 1 60 emerges the resulting regional we

us regional income convergence a spatial econometric perspective rey s j and montouri b d 1999 us regional income convergence a spatial econometric perspective reg studies 33 143 156 this study reconsiders the question of us regional economic income convergence from a spatial econometric perspective recently developed methods of exploratory spatial data analysis provide new insights on the geographical dynamics of us regional income growth patterns over the 1929 94 period strong patterns of both global and local spatial autocorrelation are found throughout the study period and the magnitude of global spatial autocorrelation is also found to exhibit strong temporal co movement with regional income dispersion a spatial econometric analysis of the familiar baumol specification reveals strong evidence of misspecification due to ignored spatial error dependence because of this dependence shocks originating in one state can spillover into surrounding states potentially complicating the transitional dynamics of the convergence process rey s j et montouri