transfer problem dynamics macroeconomics of the franco prussian war indemnity we study the classic transfer problem of predicting the effects of an international transfer on the terms of trade and the current account a two country model with debt and capital allows for realistic features of historical transfers they follow wartime increases in government spending and are financed partly by borrowing the model is applied to the largest historical transfer the franco prussian war indemnity of 1871 1873 in these three years france transferred to germany an amount equal to 22 percent of a year s gdp when the transfer is combined with measured shocks to fiscal policy and productivity over the period the model provides a very close fit to the historical sample paths of french gdp terms of trade net exports and aggregate consumption this makes a strong case for the dynamic general equilibrium approach to studying the transfer problem more generally our results provide striking evidence of the importance of international capital markets in the nineteenth century

intersectoral transfer growth and inequality in rural ecuador abstract in this paper we study intersectoral transfer and its impact on the distribution of income in ecuador we find that income shares between farm and nonfarm activities are roughly equal on average although the rich in rural areas typically receive a greater share of income from nonfarm sources thus decomposing inequality by income source reveals that a rise in nonfarm incomes increases inequality drawing on a new method to estimate local level distributional outcomes growth of the high productivity nonfarm sector is observed to have a strong and positive association with average consumption and inequality growth of the low productivity nonfarm sector is associated with little change in either average income or income inequality irrespective of subsector growth of the nonfarm sector is associated with a substantial fall in poverty

informality property rights and poverty in china s favelas in this study of households living in informal settlements in three principal chinese cities we analyze the associations between informality property rights and poverty we propose that informality can be understood in terms of property rights presence absence strength completeness and ambiguity drawing on the property rights entitlements theories of sen de soto ostrom alchian and coase we refine a list of property rights effects that can be tested empirically using a household questionnaire survey of 1 208 respondents from a representative sample of 60 urban villages in beijing shanghai and guangzhou we use robust regression models to detect statistical relationships between household performance on six poverty domains as a function of four property rights domains controlling for income human capital and other influences we find evidence for what we call sen effects and de soto effects our models show that some property rights are associated with lower poverty indicators but we also find evidence to show that the absence weakness or ambiguity of property rights also reduce poverty indicators on particular domains through what we assume to be a substitution effect informal settlements permit poorer household to live at lower costs than is usually or officially acceptable and thus spend more on other welfare enhancing expenditures the distribution of property rights determines the size distribution and impacts of these trade offs and shapes the economic and social performance of informal settlements

informality and poverty in ecuador this paper uses national representative data from the ecuadorian family expenditure survey to study the determinants of poverty and informality in the country taking into account the two way relationship between these two phenomena the main contribution of this paper is to present new empirical evidence on this relationship for a developing country where more than 60 of workers are in the informal sector the results support the view of a heterogeneous informal market in which informal work is both a demand led phenomenon and a voluntary and primarily supply led form of employment

intertemporal equilibrium and the transfer paradox the transfer paradox may occur in a world with only two countries at a dynamically stable intertemporal competitive equilibrium in a framework of overlapping generations with production and investment a transfer of income may immiserize the recipient while enriching the donor away from the golden rule a transfer may result in a pareto improvement

land tenure arrangements and rural urban migration in china summary obstacles to internal migration in china contribute to inefficiency inequality and land degradation academic and policy debate has primarily focused on discrimination against rural migrants on arrival in urban areas meanwhile barriers to migration out of rural areas have received less attention this paper examines the role of incomplete rural property rights in the migration decisions of rural households we examine the relationship between tenure insecurity and restrictions on land rentals and participation in outside labor markets the results indicate that tenure insecurity reduces migration this relationship is particularly pronounced on forest land which has implications for the conservation of recently replanted forest areas

an analysis of turkey s accession to the european union we build a two country dynamic general equilibrium model to study whether european citizens would bene t from the eventual accession of turkey to the european union eu the results of the simulations show that turkey s accession is welfare enhancing for europeans provided that turkish total factor productivity tfp increases suf ciently after enlargement in the benchmark model with no capital mobility the europeans are better off if the turkish tfp increase bridges more than 21 of the initial tfp gap between turkey and the eu this gure increases to 33 when capital mobility is introduced

nonfarm income diversification and household livelihood strategies in rural africa concepts dynamics and policy implications abstract asset activity and income diversification lie at the heart of livelihood strategies in rural africa this paper introduces a special issue on the topic income diversification and livelihoods in rural africa cause and consequence of change we concentrate on core conceptual issues that bedevil the literature on rural income diversification and the policy implications of the empirical evidence presented in this special issue

organizations space and capital in the development of korea s electronics industry suarez villa l and han p h 1990 organizations space and capital in the development of korea s electronics industry reg studies 25 327 343 this paper analyses the effect of foreign and domestic capital on the organization of production and the spatial distribution of korea s electronics industry an assessment of korea s international advantages and their impact on trade labour employment and foreign capital is followed by factor analyses using data collected through establishment surveys these provide a set of significant organizational dimensions based on a differentiation of capital and regional location where scale is found to be a most important factor in production domestic capital contributes more than foreign capital to the integration of electronics in korea s productive structure but has a lower export emphasis and tends to concentrate more in the primate metropolitan region suarez villa l et han p h 1991 organisations espace et capital dans le developpement de l electroniqu

remittances and inequality in this paper the authors propose a framework and develop techniques for analyzing the impact of migrant remittances on the distribution of rural income by size and subsequently its impact on rural welfare household data are used to assign numerical coefficients to the impact of net remittances from both internal and international migrants on income inequality in 2 mexican villages the impact of migrant remittances on the distribution of rural income by size depends critically on the degree to which migration opportunities become diffused through the village population on the returns to human capital embodied in remittances and on the distribution of potentially remittance enhancing skills and education across village households our empirical findings demonstrate that in a village where many households contain internal migrants but few have experience migrating to the u s remittances from mexico to us migrants have an unequalizing impact on village incomes while remittances from internal migrants have a favorable effect on the village income distribution by contrast in a village with a long historyh of sending migrants to the us and hence a more ready access to us labor markets us to mexico remittances have an equalizing impact on incomes remittances from internal migrants in this village however embody a large human capital component and are highly correlated with household income hence internal migrant remittances account for a comparatively large share of inequalities in the 2nd village the overall effect of remittances on income inequality is favorable in both villages migration type migration stage and interaction terms all appear to play a role in this context the effects of small changes in remittances upon income inequality and rural welfare in the 2 villages are explored and some implications for migration and rural development policy are considered authors modified

international migration and income distribution in the philippines the author uses data on remittances from migrants to determine the effects of migration on household income and its distribution in the philippines i briefly describe the evolution of household income distribution using fies the family income and expenditure survey and the characteristics of households that receive income from migrants and those that do not i discuss the analytical framework that is used and outline the changes in incomes and inequality that emigration causes excerpt

agroclimatic shock income inequality and poverty evidence from burkina faso abstract this paper examines the impacts of agroclimatic shock on income inequality and poverty using household farm data from three agroecological zones of burkina faso together with income source decompositions of the gini coefficient and the foster greer thorbecke poverty index before and after a severe drought our findings reveal that because the poor lack acces to off farm income off farm income increases inequality and fails to shield poor households against agroclimatic risks the direction of the empirical relationship between changes in inequality and poverty after the drought depends critically on environmental variables and on apparent constraints on income diversification at different points in the income distribution

international technology transfer in services this study examines the nature of technology and the process of its transfer in five service industries from parent companies to foreign affiliates three principal research questions are posed what is the key technology in each industry what are the main methods for transferring this technology how and why do technology and transfer methods differ across firms industries and countries the empirical analysis shows that key technologies were generally knowledge of experience in the industry and methodology for producing the service transfer of the technology was mainly done through the training and transfer of experts and organizational forms were wholly owned subsidiaries and international partnerships more technology transfer occurred when firms were more international when affiliates were more recently established and when parent ownership was lower in the affiliate some evidence exists that more firm specific jointly produced technology leads to higher ownership percentage and greater transfer to affiliates

china s uneven progress against poverty while the incidence of extreme poverty in china fell dramatically over 1980 2001 progress was uneven over time and across provinces rural areas accounted for the bulk of the gains to the poor though migration to urban areas helped the pattern of growth mattered rural economic growth was far more important to national poverty reduction than urban economic growth agriculture played a far more important role than the secondary or tertiary sources of gross domestic product gdp rising inequality within the rural sector greatly slowed poverty reduction provinces starting with relatively high inequality saw slower progress against poverty due both to lower growth and a lower growth elasticity of poverty reduction taxation of farmers and inflation hurt the poor external trade had little short term impact

consumption savings and investment by social class in bangladesh does the rural sector support the urban sector this article employs input output analysis and information from a social accounting matrix and the concept of net savings to examine savings consumption and investment behaviour by various social classes in bangladesh in urban and rural areas considerable differences between social classes can be identified in all three respects a majority of the social classes in the rural sector does not appear to generate enough savings to sustain its consumption whereas the urban social classes do there seems to be little difference in consumption pattern of the rural rich and the urban rich there is considerable urban rural difference in the import intensities of consumption the findings of this study based on the hazari model do not establish the existence of urban bias but the problem seems to be one of rich bias rather than urban bias per se however the hazari model cannot capture all possible sources of urban bias and circumstantial evidence indicates concentration of advantages in the urban areas

migration remittances and inequality a sensitivity analysis using the extended gini index abstract this paper uses the extended gini inequality index to examine the sensitivity of measurements of impacts of migrant remittances on the distribution of household income by size to different value judgements when measuring inequality the results illustrate the robustness of earlier findings that the impacts of migration on village income distributions differ for different types of migration and for different periods in a village s migration history the magnitude of these impacts however appears to be quite sensitive to the weights attached to incomes at different points in the village income distribution for example in a village with considerable mexico to u s migration experience remittances from mexico to u s migrants have a favorable effect on the village income distribution however the extended gini analysis shows that this favorable impact decreases as more weight is attached to incomes in the poorest households this finding is consistent with the view that barriers to high paying mexico to u s migration work exist for households at the bottom of the village income distribution

third world cities the changing national settlement system this is a review of recent literature on trends in urbanization in developing countries the author examines the decline in the pace of urbanization in the middle east and latin america changes in migration related to changes in spatial structure a trend toward a more polycentric form of metropolitan development around some major urban centers a decline in the pace of metropolitan expansion associated with economic recession and the failure of regional policy to affect urbanization trends annotation

economic growth income inequality and poverty in china under economic reforms china s gross domestic product gdp more than quadrupled between 1978 and 1996 under economic reforms per capita disposable incomes more than tripled in the cities and almost quadrupled in the rural areas however rapid economic growth brought about large income inequality which slowed down poverty reduction in 1995 there were still 70 170 million people living in poverty this article aims to assess the relationship between economic growth income inequality and poverty using both secondary and household survey data the main findings are 1 urban rural divide and spatial inequality are two major factors accounting for overall income inequality 2 non wage and non farm incomes are more unequally distributed than wage and farm incomes and 3 the incidence of poverty is very sensitive to the changes in per capita income and inequality

big business and urban congestion in taiwan the origins of small enterprise and regionally decentralized industry respectively abstract two pillars of taiwan s economy that are regarded as models for other developing countries to follow are small and medium size enterprises smes and regional decentralization of industry this paper suggests that the historical roots of both phenomena make the policies necessary to reproduce the taiwan model elsewhere less straightforward than is typically supposed by the mid 1960s the major factor behind regional decentralization was urban congestion big business seems to have been instrumental in the growth of smes

rural urban disparities in india and china abstract this paper compares rural urban disparities in china and india in light of differences in the following indicators income and consumption deposit to credit ratios and agricultural and industrial productivity access to such public services as health are also considered reasons for disparities are sought in government policies affecting agricultural terms of trade credit and rural to urban migration the paper concludes that the chinese economy during the mao zedong period was much more egalitarian than the indian but the case is less clearcut for the deng xiaoping period

india and china contrasts in economic liberalization abstract it is argued that in both india and china despite some important differences 1 a similar cultural and political imperatives led to similar systems of dirigisme and economic outcomes with the chinese growth higher than the indian because of higher investment 2 b crises engendered by their dirigiste regimes impelled reform 3 c their attempts to replace the plan by the market have striking similarities but 4 d ultimately because of continuing atavistic attitudes to toward trade and commerce the reforms remain insecure

international real business cycles we ask whether a two country real business cycle model can account simultaneously for domestic and international aspects of business cycles with this question in mind we document a number of discrepancies between theory and data the most striking discrepancy concerns the correlations of consumption and output across countries in the data outputs are generally more highly correlated across countries than consumptions in the model we see the opposite

the impact of china s economic reforms on agricultural productivity growth this paper presents a method for assessing the relative importance of price increases and strengthened individual incentives due to the introduction of the responsibility system for the post 1978 increase in china s agricultural productivity data on post 1978 chinese agricultural performance suggest that a little over three quarters of the measured productivity increase is due to payment system changes and the remainder to price increases we also use our method to calculate incentive indices giving an estimate of the fraction of their marginal product that peasants received under the pre 1978 regime

technology productivity and the multinational enterprise this article reviews the relevance of the transactions costs model to the role of the firm in production and diffusion of knowledge a revival of interest in technology productivity and growth has generated a new empirical and theoretical literature a review of these developments suggests that they have not yet been reflected in significant adaptation of the conventional firm versus market concept research has been severely hampered by data gaps and suggestions are made with respect to improvements in the information base finally technology issues are and will be of increasing significance in both domestic and international policy and must be factored into the conceptual template of corporate strategy

the impact of migration on rural poverty and inequality a case study in china large numbers of agricultural labor moved from the countryside to cities after the economic reforms in china migration and remittances play an important role in transforming the structure of rural household income this article examines the impact of rural to urban migration on rural poverty and inequality in a mountainous area of hubei province using the data of a 2002 household survey since migration income is a potential substitute for farm income we present counterfactual scenarios of what rural income poverty and inequality would have been in the absence of migration our results show that by providing alternatives to households with lower marginal labor productivity in agriculture migration leads to an increase in rural income in contrast to many studies that suggest that the increasing share of nonfarm income in total income widens inequality this article offers support for the hypothesis that migration tends to have egalitarian effects on rural income for three reasons 1 migration is rational self selection farmers with higher expected return in agricultural activities and or in local nonfarm activities choose to remain in the countryside while those with higher expected return in urban nonfarm sectors migrate 2 households facing binding constraints of land supply are more likely to migrate 3 poorer households benefit disproportionately from migration

non farm income and inequality in rural pakistan a decomposition analysis this article uses three year panel data to analyse the impact of non farm income on income inequality in rural pakistan after pinpointing the importance of rural non farm income for the poor the article decomposes total rural income among five sources non farm agricultural livestock rental and transfer this decomposition shows that non farm income represents an inequality decreasing source of income the study then decomposes the sources of non farm income this analysis reveals that while non farm unskilled labour income has an equalising effect on income distribution non farm government income has a disequalising effect

from brigade to village community the land tenure system and rural development in china although there are manifold problems in the current land tenure and land use systems family tenure has been a better organizational form for utilizing farmland than was collective tenure community based allocation is an important element in a transitional economic operating mechanism and it may be merely a temporary phenomenon market coordination can only be introduced gradually into the process of land allocation by further reform of the existing socioeconomic framework steady growth depends on long term integrated rural development c 1993 academic press inc copyright 1993 by oxford university press

towards an appraisal of the impact of rural reform in china 1978 85 china s economic institutions have been radically transformed since 1978 the most dramatic changes have been in the countryside where a virtual de collectivisation has taken place see nolan 1983 with profound direct effects on the 800 million rural dwellers as well as important implications for china s 200 odd million urban population 1 the significance of these changes goes beyond china s boundaries their self evident success in stimulating output growth must lead to a wide ranging reassessment of the appropriateness of collective institutions in agriculture it is no surprise that a delegation of soviet economists in china early in 1985 showed special interest in the agricultural reforms in contemporary china official policy changes so fast as to render obsolete any appraisal of their prospective consequences and to make forecasts somewhat akin to astrology and given the severely incomplete while rapidly improving statistical base analysis of the past still borders on archaeology nonetheless evidence from a wide range of sources both official and informal as well as written oral and visual is sufficient to construct a reasonably comprehensive picture of the impact of the agricultural reforms of 1978 83 this article examines two main issues the first section looks at some important indicators of the performance of the rural economy and considers some of the main factors that have affected it the second section examines the impact of the reforms on inequality and poverty in the countryside

the transfer problem and the intertemporal terms of trade in this paper the effects of a transfer on the intertemporal terms of trade are examined in the context of a simple two country two period model when intertemporal trade occurs because the two economies have different rates of time preference a transfer improves the terms of trade of the paying country alternatively when trade occurs owing to international differences in the endowments of goods over the two periods the effect of a transfer depends on a the relationship between the interest rate and the rates of time preference of the two countries and b the relationship between their elasticities of intertemporal consumption substitution

welfare and macroeconomic interdependence we develop a baseline model of monetary and fiscal transmission in interdependent economies the welfare effects of expansionary policies are related to monopolistic supply in production and monopoly power of a country in trade an unanticipated exchange rate depreciation can be beggar thyself rather than beggar thy neighbor as gains in domestic output are offset by deteriorating terms of trade smaller and more open economies are more prone to suffer from inflationary shocks larger economies benefit from moderate demand led expansions but may be worse off if policy makers attempt to close the output gap fiscal shocks are generally beggar thy neighbor in the long run in the short run they raise domestic demand at given terms of trade thus reducing the welfare benefits from monetary expansions analytical tractability makes our model uniquely suitable as a starting point to approach the recent new open economy macroeconomic literature

institutions investment and growth new cross country and panel data evidence this paper outlines the alternative channels through which institutions affect growth and studies the empirical relationship between institutions investment and growth the empirical results indicate that i free market institutions have a positive effect on growth ii economic freedom affects growth through both a direct effect on total factor productivity and an indirect effect on investment iii political and civil liberties may stimulate investment iv an important interaction exists between freedom and human capital investment v milton friedman s conjectures on the relation between political and economic freedom are correct vi promoting economic freedom is an effective policy toward facilitating growth and other types of freedom jel o17 o40 p51

resource based industry in boom downswing and liberalization mexico abstract mexico s oil windfall was advantageously later and smaller than that of most oil exporters but it was still absorbed too quickly inflation accelerated the exchange rate appreciated and diversification into competitive non oil tradeables like resource based industry rbi was retarded too much rbi investment was channelled through state enterprises whose performance deteriorated it relied heavily on the protected domestic market which fell short of projections excess capacity and inadequate revenues then made rbi vulnerable as mexico rapidly liberalized its economy in the late 1980s

poverty and distorted industrialization in the brazilian northeast abstract dramaric federal intervention and extensive industrialization in the brazilian northeast have not overcome its stagnant economy and society after centuries of isolation and dependence on sugar exports the northeast was integrated economicallu into brazil during 1930 1960 and since then it has been partially industrialized the regional economy however is weakly integrated and highly unequal leaving local markets small industrial growth remains keyed to other parts of brazil and dependent politics distort the region s relations with brasilia social inequality is extreme prospects for the future are bleak

dynamics of the trade balance and the terms of trade the j curve the authors provide a theoretical interpretation of two features of international data the countercyclical movements in net exports and the tendency for the trade balance to be negatively correlated with current and future movements in terms of trade but positively correlated with past movements they document the same properties in a two country stochastic growth model in which trade fluctuations reflect in large part the dynamics of capital formation the authors find that their general equilibrium perspective is essential the relation between the trade balance and the terms of trade depends critically on the source of fluctuations copyright 1994 by american economic association

poverty and famines an essay on entitlement and deprivation this book focuses on the causes of starvation in general and famines in particular the traditional analysis of famines is shown to be fundamentally defective and the author develops an alternative analysis

turkey toward eu accession the purpose of this paper is to study selected aspects of turkish accession to the eu joining the eu will require that turkey attains macroeconomic stability adopts the common agricultural policy and liberalizes its services and network industries furthermore joining the eu will require turkey to adopt and implement the whole body of eu legislation and standards the acquis communautaire according to the eu membership criteria new members must be able to demonstrate the ability to take on the obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of political economic and monetary union thus turkey will be expected to adopt the euro when it is ready to do so but not immediately upon accession integration will boost allocative efficiency in the turkish economy which in turn will make the country a better place to invest furthermore turkey will reap the benefits from monetary integration and from migration of labour to the eu but the welfare gains will have a price and the price will be the adjustment costs associated with the adoption of the acquis communautaire the final section of the paper considers the effects of accession on the eu in terms of migration and budgetary effects

industrial location in post reform india patterns of inter regional divergence and intra regional convergence where do new industrial investments locate and what factors drive the industrial location decisions do these investments follow the model of divergence followed by convergence suggested by the cumulative causation agglomeration economies and transport costs approaches these questions are examined with district level data from india for the pre and post reform periods using first tables and maps of concentration and clustering aggregated for all industry and disaggregated into five sectors heavy industries chemicals and petroleum textiles agribusiness and utilities and second logistic and ols heckman selection regression models for these six elements the data provide solid evidence both of inter regional divergence and intra regional convergence and suggest that concentrated decentralisation is the appropriate framework for understanding industrial location in post reform india

income strategies among rural households in mexico the role of off farm activities abstract off farm activities generate on average more than half of farm households incomes in the mexican ejido sector participation in these activities helps reduce poverty and contributes to greater equality in the distribution of income this paper analyzes the determinants of access to off farm sources of income across households we find that education plays a major role in accessing better remunerated nonagricultural employment adults of indigenous ethnic origin suffer from an educational lag and have less access to off farm nonagricultural employment than non indigenous adults at identical educational levels the regional availability of off farm employment strongly affects participation in addition women are differentially limited by distance to urban centers in their ability to gain off farm employment

leaving the countryside rural to urban migration decisions in china this paper employs a simple theoretical model of labor allocation within rural households given existing land arrangements in an attempt to explain why rural chinese do not fully participate in labor migration it first explores the mechanisms by which individual household and community characteristics affect the migration decision empirical results are then presented to substantiate the derived hypotheses the paper further explores the question of whether the migration decision is permanent by analyzing the responses of household consumption to income from migration excerpt

the determinants of nonfarm income diversification in rural peru abstract this paper shows that in peruvian rural areas there has been substantial growth over the past decade in household employment outside of own farming at present 51 of the net income of rural households comes from these off farm activities and thus they certainly cannot be considered as marginal the reasons households diversify their incomes are several access to public assets such as roads and private assets such as education and credit is an important factor in diversification increasing access to these assets will help rural households to increase their self employment as well as wage employment in the nonfarm sector

income inequalities in china evidence from household survey data on the basis of a household data set this paper compares household income inequality in urban and rural china decomposes inequality into intra and interprovincial components and analyzes the contribution of various income sources to total income equality the main findings of the paper are first that unlike in most developing economies income inequality in urban areas is lower than in rural areas second nationwide income inequality is due mostly to intraprovincial inequality third components of income associated with economic reforms are more unequally distributed than the rest

politics and productivity i introduction economic studies of long run performance are focusing increasingly on political legal financial and social factors development is no longer regarded as a gradual inevitable transformation from self sufficiency to specialization and participation in the division of labor instead progress follows the creation and evolution of institutions that support social and commercial relationships the new institutional economics explains that growth requires that the potential hazards of trade shirking opportunism risk and so on be controlled by institutions like secure property rights reliable procedures for resolving disputes and means of enforcing contracts in the absence of close social ties these institutions reduce information costs encourage capital formation and capital mobility allow risks to be priced and shared and otherwise facilitate cooperation north and thomas 1973 north 1990 drobak and nye 1997 levine 1997 in particular political authorities must make credible commitments not to expropriate private resources once investments have been made 1 despite widespread agreement that institutions matter there is no consensus on how they should be incorporated into the analysis even the best empirical studies of productivity and growth treat institutional characteristics in an eclectic way barro s 1991 influential article for example uses the numbers of assassinations and revolutions per capita as proxies for political instability finding these measures negatively correlated with growth and investment scully 1988 regresses growth rates on dummy variables derived from gastil s 1982 ordinal rankings of political and economic liberty king and levine 1993a 1993b 1993c derive various measures of the quality of financial intermediaries and show that these measures are good predictors of growth this article presents a different approach to analyzing the relationship between institutions and aggregate economic performance following the modem productivity literature see for example fried et al 1993 we model economic performance with a stochastic production frontier frontier analysis is a form of benchmarking it analyzes a group of branches firms nations or other units by identifying best practices and evaluating each member s performance relative to the best practice frontier the results produce not only qualitative rankings of the group members but also numerical efficiency scores that can be used to assess the effects of various policies and characteristics for this reason frontier analysis is well suited for studying the effects of legal and political institutions on the economic performance of nations to capture institutional factors we use two comprehensive indexes of legal regulatory and political conditions working with a broad sample of countries from 1975 to 1990 we incorporate a widely used measure of economic freedom along with a new measure of policy stability to represent a country s institutional environment the new institutional economics suggests that countries with high levels of economic freedom protection of private property rights respect for the rule of law an unhampered price system and so on and policy stability commitment not to change the rules of the game ex post will be closer to the best practice frontier in our model economic freedom and policy stability affect economic performance by enhancing technical efficiency in other words these institutions do not alter the state of technology but they allow producers to squeeze more out of current technology for instance countries with more stable policies attract more foreign investment than countries with less stable policies ceteris paribus this leads to increased competition among producers which in turn brings efficiency gains similarly countries with lower taxes milder regulatory burdens lower inflation fewer restrictions on foreign ownership and so on are likely to produce output more efficiently than countries with policies that restrict production inhibit capital formation and reduce competition

migration remittances and inequality estimating the net effects of migration on income distribution this paper examines the net effects of migration and remittances on income distribution potential home earnings of migrants are imputed as are the earnings of non migrants in migrant households in order to construct no migration counterfacmals to compare with the observed income distribution including remittances the earnings functions used to impute migrant home earnings are estimated from observations on non migrants in a selection corrected estimation framework which incorporates migration choice and labor force participation decisions for a sample of households in bluefields nicaragua migration and remittances increase income inequality when compared with the no migration counterfactual 1998 elsevier science b v

an economic model of international joint venture strategy the strategic choice between joint ventures licensing agreements and mergers is analysed using eight key factors suggested by internalisation theory the model explains the increasing role of international joint ventures in the 1980s in terms of the accelerating pace of technological innovation and the globalisation of markets it offers a range of predictions about the formation of joint ventures within industries across industries across locations and over time it exploits a powerful modelling technique that has many other applications in international business strategy

systems competition and network effects this paper discusses firm behavior market performance and the public and private institutions that arise in systems markets i e markets where consumers use compatible components together to generate benefits in such markets which include communications networks and hardware software networks popular products are inherently more valuable these network effects can drive corporate strategies and are critical in understanding innovation in many high technology markets the discussion here emphasizes the dynamics of consumer adoption decisions in the presence of network effects competition between incompatible systems and how suppliers choose which components are compatible and which are not

co evolution of gated communities and local public goods gated communities are often seen as steps towards the privatization of the public realm this is too simple a characterization however privately and publicly governed infrastructure and services exist and adapt symbiotically there is little empirical research focusing on the co evolution of private and public neighbourhoods in this paper we focus on a specific question that has not yet been answered does the spatial pattern of privately supplied public goods co evolve with the pattern of publicly supplied public goods we examine this question through a case study of seoul where club residential communities are common enough to test co evolution hypotheses we identify co evolutionary relationships between club goods supplied in condominiums and public goods supplied by municipalities and market we also find evidence of tieboutian intra urban market and show how the substitution of club goods for positive urban externalities seems to weaken the influence of general accessibility on residential loca

polarization reversal in the state of sao paulo brazil polarization reversal pr is the term given to the turning point in the spatial pattern of growth and development in a nation when continuing relative concentration ceases and urban deconcentration or spatial decentralization commences the focus of this paper is on those ldcs with fast growth rates of population which are reaching a transitional stage in their pattern of economic development as well as a change in direction of their spatial development the paper briefly discusses why a pr turning point may be anticipated as the economy of a nation grows and the urban system develops it then examines possible indices of pr and of alternative definitions arriving at a new and narrower definition of pr this definition and the earlier measures are then considered in the context of sao paulo which underwent increasing polarization of urban population from 1950 1970 but experienced a pr turning in the 1970s this may be the first documented example of pr in an ldc