global feminization through flexible labor abstract the emphasis on structural adjustment and labor flexibility in both developing and industrialized economies is rapidly altering the nature of employment women are being substituted for men and many forms of work are being converted into the kinds of jobs traditionally geared to women international data on recent trends in female economic activity reveal that new types of labor data are needed to highlight the mechanisms of control over workers and the actual economic forms of vulnerability to which women are exposed the paper concludes by posing questions that challenge the traditional concerns of donors and policy makers in many developing countries

the peter principle a theory of decline some have observed that individuals perform worse after being promoted the peter principle which states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence suggests that something is fundamentally misaligned in the promotion process this view is unnecessary and inconsistent with the data below it is argued that ability appears lower after promotion purely as a statistical matter being promoted is evidence that a standard has been met regression to the mean implies that future ability will be lower on average firms optimally account for the regression bias in making promotion decisions but the effect is never eliminated rather than evidence of a mistake the peter principle is a necessary consequence of any promotion rule furthermore firms that take it into account appropriately adopt an optimal strategy usually firms inflate the promotion criterion to offset the peter principle effect and the more important the transitory component is relative to total variation in ability the larger

international competition income distribution and economic growth this paper shows that the neo keynesian case for wage led growth does not generally hold in an open economy model wage increases cause a loss of competitiveness that reduces the trade balance if the economy is relatively open to trade and price elasticities satisfy certain restrictions the worsening of the trade balance more than outweighs the increase in workers consumption thus reducing the growth rate the main theoretical innovation is a flexible markup pricing rule that allows changes in unit labor costs and exchange rates to affect profit margins implications for international relations and class conflict are discussed copyright 1989 by oxford university press

sample autocorrelation learning in a capital market model adaptive agent models are supposed to result in the same limit behavior as models with perfectly rational agents in this article we show that this claim cannot by accepted in general even in a simple capital market model where the agents apply sample autocorrelation learning to perform their forecasts by applying this learning algorithm the agents use sample means the sample autocorrelation coefficient and the sample variances of prices to predict the future prices and to determine the demand for the risky asset therefore even if the agents are not perfectly rational we require that the agents forecasts are consistent with the underlying information in this article a sufficient condition for convergence is derived analytically and checked by means of simulations the price sequence as well as the sequence of parameters estimated by means of sample autocorrelation learning converge if the initial value of the price sequence is sufficiently close to the steady state equilibrium and a random variable derived from the dividend process is not too volatile to skip the price trajectory out of the attracting region therefore the market price can even diverge and the region of convergence could become very small depending on the underlying parameters thus divergence of the price sequences is not a pathological example since it possibly occurs over a wide range of parameters therefore the often claimed coincidence of adaptive agents models and ration agent models cannot be observed even in a simple capital market model author s abstract

can agents learn their way out of chaos abstract in an olg model with adaptive learning forecast errors of the agents are analyzed in regions where the resulting dynamical system behaves chaoticly agents think they are living in stochastic world it is shown that they cannot reject the hypothesis that mean and autocorrelation coefficients of their forecast errors are 0 thus they have no incentive to switch to another learning rule predictions cannot be unmasked as being wrong because of the limited statistical tools the agents possess bounded rationality these phenomena occur in the olg model even with a cobb douglas utility function

stagnation income distribution and monopoly power the deceleration in the rate of industrial growth in the indian economy since the middlesixties initially interpreted by some as a temporary downward deviation from trend hasnow come to be generally accepted as reflecting long run tendencies towards stagnation several explanations for these tendencies have been offered bhagwati and desai 1970 and bhagwati and srinivasan 1975 have focused on inefficiencies and the misallocationof resources arising from industrial policies pursued by the government others chakravarty 1974 raj 1976 and vaidyanathan 1974 among them have emphasisedthe sluggishness of agricultural growth which is alleged to have retarded industrial growthby limiting markets and the supply of wage goods and raw materials a third view reflectedin srinivasan and narayana 1977 for example has put the blame on a slackening of invest ment demand due to lower public investment but does not explain why public investmentfell or why its fall restrained industrial growth finally there is the explanation put forthin bagchi 1970 1975 1982 in nayyar 1978 and in parts of mitra 1977 that inequali ties in income distribution have resulted in a limited demand for industrial goods reducedincentives for investment and therefore reduced growth this view seems to suggest apositive relation between growth and income equality which is opposed to the generallyaccepted idea derived from cambridge growth models that higher growth requires greaterinequality the purpose of this paper is to examine the last explanation by considering the inter action between growth and income distribution in an underdeveloped economy with thehelp of a simple macroeconomic model the model is a stylisation of the indian economy so that we will be able to use the model to assess the argument that a deceleration in therate of growth of the indian industrial economy could have been caused by an unequaldistribution of income the argument will not be made that this income distributional con straint is the binding constraint on industrial growth the model will merely examine theinternal consistency of the argument that a bad income distribution could explain stagnation in the sense of reduced growth and show that in the indian context as in other similarcontexts this argument can be put forward in explaining stagnation our argument is first presented with a highly simplified schematisation of the indianeconomy which we shall call the basic model the economy modelled produces only one

ordinary least squares learning and nonlinearities in macroeconomics the paper reviews the literature on adaptive learning in macroeconomic settings where the formation of expectations is particularly relevant special attention will be given to simple two period overlapping generations models with a unique fixed point perfect foresight equilibrium in this kind of scenario eventual long term periodic and a periodic cycles are exclusively the result of the process of learning the outcome that high rates of money growth have a potentially destabilizing effect generating periodic fluctuations and chaos is emphasized the persistence of systematic forecast errors in a scenario where agents are supposed to act rationally is relevant in this context and it will be thoroughly discussed resorting to the notions of self fulfilling mistakes consistent expectations equilibria and beliefs equilibria

gender inequality and economic growth a cross country analysis abstract this paper investigates empirically the determinants of economic growth for a set of semi industrialized export oriented economies in which women provide the bulk of labor in the export sector the primary hypothesis tested is that gender inequality which contributes to women s relatively lower wages was a stimulus to growth via the effect on exports during 1975 95 empirical analysis shows that gdp growth is positively related to gender wage inequality in contrast to recent work which suggests that income inequality slows growth evidence also indicates that part of the impact of gender wage inequality on growth is transmitted through its positive effect on investment as a share of gdp

inequality and growth uncovering the main conclusions from the empirics abstractthis paper is a critical survey of the empirical literature on the effects of inequality on economic growth we conclude that it is most likely that the disparities found in the results are due to differences in the type of countries and time periods included in the samples the variable used to measure inequality the structure of the data and the estimation techniques these findings suggest that the mechanisms that link inequality to growth are likely to operate differently in different circumstances an element that may offer important guidelines for both policy makers and researchers

feminization of the labor force the effects of long term development and structural adjustment abstract using crosscountry data pooled for 1985 and 1990 we analyze the relationship between women s share of the labor force and the processes of long term economic development and macroeconomic changes associated with structural adjustment we find that the relationship between long term development and women s share of the labor force is u shaped controlling for the feminization u we also find that structural adjustment policies have led to an increase in feminization of the labor force via worsening income distribution and increased openness

the market for preferences learning processes are widely held to be the mechanism by which boundedly rational agents adapt to environmental changes we argue that this same outcome might also be achieved by a different mechanism namely specialisation and the division of knowledge which we here extend to the consumer side of the economy we distinguish between high level preferences and low level preferences as nested systems of rules used to solve particular choice problems we argue that agents while sovereign in high level preferences may often find it expedient to acquire in a pseudo market the low level preferences in order to make good choices when purchasing complex commodities about which they have little or no experience a market for preferences arises when environmental complexity overwhelms learning possibilities and leads agents to make use of other people s specialised knowledge and decision rules

work and empowerment women and agriculture in south india this article explores the implications of women s work in agriculture in telangana a region in the state of andhra pradesh india i suggest that higher capital costs for cultivators post liberalisation increased the pressure to contain wage costs in a region where women form the majority of the agricultural wage labour force under such conditions when women perform both own cultivation as well as agricultural wage work in the fields of others they face pressure to restrict bargaining for higher wages contributing to a widening gender wage gap to the extent that wages shape intra household bargaining power the empowering effect of workforce participation for such women would thus be blunted from available nss data i provide some preliminary evidence in support of this argument

unemployment and the real wage the economic basis for contesting political ideologies using the keynesian theory of effective demand this paper demonstrates how particular models such as that of cooperative capitalism enunciated by the left keynesian social democrats the marxian model of profit squeeze emphasizing distributive conflict and even the conservative model relying on supply side stimulus fit in as particular variants of a more general theoretical scheme through a reconstruction of the familiar is schedule the argument is weaved around the theme of the relations between unemployment and real wage in the context of both a closed and an open economy to explain the common macroeconomic basis of contesting ideologies copyright 1990 by oxford university press

macroeconomic consequences of cyclical and secular changes in feminization an experiment at gendered macromodeling abstract this paper analyzes the macroeconomic implications of cyclical and secular movements in the feminization of the labor force and changes in the intensity of female household labor we assume that a rise in the feminization of the labor force stimulates investment while a rise in the intensity of female household labor raises savings we examine the interaction of these two effects in the context of a dynamic keynesian growth cycle model and assess the likelihood of a structurally adjusting economy experiencing a recovery through feminization our analysis shows that for a gender based recovery to succeed the impact of feminization of the labor force on investment must be stronger than the impact a rising intensity of female household labor has on savings our analysis shows that high and high middleincome countries are more likely to benefit from feminization processes

secular changes in the gender composition of employment and growth dynamics in the north and the south abstract in a simple theoretical exercise the paper shows that gender relations matter in the standard analysis of trade liberalization and economic growth it utilizes a model with the two differential equations phase diagram technique which enables us to examine the cumulative interaction between economic growth and changes in the female share of employment the model shows that changes in the gender composition of employment caused by a new global division of labor between the north and the south can thwart the economic benefits customarily associated with trade liberalization in both regions

distributive politics and economic growth a crude distinction between economics and politics would be that economics is concerned with expanding the pie while politics is about distributing it in this paper we analyze the relationship between the two we focus on how an economy s initial configuration of resources shapes the political struggle for income and wealth distribution and how that in turn affects long run growth our main conclusion is that inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth retarding policies we derive this result from a simple political economy model of growth and present cross country evidence consistent with it the key feature of our model is that individuals differ in their relative factor endowments we distinguish between two types of factors an accumulated factor called capital and a nonaccumulated factor called labor growth is driven by the expansion of the capital stock which is in turn determined by individual saving decisions long run growth is endogenous as the aggregate production function is taken to be linearly homogeneous in capital and productive government services taken together the provision of government services is financed by a tax on capital because government services are productive a small tax on

the sources of asian pacific economic growth the objective of this study is to analyze the sources of economic growth of ten asian pacific countries apcs china hong kong indonesia japan malaysia the philippines singapore south korea taiwan and thailand in conjunction with four industrialized western countries iwcs france west germany united kingdom and the united states in the postwar period in previous studies boskin and lau 1990 and kim and lau 1994c find for the group of five g 5 and the east asian newly industrialized countries nics respectively that 1 all countries share the same aggregate metaproduction function in terms of efficiency equivalent units and 2 technical progress can be represented in all countries as purely capitalaugmenting however kim and lau 1994c also find that there has been no measured technical progress in the east asian nics despite their much higher rates of economic growth the questions of interest in this study are 1 does the same aggregate meta production function that applies to the g5 countries and the east asian nics also apply to other apcs 2 does the finding of absence of technical progress hold for all the other apcs except japan and 3 what is the relative importance of the different sources of economic growth for the apcs

chaotic learning equilibria chaotic temporary equilibrium trajectories under least squares learning are shown to exist in a standard version of the overlapping generations model theses trajectories show forecast errors that never vanish thus we do not find convergence to an equilibrium in which agents have perfect foresight complex trajectories can even be found in the case of savings functions which are monotonically decreasing in the expected gross rate of inflation in this case no cyclical or chaotic trajectories with perfect foresight exist thus learning alone is a source of chaotic dynamic journal of economic literature classification numbers d83 d84

imperfect foresight and chaos an example of a self fulfilling mistake abstract we consider an overlapping generations economy with a single production sector and a government first we assume that the households have imperfect foresight in the sense that they cannot distinguish between the trajectories of a deterministic chaotic system and a stochastic process it is shown that mistaking a deterministic chaotic system for a stochastic one is a self fulfilling mistake because the possibility of making this mistake arises only when it is made the unique perfect foresight equilibrium is proved to exhibit simple dynamics for most parameter values finally we show that when agents apply simple econometric models to build their expectations the resulting dynamics resemble the chaotic dynamics of the imperfect foresight equilibrium under certain parameter constellations while they are close to the simple dynamics of the perfect foresight equilibrium for other parameter values

engendering macroeconomics a reconsideration of growth theory abstract macroeconomics is gender biased because of its neglect of the reproductive sector this neglect is formalized in the assumptions supporting most macroeconomic models that population and the mapping from population to the labor force are determined exogenously the use of these assumptions is demonstrated for the case of the aggregate growth models which have evolved from harrod s original contribution in addition the development growth literature is shown to harbor a similar neglect some suggestions are made as to how these assumptions might be relaxed and some elements of a consequent theory and data project outlined

cobweb dynamics under bounded rationality this paper discusses recent work on expectation formation in the familiar cobweb hog cycle model a convenient feature of the model is the fact that it has a unique rational expectations equilibrium ree attention will be focused on whether this unique ree can be learned under bounded rationality with agents using simple habitual rule of thumb forecasting rules or whether other approximate rational expectations equilibria can arise where forecasts are although not perfect approximately correct in particular the possibility of chaotic equilibria under bounded rationality will be discussed both the homogeneous agent case and the heterogeneous case with evolutionary competition between different forecasting rules will be discussed recent experimental work on expectations formation in the cobweb economy suggests excess volatility and endogenous possibly chaotic price fluctuations driven by the interaction of competing boundedly rational agents