economic development in a world with many countries abstract this paper examines economic development and growth within a model of a continuum of countries we can show the industrialization process of less developed countries endogenously the necessary conditions for industrialization depend on the relative position of the country in the world economy hence not only the domestic conditions but also the performances of other countries are important for industrialization by using this result we also consider the relation between agricultural productivity and industrialization this relation is dependent on the situation of the world economy if an agricultural country has high industrial productivity high agricultural productivity may enhance industrialization but this relation may become inverse by changing the performance of other less developed countries furthermore we examine the effects of less productive industrialized countries those countries deter industrialization of less developed countries and development of other industrialized countries this result is important to consider the infant industry protection policy

household formation housing prices and public policy impacts abstract this paper specifies and estimates a model of housing demand that explicitly includes the decision of individuals to form independent households parameter estimates reveal a considerable response of headship rates not only to income but also to housing prices analysis of housing policies ignoring the endogeneity of household formation is thus potentially biased the model is employed to evaluate the effects of a housing voucher program simulated responses indicate that such a program creates a substantial additional demand for housing due to its positive impact on the propensity of young and elderly persons to live independently

the energy transition of the transition economies an empirical analysis the aggregate manufacturing energy intensity of 28 countries in eastern europe and central asia had declined by 35 percent during 1998 2008 this study reveals strong evidence of convergence less efficient countries improved more rapidly and the cross country variance in energy productivity narrowed over time an index decomposition analysis indicates that energy intensities declined largely because of more efficient energy use rather than shifts from energy intensive to less intensive manufacturing activities income growth and energy price increases were the main drivers of the convergence they dominated the impact of trade which led to specialization in energy intensive industries

policy rivalry among industrial states what can we learn from models of strategic trade policy the economic theory of international trade has changed dramatically over the last decade by admitting into its mainstream a body of literature that focuses on the implications of monopolistic and oligopolistic elements in international markets by applying the tools of the new industrial organization in an international context two new classes of models have emerged models of intra industry trade and models of strategic trade policy the policy implications of models of strategic trade policy were quite disturbing for the economics profession since these models demonstrated that the classical harmony between national and cosmopolitan welfare maximization does not exist if one assumes opportunities for strategic manipulation of oligopolistic international industries this article reviews two prominent models of strategic trade policy the brander spencer model and the krugman model and relates them to more familiar earlier concepts such as stackelberg s asymmetrical duopoly solution and the venerable infant industry argument for government intervention the primary purpose of this article however is to provide a synopsis of the large literature addressing the question of whether models of strategic trade policy can give guidance for government policy

centralized bargaining and reorganized work are they compatible the paper examines the implications for wage bargaining of an important aspect of the ongoing reorganization of work the move from occupational specialization toward multi tasking the analysis shows how on account of such reorganization centralized bargaining becomes increasingly ine cient and detrimental to rms pro t opportunities since it prevents rms from o ering their employees adequate incentives to perform the appropriate mix of tasks the paper also shows how centralized bargaining inhibits rms from using wages to induce workers to learn how to use their experience from one set of tasks to enhance their performance at other tasks in this way the paper may also help explain the increasing resistance to centralized bargaining in various advanced market economies 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

can a liberalization of capital outflows increase net capital inflows abstract facing massive capital inflows that put downward pressure on the real exchange rate some policymakers and analysts have recommended a liberalization of capital outflows empirically however the removal of capital outflow controls has apparently stimulated a net inflow of capital in several experiences such as britain since 1979 italy new zealand and spain in the mid to late 1980s and colombia egypt and mexico in the 1990s numerous measures to liberalize capital outflows in chile during the 1990s have not had a noticeable effect in offseting a surge of net capital inflows how can we explain the apparent paradox that reducing controls on capital outflows can actually increase net capital inflows our theoretical model provides one such explanation a liberalization of capital outflows understood here as a reduction in the minimum capital repatriation period for foreign investment reduces the degree of irreversibility of the decision to invest in a given country this in turn lowers the option value of waiting until uncertainty about a possible change in the rules of the game that affect investment in domestic assets is resolved because in this event foreigners investing at home will be stuck with the low return asset for a shorter period of time thus a reduction in the minimum repatriation period is likely to increase not decrease net capital inflows this result has an important policy implication liberalizing capital outflows may have significant benefits on its own but it may not be the appropriate policy to defend the real exchange rate in the presence of massive capital inflows because it is likely to strengthen those very capital inflows

aid policy and growth in post conflict societies countries emerging from civil war attract both aid and policy advice this paper provides the first systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post conflict growth process it is based on a comprehensive data set of large civil wars and covers 27 countries that were in their first decade of post conflict economic recovery during the 1990s the authors first investigate whether the absorptive capacity for aid is systematically different in post conflict countries they find that during the first three post conflict years absorptive capacity is no greater than normal but that in the rest of the first decade it is approximately double its normal level so ideally aid should phase in during the decade historically aid has not on average been higher in post conflict societies and it has tended to taper out over the course of the decade the authors then investigate whether the contribution of policy to growth is systematically different in post conflict countries and in particular whether particular components of policy are differentially important for this they use the world bank policy rating database the authors find that growth is more sensitive to policy in post conflict societies comparing the efficacy of different policies they find that social policies are differentially important relative to macroeconomic policies however historically this does not appear to have been how policy reform has been prioritized in post conflict societies

agricultural productivity and structural transformation evidence from brazil we study the eects of the adoption of new agricultural technologies on structural transfor mation to guide empirical work we present a simple model where the eect of agricultural productivity on industrial development depends on the factor bias of technical change we test the predictions of the model by studying the introduction of genetically engineered soybean seeds in brazil which had heterogeneous eects on agricultural productivity across areas with dierent soil and weather characteristics we nd that technical change in soy production was strongly labor saving and lead to industrial growth as predicted by the model

dutch disease effect of oil rents on agriculture value added in middle east and north african mena countries abstract this paper investigates the effect of oil rents on agriculture value added in oil producing middle east and north african mena countries annual data from 1970 to 2011 panel cointegration tests by pedroni 1999 long ran panel causality tests by canning and pedroni 2008 and two step system gmm by blundell and bond 1998 are used in this study we find a negative relationship between oil rents and agriculture value added in the long run with a rather slow rate of short run adjustment of agriculture value added back to equilibrium after a boom in oil rents these results indicate that an oil sector boom is associated with a contraction in the agriculture sectors of the countries in the panel in the long run this is probably attributable to a resource movement effect from other economic sectors to the booming oil sector in these countries this serves as evidence of a dutch disease effect of an oil sector boom on agriculture in the mena countries in this study

programme evaluation with multiple treatments this paper reviews the main identification and estimation strategies for microeconometric policy evaluation particular emphasis is laid on evaluating policies consisting of multiple programmes which is of high relevance in practice for example active labour market policies may consist of different training programmes employment programmes and wage subsidies similarly sickness rehabilitation policies often offer different vocational as well as non vocational rehabilitation measures first the main identification strategies control for confounding variables difference in difference instrumental variable and regression discontinuity identification are discussed in the multiple programme setting thereafter the different nonparametric matching and weighting estimators of the average treatment effects and their properties are examined download discussion paper pdf 484 kb

absorbing a windfall of foreign exchange dutch disease dynamics abstract the permanent income rule is seldom the optimal response to a windfall of foreign exchange such as that from a resource discovery absorptive capacity constraints require domestic investment and investment in structures requires non traded inputs the supply of which is constrained by the initial capital stock this particularly when combined with intra sectoral capital immobility delays adjustment and creates short run dutch disease symptoms as the real exchange rate sharply appreciates and overshoots its long run value optimal revenue management requires investing in the domestic non traded goods sector and a slow build up of consumption accumulation of foreign assets adjusts to accommodate the time paths of domestic consumption and investment

the effects of mongolia s booming mining industry on its agricultural sector a test for dutch disease dutch disease occurs when currency strengthening associated with a booming sector of an economy crowds out a lagging trade dependent sector in this study a keynesian style model is specified to deduce hypotheses about how increased foreign direct investment fdi aimed at mongolia s mining sector affects its agricultural sector a key finding is that while econometric results suggest the increased fdi strengthened mongolia s currency its adverse effect on mongolia s trade sensitive agricultural sector is not sufficiently strong to cause the sector to decline although dutch disease was not detected the posited mechanism clearly is important specifically when currency strengthening is ignored the reduced form elasticity of agricultural value added with respect to fdi is 2 7 times larger than when currency strengthening is taken into account 0 103 vs 0 038 also fdi induced currency strengthening causes the keynesian multiplier y g to drop from 2 40 to 2 00 and the fdi multiplier y fdi to drop from 3 05 to 1 89

investment scaling up and the role of government abstractthis article studies the fiscal and welfare implications of a scaling up of public investment when the government is subject to inefficiencies on the spending and on the tax collection side in our simulations the scaling up of public investments results in higher long run output and consumption levels but requires a fiscal stabilization package in order to preserve fiscal sustainability the effects on consumers welfare after the fiscal adjustment are nontrivial our welfare analysis shows that consumers welfare is increased when the government smooths the fiscal adjustment via higher borrowing and not through an increase in taxation moreover the comparison between several stabilization packages via tax adjustment shows that higher welfare is achieved when the government relies mostly on taxation of capital as this allows higher levels of consumption lower fiscal costs that do not undermine fiscal sustainability can however be achieved if the government manages to reduce inefficiency in tax

institutions health shocks and labour market outcomes across europe this paper investigates the relationship between health shocks and labour market outcomes in 9 european countries using the european community household panel matching techniques are used to control for the non experimental nature of the data the results suggest that there is a significant causal effect from health on the probability of employment individuals who incur a health shock are significantly more likely to leave employment and transit into disability the estimates differ across countries with the largest employment effects being found in the netherlands denmark spain and ireland and the smallest in france and italy differences in social security arrangements help to explain these cross country differences

resource curse or not a question of appropriability this thesis presents three self contained essays focusing on empirical questions in growth and development economics each article addresses specific questions on why countries perform differently in particular i analyse the effect of democracy on economic development the relationship between natural resources and growth and the efficiency of foreign development assistance in the first essay democracy consolidation and growth i analyse the effect of democracy on economic growth in this context i argue that an important aspect to consider is how consolidated political systems are put simply i find that it is not only a question of how democratic countries are but also how long they have been democratic in other words economic performance tends to improve with the duration of uninterrupted democracy the performance of autocracies on the other hand tends to deteriorate over time however for newly established political systems there seems to be a cost of being democratic this implies that democracies only bear their fruit after some time the analysis has important policy implications to overcome initial straits international assistance focused on democratic consolidation may be important and a very good investment in fostering long run development the second essay resource curse or not a question of appropriability together with anne boschini and jesper roine is concerned with the relation between natural resources and economic development for most laymen as well as for most economists it would seem reasonable that countries richly endowed in natural resources also benefit from this wealth however a large literature has found a systematic negative effect of natural resource abundance on economic growth we suggest that this so called resource curse is not determined by resource endowments alone but rather by the interaction between the type of resources a country possesses and the quality of institutions in the country this combination of factors determines what we call the appropriability of a resource the concept of appropriability captures the likelihood of natural resources leading to rentseeking corruption or conflicts which in turn will harm economic development our results suggest that if institutions are good enough the curse may be turned into a blessing this may explain why some countries such as norway and botswana tend to benefit from their resources while others such as angola and sierra leone do not the third and final essay of this thesis foreign sectoral aid fungibility growth and poverty reduction is a contribution to the aid efficiency literature which is concerned with the question of whether aid helps or hinders economic development foreign development assistance is often targeted on specific public expenditure sectors if this aid is not used in the sector for which it was granted e g health education it is said to be fungible and donors may end up financing something completely different from what they intended e g military expenditures the major concern about sectoral fungibility is that the alternative use of aid may be less productive or less socially useful however measuring fungibility is not sufficient to determine whether foreign sectoral aid fungibility is actually harmful what is important is how the funds treated as fungible are used the essay starts by obtaining estimates of fungibility for 57 countries the results suggest that sectoral aid is indeed largely treated as fungible by recipient countries next to assess the economic and health effects of fungibility these estimates are incorporated into an empirical model of aid and growth as well as into a model of aid and infant mortality altogether i find no evidence of more fungible sectoral aid leading to worse performance

optimal dutch disease growth models of the dutch disease such as those of krugman 1987 matsuyama 1992 sachs and warner 1995 and gylfason et al 1999 explain why resource abundance may reduce growth however the literature also raises a new question if the use of resource wealth hurts productivity growth how should such wealth be optimally managed this question forms the topic of the present paper in which we extend the growth literature on the dutch disease from a positive to a normative setting we show that the assumptions in the previous literature imply that the optimal share of national wealth consumed in each period needs to be adjusted down however some dutch disease is always optimal thus lower growth in resource abundant countries may not be a problem in itself but may be part of an optimal growth path the optimal spending path of the resource wealth may be increasing or decreasing over time and we discuss why this is the case

foreign aid the real exchange rate and economic growth in the aftermath of civil wars foreign aid the real exchange rate rer and economic growth are three key variables that shape the aftermath of civil wars in many developing countries panel estimations drawn from a sample of 39 conflict and 44 non conflict countries between 1970 and 2004 indicate that although post conflict countries receive larger aid flows and exhibit moderate rer overvaluation after peace is attained overvaluation cannot be traced to aid yet foreign aid is among the significant determinants of the equilibrium rer an id is also an important determinant of economic growth particularly after peace is reached aid exhibits decreasing returns however and interacts negatively with rer overvaluation rer overvaluation reduces growth but this effect is ameliorated by financial development post conflict policies should therefore aim to use aid prudently avoid rer misalignment and support financial and capital market development to achi eve high and stable growth in the aftermath of war and beyond

post conflict transitions an overview in the two to five years immediately following end of conflicts united nations un peacekeeping operations have succeeded in maintaining peace while income and consumption growth rates have been higher than normal and recovery on key education and health indicators has been possible aid also has been super effective in promoting recovery not only by financing physical infrastructure but also by helping in the monetary reconstruction of post conflict economies however sustaining these short term gains was met with two difficult challenges first long term sustainability of peace and growth hinges primarily on the ability of post conflict societies to develop institutions for the delivery of public goods which in turn depends on the capacity of post conflict elites to overcome an entrenched culture of political fragmentation and form stable national coalitions beyond their immediate ethnic or regional power bases second after catch up growth runs its course high levels of aid can lead to overvalued real currencies at a time when growth requires a competitive exchange rate and economic diversification successful peace building will therefore require that these political and economic imperatives of post conflict transitions be accounted for in the design of un peacekeeping operations as well as the aid regime

three decades of italian comparative advantages he structure of italian exports its characteristics its changes over time its causes and implications in terms of income and growth employment and fragility with respect to domestic and international shocks has been the issue around which at least three generations of italian economists have discussed and disagreed over the last 30 years if one has to attribute to one single cause the origin of this multi faceted debate that very cause would be the perplexity associated with the evidence of italy being on the one hand a large industrialised country with per capita income comparable to the top high income oecd members world bank 2004 and on the other hand being characterised by an export composition where traditional low skilled labour intensive sectors oecd 2001 and peneder 2003 such as textiles wearing apparel leather products furniture and footwear still play a relevant role this anomaly in the italian trade structure with respect to one of its fellow members of the g7 and its high level of persistence is what makes of italy a case in the international trading system this paper describes the primary feature giving rise to this debate the italian export composition and its evolution over time the analysis makes use of the revealed comparative advantage rca index associated with the name of bela balassa and through non parametric statistical techniques estimates the empirical the author is very grateful to miur prin pie 2003 and jetro for the financial support and to giancarlo spagnolo for his encouragement discussions with matteo bugamelli giuliano conti davide castellani sergio de nardis paolo guerrieri fabrizio onida and lucia tajoli are gratefully acknowledged the author thanks riccardo faini for sharing his work on the topic and lucia piscitello for making her districts taxonomy available he also benefited from the comments of two anonymous referees that largely influenced the restructuring of the paper many of the arguments of this paper come from the inspiring discussions the author had over the years with massimo tamberi all remaining errors and omissions are the author s own responsibility the data sets and the rscript used in the paper can be downloaded from the webpage http www economiamc org debenedictis

natural resource booms and inequality theory and evidence we develop a theory in the context of a two sector growth model in which learning by doing drives growth to explain the time path of income inequality following natural resource booms in resource rich countries under the condition of a relatively unskilled labor intensive non traded sector inequality falls immediately after a boom and then increases steadily over time until the initial impact of the boom disappears using data for 90 countries between 1965 and 1999 we find evidence in support of the theory especially for oil and mineral booms we also find that uncertainty about future commodity prices increases long run inequality

the resource curse a statistical mirage abstract a surprising feature of resource rich economies is slow growth it is often argued that natural resource production impedes development by creating market or institutional failures this paper establishes an alternative explanation a slow growing resource sector a declining resource sector is disproportionately reflected in resource dependent countries additionally there is little evidence that resource dependence impedes growth in non resource sectors more generally this paper illustrates the importance of considering industry composition in cross country growth regressions

why do some resource abundant countries succeed while others do not on average resource abundant countries have experienced lower growth over the last four decades than their resource poor counterparts but the most interesting aspect of the paradox of plenty is not the average effect of natural resources but its variation for every nigeria or venezuela there is a norway or a botswana why do natural resources induce prosperity in some countries but stagnation in others this paper gives an overview of the dimensions along which resource abundant winners and losers differ in light of this it then discusses different theory models of the resource curse with a particular emphasis on recent developments

learning to love the dutch disease evidence from the mineral economies abstract recent literature proposes that a booming minerals sector may not only lead to dutch disease effects it may also be a development curse mineral economy case studies have tentatively confirmed this recourse curse thesis this paper examines the long run economic and development performance of a more general grouping of mineral based economies and finds little corroborating evidence

resource shocks and human capital stocks brain drain or brain gain abstract based on the paradox of plenty resource abundant countries tend to be vulnerable for lower economic prosperity along with instable political institutions as well as corruption this paper sheds light on the relationship between resource abundance and the selectivity of migration first i combine a dutch disease model with a roy borjas model in order to elaborate on the relationship between resource shocks and migrant selectivity theoretically thereby i predict that resource booms give rise to brain drain effects which are mediated through distributional effects under certain conditions second i provide empirical evidence for the effect of resource shocks on migrant selectivity based on a structural equation model in order to disentangle effects on income inequality and migrant selectivity the results show that resource shocks especially oil booms strengthen brain drain effects in a sample with 116 source and 23 destination countries between 1910 and 2009

the dynamic impact of unilateral environmental policies this paper builds a two country two sector polluting nonpolluting trade model with directed technical change examining whether unilateral environmental policies can ensure sustainable growth the emission rate of the polluting sector depends on its relative use of a clean and a dirty input a unilateral policy combining clean research subsidies and a trade tax can ensure sustainable growth while unilateral carbon taxes alone increase innovation in the polluting sector abroad and generally cannot ensure sustainable growth relative to autarky and exogenous technical change respectively trade and directed technical change accelerate environmental degradation either under laissez faire or with unilateral carbon taxes yet both help reduce environmental degradation under the appropriate unilateral policy i characterize the optimal unilateral policy analytically and numerically using calibrated simulations knowledge spillovers have the potential to reduce the otherwise large welfare costs of restricting policy to onecountry

utilisation of the stock of owner occupied single family houses an econometric analysis in many single family houses the owner has the option to let a part of the house to another party or to use the entire house for her own purposes this paper uses a stochastic utility framework to provide a theoretical analysis of this dichotomous choice the paper also shows how an empirical model that is consistent with the theoretical model can be formulated and estimated using suitable parameterisation within the empirical analysis we test and reject the hypothesis of locally linear utility functions that are frequently used in models of discrete housing choices furthermore the estimated model is used to show how the tax treatment of owner occupiers affects the utilisation of the stock of single family houses

the dutch disease a disease after all many third world oil producers are encountering serious problems in building up a diversified export base while west european oil and gas producers netherlands united kingdom are suffering a decline in their traded goods manufacturing sector induced by real wage pressures it is becoming increasingly clear that high but temporary oil revenues may be somewhat ora mixed blessing the quip of the economist notwithstanding the mechanism behind this unbalance is clear enough part of the oil revenues is spent on non traded goods which leads to a real appreciation i e a rise in the relative price of non traded goods in terms of traded goods this in turn draws resources out of the non oil traded sector into the non traded goods producing sector corden and neary 1982 van wijnbergen 1980 one may say that this is an efficient response to the increase in income from oil production the united kingdom mexico egypt simply should move into oil derived industries and non traded goods and forget about their manufacturing sector until oil reserves are exhausted however many developing countries are hesitant to take this advice after all the post world war ii success stories in economic development involve without exception countries that promoted their traded goods sector aggressively moreover it is a well established stylised fact that technological progress is faster in the traded non sheltered sectors of an economy than in the non traded sector balassa 1964 is an early reference considering the hypothesis that technological progress rather than taking place exogenously with the passage of time is a function of accumulated experience the concern of countries like egypt mexico or indonesia is much easier to understand since solow 1957 and denison 1962 it is known that capital accumulation explain only a small part of economic growth if most of economic growth is caused by learning by doing induced technologica

r d and manufacturing production specialization in developed economies a study of the relation between technology and manufacturing production specialization in a series of developed economies is performed by means of models relating indicators of revealed symmetric comparative advantage of value added and exports to similar measures of comparative performance of r d expenditure capital intensity total factor productivity and wage costs the production and r d specialization are shown to be substantial and sticky this contrasts with the evidence of a substantial degree of convergence in the patterns of the other variables regression estimates show that although all variables play their part the impact of comparative r d efforts on production specialization is by far the strongest this impact is found to be stronger in the smaller economies and it is especially important in research intensive industries the influence of comparative wages is moreover found to be positive here suggesting the dominance of a labour skill and efficiency wage effect over a wage cost comp

using natural resources for development why has it proven so difficult developing economies have found it hard to use natural resource wealth to improve their economic performance utilizing resource endowments is a multistage economic and political problem that requires private investment to discover and extract the resource fiscal regimes to capture revenue judicious spending and investment decisions and policies to manage volatility and mitigate adverse impacts on the rest of the economy experience is mixed with some successes such as botswana and malaysia and more failures this paper reviews the challenges that are faced in successfully managing resource wealth the evidence on country performance and the reasons for disappointing results

on the effectiveness of capital controls the experience of colombia during the 1990s abstract this paper analyzes the effectiveness of capital controls in colombia the evidence presented points towards a relative inability of the measures adopted to reduce the level of capital inflows nonetheless the evidence suggests that non remunerated deposits have been successful in inducing a recomposition of foreign liabilities in favor of long term maturities it is likely that this is a positive result as it has made the country less vulnerable to a reversal in capital flows in this sense controls may be viewed as an effective way of internalizing the negative externality imposed by short term maturities

the dutch disease and the technological gap abstract i present a theory explaining why less technologically advanced countries could be more vulnerable to the dutch disease in a bilateral trade model with monopolistic competition and increasing returns to scale the extent of the crowding out in the tradable sector depends positively on an interaction between the amount of revenues from natural resources exports and the productivity gap vis a vis the trade partners with learning by doing the mechanism is self reinforcing leading to a productivity divergence pattern the predictions of the model are consistent with cross country empirical evidence

cursed by resources or institutions natural resource abundant countries constitute both growth losers and growth winners and the main difference between the success cases and the cases of failure lays in the quality of institutions with grabber friendly institutions more natural resources push aggregate income down while with producer friendly institutions more natural resources increase income such a theory finds strong support in data a key question we also discuss is if resources in addition alter the quality of institutions when that is the case countries with bad institutions suffer a double resource curse as the deterioration of institutions strenghtens the negative effect of more natural resources

evaluation of swedish youth labor market programs this paper evaluates two swedish active labour market programmes for youth namely youth practice and labour market training a non parametric matching approach is applied to estimate the average p

real exchange rate policies for economic development abstract this paper analyzes the role of real exchange rate rer policies in promoting economic development markets provide a suboptimal amount of investment in sectors characterized by learning spillovers we show that a stable and competitive rer policy may correct for this externality and other related market failures the resulting development of these sectors leads to overall faster economic growth a system of effectively multiple exchange rates is required when spillovers across different tradable sectors differ the impact of rer policies is increased when they are complemented by traditional industrial policies that increase the elasticity of the aggregate supply to the rer among the instruments required to implement a stable and competitive rer are interventions in the foreign exchange market and regulation of capital flows we also discuss the trade offs associated with alternative stable and competitive rer policies and the relationship between the use of exchange rate policies for macro stability and for development

the real exchange rate and macroeconomic performance in sub saharan africa abstract pooled time series and cross section data for 33 countries in sub saharan africa ssa confirm the negative relationship between the real exchange rate rer misalignment and economic performance economic growth imports exports saving and investment macroeconomic instability also slows growth and other indicators of performance higher levels of misalignment are accompanied by higher levels of macroeconomic instability both lower levels of rer misalignment and instability lead to better economic performance the edwards model of rer determination performs well for the region black market premia tend to show a greater degree of misalignment in rer than alternative measures

aid policies and growth the authors of this paper use a new database on foreign aid to examine the relationships among foreign aid economic policies and growth of per capita gdp in panel growth regressions for 56 developing countries and 6 four year periods 1970 93 they find that the policies that have a great effect on growth are those related to fiscal surplus inflation and trade openness they construct an index for those three policies and have that index interact with foreign aid they have instruments for both aid and aid interacting with policies they find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies in the presence of poor policies aid has no positive effect on growth this result is robust in a variety of specifications which include or exclude middle income countries include or exclude outliers and treat policies as exogenous or endogenous they examine the determinants of policy and find no evidence that aid has systematically affected policies either for good or for ill they estimate an aid allocation equation and show that any tendency for aid to reward good policies has been overwhelmed by donors pursuit of their own strategic interests in a counterfactual they reallocate aid reduce the role of donor interests and increasing the importance of policy such a reallocation would have a large positive effect on developing countries growth rates

the production life cycle tasks in production have different dynamics in comparison with individual products we build a general equilibrium model where three forces offshoring learning and wage interact to determine how production fragmentation evolves over time we show that the production process follows a life cycle its fragmentation emerges deepens and converges our model is stylized and versatile which can be used to tractably characterize the loci of global output productivity welfare and value added distribution as production fragmentation progresses this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

structural transformation and comparative advantage implications for small open economies data from the last half century show that revealed comparative advantage in agriculture manufacturing is negatively positively associated with the rate of decline in labour share in agriculture motivated by this finding the author constructs and calibrates a simple open economy model where there is learning by doing in manufacturing and industry supplied inputs to agricultural production this paper focuses on the effects of comparative advantage and learning by doing on structural transformation and calibrate the model to the us and the uk data to estimate key parameters of the model quantitative experiments show that holding constant other factors a small difference in a country s comparative advantage can account for a large variation in structural transformation for open economies which does not require nearly as much differential productivity growth as in closed economy models

the transformation of competitive advantage in east asia an analysis of technological and trade specialisation summary in recent years there has been considerable interest in the relationship between a country s export competitiveness and the role played by technology in strengthening and maintaining competitive advantage a central feature of recent empirical work mainly focused on the oecd countries has rested on examining patterns of export and technological specialization between economies and sectors this paper moves attention away from the advanced industrialized economies to examine the trends for trade and technological specialization among the east asian developing economies in particular two aspects of specialization are examined first to what extent have patterns of competitive advantage changed over time and second to measure the relationship between patterns of trade and technological specialization important differences are found in the patterns of specialization and in the relationship between them among the advanced east asian economies and those catching up

a microeconometric evaluation of rehabilitation of long term sickness in sweden in this study the effects of various types of rehabilitation programmes on labour market out comes are estimated a main feature of this study is that it jointly evaluates multiple treat ments by nonparametric matching estimators the study is based on a large sample of per sons in western sweden who are long term sick and could participate in rehabilitation pro grammes our results suggest that work place training is superior to the other rehabilitation programmes with respect to labour market outcomes but compared to non participation no positive effects are found doi 10 1002 jae 757 download appendix pdf 147 kb

does the exchange rate regime make a difference in inflation performance in developing and emerging countries the role of inflation targeting abstract we apply propensity score matching estimators with multiple outcomes to evaluate the impacts of exchange rate regimes fixed intermediate and flexible without inflation targeting and inflation targeting on inflation rates in emerging and developing countries an inflation targeting regime does better than or at least as good work as a fixed regime in lowering inflation rates when compared with intermediate or flexible regimes we do not observe a clear difference in inflation rates between fixed and inflation targeting regimes in recent years 2000 2007 intermediate and flexible regimes provide higher inflation than fixed or inflation targeting regimes in most cases

the narrow moving band the dutch disease and the competitive consequences of mrs thatcher notes on trade in the presence of dynamic scale economies abstract this paper presents a model of trade in which comparative advantage instead of being determined by underlying attributes of countries evolves over time through learning by doing in this model arbitrary patterns of specialization once established tend to become entrenched over time the model sheds light on three widely held views that do not make sense in more conventional models first is the view that temporary protection of selected sectors can permanently alter the pattern of comparative advantage in the protecting country s favor second is the view that seemingly favorable developments such as the discovery of exportable natural resources may lead to a permanent loss of other sectors and reduce welfare in the long run third is the possibility that a temporary overvaluation of a currency due to tight money can lead to a permanent loss of competitiveness in some sectors

the behavior of manufacturing firms under the new economic model abstract a study of medium and large domestic manufacturing firms in latin america shows that the region s new economic model has led to significant transformations in firm behavior the study results may not be generalizable however since the sample is small and not statistically representative nevertheless they provide insights into the behavior of the most modernizing domestic manufacturing firms and into the role of policy aimed at encouraging firms to upgrade

institutions and the resource curse countries rich in natural resources constitute both growth losers and growth winners we claim that the main reason for these diverging experiences is differences in the quality of institutions more natural resources push aggregate income down when institutions are grabber friendly while more resources raise income when institutions are producer friendly we test this theory building on sachs and warner s influential works on the resource curse our main hypothesis that institutions are decisive for the resource curse is confirmed our results contrast the claims of sachs and warner that institutions do not play a role

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

natural resources rent seeking and welfare abstract a new and very simple mechanism to explain why natural resource abundance may lower income and welfare is developed in a model with rent seeking a greater amount of natural resources increases the number of entrepreneurs engaged in rent seeking and reduces the number of entrepreneurs running productive firms with a demand externality it is shown that the drop in income as a result of this is higher than the increase in income from the natural resource more natural resources thus lead to lower welfare

demographic transition in resource rich countries a blessing or a curse summary this study argues that resource wealth is a key factor for understanding income effects of demographic transition we develop a simple model highlighting how the income effect of increased labor supply may depend on resource rents and provide empirical evidence that support the theoretical predictions using panel data covering the period from 1982 to 2006 for more than 120 countries we find a negative interaction effect between resource wealth and demographic transition on national income moreover the negative interaction effect does not depend on institutional quality and is found also across different samples

booming sector and de industrialisation in a small open economy this paper presents a theoretical analysis of the dutch disease the phenomenon whereby a boom in one traded goods sector squeezes porfitability in other traded goods sectors both by directly bi

temporary controls on capital inflows abstract during the past decade a number of countries imposed capital controls that had two distinguishing features they were asymmetric in that they were designed principally to discourage capital inflows and they were temporary this paper studies formally the consequences of these policies calibrates their potential effectiveness and assesses their welfare implications in an environment in which the level of capital inflows can be sub optimal in addition motivated by the fact that these types of controls have often been left in place after the dissipation of the shock that lead to the controls being implemented the paper evaluates the welfare cost of procrastination in removing these types of controls

disaggregated capital flows and developing countries competitiveness summary attracting capital and foreign exchange flows is crucial for developing countries yet these flows could lead to real exchange rate appreciation and may thus have detrimental effects on competitiveness jeopardizing exports and growth we investigate this dilemma by comparing the impact of six types of flows on real exchange rate behavior in a sample of 57 developing countries covering africa europe asia latin america and the middle east the results reveal that portfolio investments foreign borrowing aid and income lead to real exchange rate appreciation while remittances have disparate effects across regions foreign direct investments have no effect on the real exchange rate contributing to resolve the above dilemma

the division of labor need not imply regional specialization the regional specialization of economic activities is generally deemed desirable for three reasons 1 the law of comparative advantage 2 localized economies of scale and 3 knowledge spillovers taking a methodological individualist perspective we claim that 1 the law of comparative advantage while valid for individuals and firms does not necessarily imply regional specialization when regions are viewed as consisting of heterogeneous individuals 2 localized economies of scale are seldom specific to one industry and external in all but the regional level and 3 the study of knowledge spillovers is inconclusive and would benefit from a more disaggregated perspective

post disaster aid and development of the manufacturing sector lessons from a natural experiment in china abstract we adopt a disaggregate approach to study the link between aid and dutch disease dynamics using a natural experiment in china specifically we examine whether post disaster aid provided to a subsample of chinese counties devastated by an earthquake in 2008 affects the sectoral composition of local economies using different methods we consistently find that counties receiving more aid even nearby counties not directly damaged by the earthquake tend to suffer from a contraction of the manufacturing sector innovative features of the paper include its regional perspective its identification strategy resting on a special provision in chinese policy pairwise aid and its focus on dutch disease effects in the context of post disaster aid

on discrete choice models of housing demand abstract this paper explores several specifications of discrete choice models in estimating housing consumption for purposes of projection and policy simulation we view housing consumption comprehensively as it includes the choice between three types of homeownership five types of rented housing and as a ninth alternative not heading a household the familiar multinomial logit specification is rejected by several specification tests the paper therefore studies a variety of nested multinomial logit models of hierarchical choice that allow a richer substitution pattern among the very disparate housing choices enumerated above estimations of different nesting structures reveal strong and plausible differences among nesting structures

carbon curse in developed countries among the ten countries with the highest carbon intensity six are natural resource rich countries this suggests the existence of a carbon curse resource rich countries would tend to follow more carbon intensive development paths than resource poor countries we investigate this assumption empirically using a panel data method covering 29 countries oecd and bric and seven sectors over the 1995 2009 period first at the macroeconomic level we find that the relationship between national co 2 emissions per unit of gdp and abundance in natural resources is u shaped the carbon curse appears only after the turning point second we measure the impact of resource abundance on sectoral emissions for two groups of countries based on their resource endowments we show that a country rich in natural resources pollutes relatively more in resource related sectors as well as all other sectors our results suggest that the debate on climate change mitigation should rather focus on a comparison of resource rich countries versus resource poor countries than the developed country versus developing country debate

evaluation of credit guarantee policy using propensity score matching in this article we evaluate the effect of the credit guarantee policy by comparing a large sample of guaranteed firms and matched non guaranteed firms from 2000 to 2003 the sample firms are compared with respect to growth rates of different performance indicators including productivity sales employment investment r d wage level and the survival of firms in the post crisis period in order to avoid the selectivity problem propensity score matching methodologies are adopted results suggest that credit guarantees influenced significantly firms ability to maintain their size and increase their survival rate but not to increase their r d and investment and hence their growth in productivity moreover due to the adverse selection problem firms with lower productivity were receiving guarantees

the evolution of comparative advantage measurement and welfare implications using an industry level dataset of production and trade spanning 75 countries and 5 decades and a fully specied multi sector ricardian model we estimate productivities at sector level and examine how they evolve over time in both developed and developing countries we nd that in both country groups comparative advantage has become weaker productivity grew systematically faster in sectors that were initially at the greater comparative disadvantage the global welfare implications of this phenomenon are signicant relative to the counterfactual scenario in which an individual country s comparative advantage remained the same as in the 1960s and technology in all sectors grew at the same country specic average rate welfare today is 1 9 lower at the median the welfare impact varies greatly across countries ranging from 0 5 to 6 among oecd countries and from 9 to 27 among non oecd countries remarkably for the oecd countries nearly all of the welfare impact is driven by changes in technology in oecd countries and for the non oecd countries nearly all of the welfare impact is driven by changes in technology in non oecd countries

learning by doing and the dutch disease this paper develops a model of learning by doing and the dutch disease that extends the earlier literature in two ways first it is assumed that both the traded and the non traded sector can contribute to learning second it is assumed that there are learning spillovers between the sectors it is shown that within such a model a foreign exchange gift results in a real exchange rate depreciation in the long run due to a shift in the steady state relative productivity between the traded and the non traded sector in contrast to standard models of the dutch disease production and productivity in both sectors may go up or down the conditions for the different cases are worked out

dutch disease and the mitigation effect of migration evidence from canadian provinces this article evaluates whether immigration can mitigate the dutch disease effects associated with booms in natural resource sectors we derive predicted changes in the size of the non tradable sector from a small general equilibrium model a la obstfeld rogoff using data for canadian provinces we find evidence that aggregate immigration mitigates the increase in the size of the non tradable sector in booming regions the mitigation effect is due mostly to interprovincial migration and temporary foreign workers there is no evidence of such an effect for permanent international immigration interprovincial migration also results in a spreading effect of dutch disease from booming to non booming provinces

the anarchy of numbers aid development and cross country empirics the recent literature contains many stories of how foreign aid affects economic growth aid raises growth in countries with good policies or with difficult economic environments or outside the tropics or on average but with diminishing returns the diversity of the results suggests that many are fragile seven important aid growth papers are tested for robustness using 14 minimally arbitrary tests deriving mainly from differences among the studies themselves this approach investigates the importance of potentially arbitrary specification choices while minimizing the arbitrariness in testing choices all of the results appear fragile especially to sample expansion

do national level policies to promote low carbon technology deployment pay off for the investor countries abstract national level policies to promote deployment of low carbon technologies have been suggested and used as a means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the context of international climate change mitigation the long term benefits of such policies in the context of international climate change mitigation depend on their effects on near term emissions abatement and resultant long term technological change that will reduce abatement costs of achieving global mitigation goals there is also an argument that these policies might foster early mover advantages in international low carbon technology markets we first review the factors that could influence such benefits and use a global integrated assessment model to present an illustrative example to understand the potential magnitude of these benefits we find that reductions in long term abatement costs might not provide sufficient incentives to justify policies to promote the deployment of low carbon technologies in particular the emerging higher risk and currently expensive alternatives we also find that early mover advantages can potentially provide substantial benefits but only if these advantages are both strong and persistent our results suggest a role for international cooperation in low carbon technology deployment to address the existence of free riding opportunities in the context of global climate change mitigation

a note on the optimum subsidy to a learning industry abstract the existing results on the optimum subsidy to an infant industry engaged in learning by doing are of little use to policy makers because they provide no practical means of computing the level of that subsidy in part because one typically has no data with which to estimate the learning function until after the learning process is over using both the now standard analysis of bardhan 1971 and a generalization that allows for a non constant marginal utility of consumption this note demonstrates that the optimum subsidy must always be less than the rate that would completely make up for the productivity disadvantage of the infant industry relative to the efficient foreign producer to compute this ceiling rate it would be sufficient to know for example current factor prices and the foreign producer s cost function simulations show that for reasonable parameter values a naive second best policy that sets the subsidy rate equal to its ceiling value at all times not only improves on a policy of laissez faire but also consistently captures more than three quarters of the benefits of the optimum subsidy policy

oil price shocks sectoral and dynamic adjustments in a small open developed and oil exporting economy the recent uptrend in oil prices represents both an opportunity and a challenge for small open developed and oil exporting countries using canada as a study case and in contrast to most studies that use aggregate models this paper employs a multi sector intertemporal general equilibrium model to provide perspectives on the sectoral aggregate and dynamic adjustments of a sustained increase in oil prices it highlights the transmission channels through which the rise in oil prices affects the domestic economy the simulation results suggest that the shock would have positive aggregate impacts but would also spur the reallocation of resources and would therefore induce disparities in sectoral adjustments the suggested contraction in some industries could not however be attributed to a pure dutch disease phenomenon because of among other factors the cost push effect induced by the increase in oil prices

employment effects of active labor market programs for sick listed workers we use register data of 88 948 sick listed workers in denmark over the period 2008 2011 to investigate the effect of active labor market programs on the duration until returning to non subsidized employment and the duration of this employment to identify causal treatment effects we exploit over time variation in the use of active labor market programs in 98 job centers and time to event we find that ordinary education and subsidized job training have significant positive employment effects subsidized job training has a large positive effect on the transition into employment but no effect on the subsequent employment duration in contrast ordinary education has a positive effect on employment duration but no effect on the transition into employment the latter effect is the result of two opposing effects a large positive effect of having completed education and a large negative lock in effect with low re employment chances during program participation

the resource curse what have we learned from two decades of intensive research introduction to the special issue there has been increasing interest in the so called resource curse that is the tendency of resource rich countries to underperform in several development outcomes this has generated a mountain of often contradictory evidence leaving many floundering in the flood of information this special issue compiles eight papers from some of the most prominent contributors to this literature combining original research with critical reflection on the current stock of knowledge the studies collectively emphasise the complexities and conditionalities of the curse its presence intensity is largely context specific depending on the type of resources socio political institutions and linkages with the rest of the economy

a ricardian model with a continuum of goods under nonhomothetic preferences demand complementarities income distribution and north south trade this paper develops a ricardian model of trade in which goods are indexed according to priority and higher indexed goods are consumed only by richer households south north has a comparative advantage in lower higher indexed goods and hence specializes in goods with lower higher income elasticities of demand product cycles and a southern terms of trade deterioration result from faster population growth and uniform productivity growth in south and a global productivity improvement south s domestic income redistribution policy can improve its terms of trade so much that every household in south may be better off at the expense of north

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

the effects of expanding the generosity of the statutory sickness insurance system summary this article evaluates an expansion of employer mandated sick leave from 80 to 100 of forgone gross wages in germany we employ and compare parametric difference in difference did matching did and mixed approaches overall workplace absences increased by at least 10 or 1 day per worker per year we show that taking partial compliance into account increases coefficient estimates further heterogeneity in response behavior was of great importance there is no evidence that the increase in sick leave improved employee health a finding that supports a shirking explanation finally we provide evidence on potential labor market adjustments to the reform copyright 2013 john wiley sons ltd

the division of labor coordination costs and knowledge this paper considers specialization and the division of labor a more extensive division of labor raises productivity because returns to the time spent on tasks are usually greater to workers who concentrate on a narrower range of skills the traditional discussion of the division of labor emphasizes the limitations to specialization imposed by the extent of the market we claim that the degree of specialization is more often determined by other considerations especially emphasized are various costs of coordinating specialized workers who perform complementary tasks and the amount of general knowledge available