a dynamic theory of collective goods programs a collective goods program such as an entitlement program distributes benefits and costs according to constituents characteristics this paper presents a dynamic theory of the legislative choice of collective goods programs based on a sequential model of proposal making and voting in a majority rule legislature where the status quo in a session is given by the program last enacted a stationary markov perfect equilibrium is characterized for a unidimensional collective goods program and yields a generalized median voter theorem comparative statics on preferences and legislative procedures and a characterization of the dynamics of such programs equilibrium programs can expand or contract over time but they ultimately converge to the median on the path to that point legislators may act strategically to address the durability problem that a future legislature can undo the actions of the present legislature by strategically positioning the status quo to limit the changes that future legislatures can make

regulatory fog the role of information in regulatory persistence abstract regulation is very persistent even when inefficient we propose an explanation for regulatory persistence based on regulatory fog the phenomenon by which regulation obscures information regarding the value of counterfactual policies we construct a dynamic model of regulation in which the underlying need for regulation varies stochastically and regulation undermines the social planner s ability to observe the state of the world compared to a full information benchmark regulation is highly persistent often lasting indefinitely regulatory fog is robust to a broad range of partially informative policies and can be quite detrimental to social welfare regulatory experiments modeled as costly and imperfect signals of the underlying state do not eliminate the effects of regulatory fog we characterize their effects and provide a framework for choosing amongst a set of potential regulatory experiments

external shocks and the demand for adjustment finance when a country experiences a long term adverse external shock resulting in a balance of payments deficit unsustainable in the medium term how quickly should it adjust because time is required for movement of productive factors and consumptive patterns the short term effect of the shock will be a large increase in the value of foreign exchange it then pays to borrow abroad during the first years of the transition against those years when full resource and demand reallocations have taken place to allow this adjustment path the market exchange rate should follow the shadow exchange rate this article uses a simple traded nontraded sector model with lagged responses and optimal borrowing theory to derive a quantitative relationship between the magnitude of the shock and the optimal amount of borrowing the speed at which the original shortfall of foreign currency should be closed and the required currency depreciation during the borrowing and repayment period

do more jobs in the modern sector increase urban unemployment abstract this note considers the effect of an increase in the rate of urban job creation on migration and urban unemployment the different results obtained when the issue was previously analyzed are reconciled the period of time allowed for adjustment and the specification of the migration function are crucial in explaining the different results

price dispersion and incomplete learning in the long run abstract in each period a seller chooses a price and the customer for that period buys either one unit or nothing the relationship between price and purchase probability is one of two linear functions it is shown that the seller behaving optimally does not necessarily learn which function is the actual relationship since there can be a positive probability of sequences of prices converging to the price at which the two functions give the same purchase probability

coffee economic fluctuations and stabilisation an intertemporal disequilibrium model with capital market imperfections abstract this paper develops a two period disequilibrium model of a small open economy under keynesian unemployment to analyse the effects of temporary anticipated and permanent coffee price shocks the model includes a government sector that administers a commodity price stabilisation fund and allows for capital market imperfections the type of capital market imperfection makes an important difference to the results of the model in particular when the government borrows on more favourable terms than individuals the coffee price stabilisation fund reduces the multiplier effects of temporary and permanent shocks not only in the first but also in the second period by contrast when individuals face an upward sloping supply of capital curve the stabilisation fund shifts some of these effects from the first to the second period

learning public good provision and the information trap abstract we consider an economy with uncertainty about the true production function for a public good by using bayes rule the economy can learn from experience we show that it may learn the truth but that it may also converge to an inefficient policy where no further inference is possible so that the economy is stuck in an information trap we also show that our results are robust with respect to small experimentation

migration theories and evidence an assessment abstract this paper presents a critical survey of theories of migration their welfare and policy implications and their empirical relevance we also develop some extensions to the theory beginning with the harris and todaro ht model in particular the ht model is extended to examine risk averse behaviour within families where the migration of members of families serves to diversify risk the welfare implications of the individual migration decision and government intervention in the form of employment subsidies are examined recent evidence on international migration is presented it is shown that migration does not flow automatically in response to wage differentials characteristics of migrants and the process of self selection are found to be important determinants of the rate of migration

uninformed votes information effects in presidential elections theory recent scholarship has emphasized the potential importance of cues information shortcuts and statistical aggregation processes in allowing relatively uninformed citizens to act individually or collectively as if they were fully informed hypotheses uninformed voters successfully use cues and information shortcuts to behave as if they were fully informed failing that individual deviations from fully informed voting cancel out in a mass electorate producing the same aggregate election outcome as if voters were fully informed methods hypothetical fully informed vote choices are imputed to individual voters using the observed relationship between political information and vote choices for voters with similar social and demographic characteristics estimated by probit analysis of data from national election study surveys conducted after the six most recent united states presidential elections results both hypotheses are clearly disconfirmed at the individual level the average deviation of actual vote probabilities from hypothetical fully informed vote probabilities was about ten percentage points in the electorate as a whole these deviations were significantly diluted by aggregation but by no means eliminated incumbent presidents did almost five percentage points better and democratic candidates did almost two percentage points better than they would have if voters had in fact been fully informed

the effect of government spending on the current account output and expenditures evidence from latin america abstract this paper examines the linkages between government expenditures and current account balances in several latin american economies over the period 1974 1984 in theory these linkages critically depend on private sector responses to changes in government expenditures on both the demand and supply sides the analysis provides evidence that the negative current account government expenditure linkage is much stronger in the event of a temporary shock to government expenditures than in the event of a permanent shock the source of this differential response appears to be primarily on the expenditure side suggesting that private sectors in latin america incorporate the present discounted value rather than simply the current value of government expenditures into their expenditure decisions

majority voting with single crossing preferences we clarify and extend a number of sufficient conditions for the existence of a majority voting equilibrium on one dimensional choice domains these conditions variously stated in the previous literature all impose order restrictions on voter preferences for instance monotone marginal rates of substitution which we show to imply or be equivalent to a general ordinal version of the single crossing condition this simple property is economically intuitive and easily checked in applications this ease of application is demonstrated through an examination of voting models of redistributive income taxation and trade union bargaining behaviour

on the dynamic instability of induced migration unemployment in a dual economy abstract previous attempts to integrate the todarian analysis of rural urban migration with the dual economy growth model have relied upon an essentially static version of the migration hypothesis inappropriate in a growth context in this paper it is shown that when a dynamic version of the hypothesis is used the steady state growth equilibrium whilst characterised by a positive unemployment rate typical of todarian models is unstable these results have policy implications which differ from those presented in the previous literature

monetary fiscal and exchange intervention policy in a two country intertemporal disequilibrium model abstract a symmetric two country two period model with flexible exchange rates and rigid first period money wages is constructed there is a single world output and perfect capital mobility agents have perfect foresight and optimise intertemporally aoki s method of sums and differences is used to analyse the model and to relate it to closed and small open versions a key structural feature is that the intertemporal budget contraint not the lm equation determines a country s output international shocks are transmitted through the real interest rate anticipated future spending increases are contractionary abroad so a permanent increase may be too this modifies mundell s findings

social mobility and redistributive politics just like economists voters have conflicting views about redistributive taxation because they estimate its incentive costs differently we model rational agents as trying to learn from their dynastic income mobility experience the relative importance of effort and predetermined factors in the generation of income inequality and therefore the magnitude of these incentive costs in the long run left wing dynasties believing less in individual effort and voting for more redistribution coexist with right wing dynasties this allows us to explain why individual mobility experience and not only current income matters for political attiitudes and how persistent differences in perceptions about social mobility can generate persistent differences in redistribution across countries

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

a model of aid impact in some south pacific microstates abstract this paper investigates the impact of foreign aid on the economic structure of the recipient economy using a two sector general equilibrium model underlying assumptions are designed to mirror a number of stylized facts about a group of south pacific microstates known as mirab countries two variants of the model are constructed to reflect these countries unequal access to overseas labor markets qualitative results reveal the likelihood of a structural transformation of the economy akin to that known as dutch disease namely the relative contraction of the tradables sector quantitative results confirm the plausibility of this outcome

voting under ignorance of job skills of unemployed the overtaxation bias abstract usual models on voting over basic income flat tax schedules rest on the assumption that voters know the whole distribution of skills even if at equilibrium some individuals do not work if individuals productivity remains unknown until they work it may be more convincing to assume that voters have only beliefs about the distribution of skills and that a learning process takes place in this paper at each period individuals vote according to their beliefs which are updated when getting new information from the job market the voting process converges towards some steady state equilibrium that depends on both the true distribution of skills and the initial beliefs the equilibrium tax rate is higher than or equal to the tax rate achieved in the perfect information framework an illustration is provided on french data if voters are over pessimistic as to the potential productivity of unemployed people majority voting may lock the economy in an informational trap with a high tax rate and a high level of inactivity

intertemporal optimizing models of trade and current account balance a survey abstract this study surveys the intertemporal optimizing models of trade and current account balance that were developed calibrated and empirically tested since they came into vogue in the 1980s the implications of these models often differ from those of static and dynamic conventional non optimizing models the literature on optimizing models has not only grown reasonably fast but has also witnessed significant advances in methodology and these models have culminated into a distinct strand of new open economy macroeconomics the studies conducted until the late 1980s have used deterministic perfect foresight models while several studies conducted since the 1990s relax the perfect foresight and certainty equivalence assumptions and develop stochastic dynamic general equilibrium models to account for uncertainty confronting the optimizing agents the future research needs to explore the possibility of tracing any preferred specification of household preferences model the effect of time varying discount factor on household utility function and intertemporal budget constraint examine the role of costs in international trade place a parallel emphasis on the empirical verifications of theoretical propositions examine the relative performance of optimizing vis a vis non optimizing models and rationalize the extreme propositions of perfect and imperfect capital mobility in the wake of moderately open capital accounts

macro economic aspects of the effectiveness of foreign aid on the two gap model home goods disequilibrium and real exchange rate misalignment we construct an open economy disequilibrium model to assess the welfare effects of aid in different macroeconomic regimes aid is shown to have different effects in different unemployment regimes because it increases the social costs of wage price rigidities in the classical regime but decreases them in the keynesian unemployment regime a link is made with the two gap model but we highlight the role of real exchange rate misalignment failure to clear the nt goods market

exchange rates trade liberalization and aid the sri lankan experience abstract in 1977 the sri lankan government embarked on an extensive program of liberalization an important element of which was devaluation to ensure a competitive real exchange rate the 1980s were however marked by an increasing divergence between the real and nominal exchange rates the depreciation of the latter not being matched by similar movements of the former this paper presents an econometric model of real exchange rate behavior in sri lanka among other things it is shown that increased aid inflows have made a significant contribution to the failure of the real exchange rate to match the depreciation in the nominal rate

the macroeconomic effects of direct foreign investment the case of thailand abstract earlier research on the macroeconomic impact of direct foreign investment dfi on the host economy focused particularly on the impact on growth and on the current account of the balance of payments findings were mixed but it was clear that the effects were not always positive and in fact quite often negative the recent upsurge in dfi flows are different from the past in that they are characterized by a strong concentration on export production it is therefore relevant to reassess the channels of macroeconomic impact and their intensity the present paper does this using thailand as an example it concludes that export oriented dfi is likely to have a positive effect on private investment and growth but can have adverse balance of payments consequences

uniform commercial policy illegal trade and the real exchange rates a theoretical analysis countries on fixed exchange rates sometimes use uniform tariff cum subsidy utcs schemes as a way of achieving a real depreciation without disturbing the nominal exchange rate a potential drawback of this policy in relation to an across the board devaluation is that a utcs scheme provides incentives for illegal trade using an optimizing model with currency convertibility and illegal trade the author finds that welfare is lower under a utcs scheme than under a corresponding across the board devaluation and that in some cases the real exchange rate actually appreciates in response to an increase in the utcs rate

rational debate and one dimensional conflict this paper studies repeated communication regarding a multidimensional collective decision in a large population when preferences coincide but beliefs about the consequences of the various decisions diverge it is shown under some specific assumptions that public communication causes the disagreement between beliefs either to vanish or to become one dimensional at the limit multidimensional disagreement indeed allows for many directions of communication including some that are orthogonal to the conflict along which agents can communicate credibly the possible convergence toward a one dimensional conflict where no further communication takes place may be related to the empirically observed geometry ofthe political conflict in many countries

inflation employment and the dutch disease in oil exporting countries a short run disequilibrium analysis the author uses nontraded goods and labor shortages in the gulf countries the decline of the traded goods sector in oil producers dutch disease and the absence of employment benefits of higher oil revenues in latin american oil producers higher oil revenues can be likened to a transfer putting pressure on non oil traded nt goods prices and drawing resources out of the t sector the slope of the wage indexation line determines whether classical unemployment or repressed inflation results various policy measures are analyzed 3 references 8 figures

debt relief and economic growth in mexico could external restraint and internal balance in mexico have been reconciled at levels of savings and investment that allowed satisfactory growth in output without the 1989 90 restructuring of debt what are the likely implications of mexico s brady deal on economic growth what are the macroeconomic effects of debt equity swaps this article develops and estimates a model to address these issues the analysis concludes that the 1989 90 agreement in mexico will contribute materially to macroeconomic stability and the restoration of economic growth copyright 1991 by oxford university press

the macroeconomic impact of development aid a critical survey the early literature explained aid s macroeconomic impact in the context of the dual gap model showing a clear link between aid and growth many now believe that the empirical evidence shows there to be no such relationship this paper critically reviews the different theoretical perspectives the dual gap model the savings debate recipient fiscal response and aid as dutch disease and the empirical debates on aid savings and growth the basis for denying a relationship between aid and growth is shown to be weak though more recent areas of research offer promising directions for future work

economists views about parameters values and policies survey results in labor and public economics specialists in labor economics and public economics at 40 leading research universities provided opinions of policy proposals quantitative best estimates and 95 percent confidence intervals for economic parameters and answers to values questions regarding income redistribution efficiency versus equity and individual versus social responsibility their positions on policy are more closely related to their values than to their estimates of relevant economic parameters average best estimates of the economic parameters agree well with the relevant literature but individual best estimates are usually widely dispersed the individual 95 percent confidence intervals are much narrower than the substantial cross respondent variation in estimates would warrant

do large capital inflows hinder competitiveness the dutch disease in ethiopia this article investigates whether large inflows of foreign aid and remittances have had a damaging impact on the ethiopian real exchange rate rer we improve the current empirical literature by i compiling a unique quarterly dataset to provide a larger sample size and enable the modelling of important intra year dynamics which should lead to better model specifications ii providing a new empirical approach unobserved components uc to test the dutch disease hypothesis and iii using several cointegration approaches to further test the robustness of our conclusions our results suggest that there are two main long run determinants of the rer in ethiopia trade openness is found to be correlated with rer depreciations while a positive shock to the terms of trade tends to appreciate the rer foreign aid is not found to have a statistically significant impact while there is only weak evidence that remittances are associated with rer appreciations the lack of empirical support for the dutc

why did the west extend the franchise democracy inequality and growth in historical perspective during the nineteenth century most western societies extended voting rights a decision that led to unprecedented redistributive programs we argue that these political reforms can be viewed as strategic decisions by the political elite to prevent widespread social unrest and revolution political transition rather than redistribution under existing political institutions occurs because current transfers do not ensure future transfers while the extension of the franchise changes future political equilibria and acts as a commitment to redistribution our theory also offers a novel explanation for the kuznets curve in many western economies during this period with the fall in inequality following redistribution due to democratization i introduction the nineteenth century was a period of fundamental political reform and unprecedented changes in taxation and redistribution britain for example was transformed from an oligarchy run by an elite to a democracy the franchise was extended in 1832 and then again in 1867 and 1884 transferring voting rights to portions of the society with no previous political representation the decades after the political reforms witnessed radical social reforms increased taxation and the extension of education to the masses moreover as noted by kuznets inequality which was previously increasing started to decline during this period the gini coefficient for income inequality in england and wales had risen from 0 400 in 1823 to 0 627 in 1871 but fell to 0 443 in 1901 two key factors in the reduction in inequality were the increase in the proportion of skilled workers williamson 1985 and the redistribution of income toward the poorer segments of the society for example taxes rose from 8 12 percent of national product in 1867 to 18 8 percent by 1927 and the progressivity of the tax system increased substantially see lindert 1989

aid dutch disease and manufacturing growth abstract we examine the effects of aid on the growth of manufacturing using a methodology that exploits the variation within countries and across manufacturing sectors and corrects for possible reverse causality we find that aid inflows have systematic adverse effects on a country s competitiveness as reflected in the lower relative growth rate of exportable industries we provide some evidence suggesting that the channel for these effects is the real exchange rate appreciation caused by aid inflows we conjecture that this may explain in part why it is hard to find robust evidence that foreign aid helps countries grow

sectoral balance in development a survey abstract this paper surveys the literature on sectoral balance to see how sectoral imbalances can retard economic development it examines definitions of sectors and balance provides background facts theories and planning tools reviews the debate on balanced growth and surveys two sector models of agriculture industry consumption investment and luxury basics interaction the open economy and the role of service nonmarket and unproductive sectors it argues that the examination of important development issues requires multisectoral analysis incorporating the insights of several of these models and that alternative models with different structural characteristics deserve attention

optimum taxation and public production in a dynamic harris todaro world abstract this paper examines the steady state dynamics and develops policy rules in a two sector optimum growth model with urban unemployment people migrate from the rural sector to the urban sector in response to a difference between the minimum expected urban wage and the actual rural wage labor in the urban sector is heterogeneous and the skilled labor force owns the capital stock in both sectors as well as the land in the rural sector the government taxes urban wages capital income from both sectors and the income from land and invests in the two sectors

sector specific minimum wages economic growth and some policy implications abstract economic growth is introduced in the urban unemployment model of harris and todaro it is shown that in the steady state the optimal savings ratio is greater than the golden rule savings ratio under full employment also the optimal proportion of total investment allocated to the urban sector is not necessarily higher than the optimal proportion under full employment

donor bias towards small countries an overlooked factor in the analysis of foreign aid and economic growth the consensus of the literature is that international cross sectional data do not reveal a stable relationship between foreign aid and economic growth a conclusion which weakens the case for giving aid however previous econometric analysis has not made allowance for the fact that larger countries grow faster but receive less aid in this paper it is demonstrated that when due allowance is made for the effects of country size a positive and significant relationship between aid and growth can be shown to exist