wto membership and the shift to consumption taxes abstract this paper explores tax policy effects and revenue implications of joining the world trade organization wto and its predecessor the general agreement on tariffs and trade gatt it documents that countries joining gatt wto after 1990 have implemented tariff cum tax reforms lowering tariff rates and raising consumption tax rates in particular through reform or introduction of a value added tax vat employing a panel of 97 developing and transitional countries 31 of which joined gatt wto between 1990 and 2011 using robust difference in difference specifications as well as the synthetic control method we find a statistically and economically significant decline in revenues from import duties this finding supports concerns about revenue losses but also corroborates the efficacy of the late uruguay gatt and the wto trade regimes in promoting free trade among new members regarding consumption taxes we find robust evidence that revenue substitution was successful since revenue losses from import duties were more than compensated for by enhanced revenues from consumption taxes with regard to the timing of the revenue effects our results show that revenue losses in import duties mostly take place at the time of membership or later changes in consumption taxation however exhibit pre membership effects as revenues are increased and vat is adopted often a few years ahead of losses in import duties no such effects are found before the start of the accession negotiations indicating that consumption tax reforms are initiated once a country is on the road to gatt wto membership

semi autonomous revenue authorities in sub saharan africa silver bullet or white elephant a major component of tax administration reform in sub saharan africa for the last 30 years has been the creation of semi autonomous revenue authorities saras the effects of their creation on rev

the macroeconomic effects of oil price fluctuations on a small open oil producing country the case of trinidad and tobago using vector autoregressive var methodology this paper empirically investigates the macroeconomic effects of oil price fluctuations on trinidad and tobago overall we find that the price of oil is a major determinant of economic activity of the country our impulse response functions suggest that following a positive oil price shock output falls within the first two years followed by positive and growing response we also investigate the macroeconomic impact of oil price volatility results suggest that an unanticipated shock to oil price volatility brings about random swings in the macroeconomy however only government revenue and the price level exhibit significant responses with regard to the magnitude of the responses shocks to oil price volatility tend to yield smaller macroeconomic impacts in comparison to shocks to oil prices variance decompositions suggest that the price of oil is a major component of forecast variation for most macroeconomic variables finally granger causality tests indicate causality from oil prices to output and oil prices to government revenue

aid and the public sector in pakistan evidence with endogenous aid summary aid has been the principal source of development finance for the majority of developing countries over the past few decades this has spawned a large literature on the effectiveness of aid which remains essentially inconclusive the empirical literature has tended to evaluate the impact of aid by including it as a variable in a regression for the determinants of some economic performance indicator this paper follows a different strand of the literature and examines the impact of aid on public sector fiscal behavior aid is in general given to the public sector thus any effect of aid is mediated by that sector we specifically address this behavioral feature by analyzing how aid revenue affects government fiscal behavior with respect to tax borrowing and expenditure decisions unlike previous contributions aid is endogenous in our model which has a number of important implications we estimate an econometric model that differs from previous studies not only in this respect but also by allowing domestic borrowing in addition to aid and tax revenue to finance both capital and recurrent expenditure structural and reduced form equations are derived and estimated using 1956 95 time series data for pakistan results indicate contrary to much of the literature that only half of aid has gone to government consumption that it has had a slightly positive impact on public investment and negative impact on tax effort

from correlates and characteristics to causes thinking about poverty from a chronic poverty perspective summary poverty and poverty reduction are currently the central concerns of development discourse and policy despite recent theoretical advances poverty analysis continues to be dominated by an income consumption conception of poverty we argue for understandings of poverty that go beyond measurement led conceptualizations to more adequately expose the causes of poverty chronic poverty is one such concept its focus on poverty duration and dynamics highlights the forms of social relations that produce poverty and which are often embedded within political institutions and economic structures poverty reduction does not simply require good policy it requires creating the capacity of poorer people to influence and hold accountable those who make policies

the economics of development a survey i the subject our definition of the subject will be the use of economic analysis to understand the economies of poor or developing countries this includes in particular how standards of living in the population are determined and how they change over time and further how policy can or should be used in the influence of these processes the definition contains in principle much or most of analytical methods in economics insofar as they can be put to use in the examination of the issues of interest this is as it should be but it poses a problem for a survey in a journal a comprehensive treatment is infeasible so we shall follow a different route the survey will focus on what i take to be the major themes and approaches which characterise the productive aspects of the subject there is therefore no pretence at being exhaustive the purpose is rather to highlight some of the advances many of these have been of real substance there are a number of possible purposes for a survey and it is important to be clear at the outset for whom it is intended what it is and what it is not this survey is addressed to economists and students of economics who know the tools of their trade but not necessarily how they have been applied to and fashioned for the analysis of the economics of developing countries it is a description of the ways in which problems can be productively formulated and approached in terms of examples chosen for their intrinsic importance and interest the vastness of the subject means that we have to be highly selective it does not seek to provide a summary evaluation of the current view of the appropriate response to immediate policy questions it is not a history of thought nor a research manifesto nor an attempt to adjudicate or settle the major debates where they arise naturally from the major purpose some judgements on these subjects will be offered but they do not themselves constitute the primary intent of this survey there are three lines of enquiry or sets of questions which have i suggest been distinctive of the most fruitful work in development economics they will

implications of oil prices shocks for the major emerging economies a comparative analysis of brics abstract this study analyses the implications of oil prices shocks for the brics economies we employed a time varying structural vector autoregressive tv sva framework in which the sources of time variation are the coefficients and variance covariance matrix of the innovations the quarter frequency data for the period of 1987qii 2017qii is used for the empirical analysis the key findings suggest that there are substantial differences and asymmetries in the response of these economies to oil shocks these differences were profound between and even within oil exporters and importers it shows that between major oil exporters i e russia and brazil the former s economy is rather more intensively influenced by oil prices shocks between the two largest net oil importers i e india and china comparatively the indian economy seems to be rather more vulnerable to oil prices shocks in terms of their adverse effects on gdp inflation and balance of trade the dependence of economies on oil and an increasing level of consumption continue to pose policy challenges for prices and economic stability the analysis on south africa also shows negative impacts of oil prices shocks however the effects are comparatively more time variant than other brics members while these asymmetries indicate significant differences in the structure of these economies they also indicate venues of cooperation and stronger trading relationships to overcome the adverse shocks and mutual development

the flypaper effect what happens to a state s spending when it receives an unconditional grant from the federal government the standard theoretical analysis predicts that the increase in spending will be the same as that generated by an equivalent increase in local incomes or roughly 5 10 percent for most states in contrast numerous empirical analyses have found that spending increases by much more with some estimates near 100 percent this result is known as the flypaper effect since the money appears to stick where it hits the authors review this evidence as well as other studies that find similar behavior in firms

democracy and national economic performance the preference for stability appear to arise because democracies ameliorate the effects of social cleavages another mechanism that might explain democratic stability when growth and volatility are jointly examined democracies reveal highly favorable economic results oes democracy affect national economic performance and if so how no question is more central to the study of political economics almost all previous work on democracy and economic performance has focused exclusively on growth rates with contradictory and confusing results in this article we argue that to reveal the impact of democratic institutions on economic performance scholars must consider two dimensions of economic performance growth rate and volatility we begin with a novel hypothesis economic policy in democracy is risk avoiding relative to policy in nondemocracies 1 because voters are riskaverse they penalize incumbent governments for economic volatility and democratic governments respond accordingly in nondemocracies we posit that elites are more likely to seek risk that voters would reject consequently autocracies produce systematically more economic volatility than

oil shocks and external balances abstract we provide estimates of the effects of demand and supply shocks in the global crude oil market on several measures of oil exporters and oil importers external balances including the oil trade balance the non oil trade balance the current account capital gains and changes in net foreign assets nfa first we show that the effect of oil demand and supply shocks on the merchandise trade balance and the current account which depending on the source of the shock can be large depends critically on the response of the non oil trade balance our results provide evidence of an intermediate degree of international financial integration second we document the presence of large and systematic valuation effects in response to these shocks valuation effects overall tend to cushion the effect of oil demand and supply shocks on the nfa positions of oil exporters and oil importers third we quantify the overall importance of global business cycle demand shocks as well as oil market specific demand and supply shocks for external balances

the fungibility of us assistance to developing countries and the impact on recipient expanditures a case study of pakistan abstract development assistance continues to be an important source of funds to developing nations donor countries prefer to provide categorical or project aid since it is believed that the typing of aid to a specific project will help to ensure that the funds are used in accordance with the designated objectives development literature indicates however that the ability to tie aid may be illusory specifically recipient nations can cut the ties associated with categorical aid and effectively transform it into purely income augmenting funds i e purely fungible resources the funds legally designated for specific developmental purposes may finance projects whose purposes are not in line with the developmental objective the fungibility of development assistance has received little empirical attention this paper is an effort to fill that gap we formulate an econometric model that explains the response of pakistan s spending for defense public nondefense and private consumption to us assistance within the fungibility framework our results suggest that us assistance to pakistan whether military or nonmilitary is fully transformed into fungible resources with impact on public spending less significant than expected

renewable energy oil prices and economic activity a granger causality in quantiles analysis this paper analyzes the causal relationship between renewable energy consumption oil prices and economic activity in the united states from july 1989 to july 2016 considering all quantiles of the distribution although the concept of granger causality is defined for the conditional distribution the majority of papers have tested granger causality using conditional mean regression models in which the causal relations are linear we apply a granger causality in quantiles analysis that evaluates causal relations in each quantile of the distribution under this approach we can discriminate between causality affecting the median and the tails of the conditional distribution we find evidence of bi directional causality between changes in renewable energy consumption and economic growth at the lowest tail of the distribution besides changes in renewable energy consumption lead economic growth at the highest tail of the distribution our results also support the unidirectional causality from fluctuations in oil prices to economic growth at the extreme quantiles of the distribution finally we find evidence of lower tail dependence from changes in oil prices to changes in renewable energy consumption our findings call for government policies aimed at developing renewable energy markets to increase energy efficiency in the u s

testing theories of real government size u s experience 1959 89 in a recent article west 17 argued that the existence of so many strands of analysis attempting to explain the growth of government calls ultimately for one consolidated or generalized theory accordingly he produced a model that integrated four such theories two on the cost side and two on the demand side the purpose of the present paper is to derive empirical measures of all four theories using u s data for the period 1959 1989 the presumption is that each one separately might contribute in its own way to a composite explanation of government growth and that what is currently most needed is a set of jointly determined empirical estimates showing relative importance while all our measures of government size consolidate federal state and local government expenditures two other measurement issues should be emphasized since they distinguish our work from other contributions to this literature the government component of our main dependent variable the real size of government is measured in two different ways the first uses the national accounts definition of government purchases which excludes transfer payments from the measure of size whereas the second includes final purchases plus net government transfer payments since we are interested in the effects of changes in the productivity of supplying government services the first of these definitions is expected to be more relevant and is so used as the basis of our empirical work however since there is a sense in which changes in the productivity of government may affect the output of transfers we also use the second definition to produce a more complete empirical exercise the other distinguishing feature of our analysis is that both definitions of government size are analyzed in real as distinct from the more usual nominal share of government in gross domestic product gdp this distinction becomes immediately more striking when it is pointed out that while most authors hitherto have attempted to explain the phenomenon of positive growth in the ratio of nominals over the past half century the ratio of reals has actually fallen for most of our

dynamics of government revenues and expenditures in industrial economies the sources of growth in government revenues and expenditures in 22 oecd countries is addressed the question of whether the revenue constraint is binding on the growth of government expenditures or whether the displacement effect of expenditure growth is binding is considered controls for the effects of the output gap and inflation rate on government revenues and expenditures in each of the 22 countries are presented a major conclusion is that reductions in spending are essential to reducing budget deficits and controlling government size

dynamics of electricity consumption oil price and economic growth global perspective this study uses the data from 157 countries from 1960 to 2014 to analyze the relationship between economic growth electricity consumption oil prices capital and labor the economic growth of developing countries with industrial infrastructure has a more significant association with electricity consumption than oil prices we use oil prices and electricity consumption jointly to study highly predictive observations for economic growth the data are categorized by income oecd and regional levels the panel cointegration long run parameter estimation and pool mean group tests are used to analyze the cointegration and short run and long run relationships between the variables the empirical results indicate the presence of cointegration between the variables the presence of feedback effects between electricity consumption and economic growth oil prices and economic growth is valid these findings confirm that in spite of the oil prices developing countries rely heavily on electricity consumption for economic growth in the short run growth and feedback effects suggest that more vigorous electricity policies should be implemented to attain sustainable economic growth for the long term

does foreign aid promote the expansion of government building on the literature on public finance i seek to advance our understanding of variations in government size by exploring the impact of official development assistance on fiscal policy i hypothesize that foreign aid operates in accordance with the flypaper effect systematically generating incentives and opportunities for the expansion of government spending results from a time series cross sectional regression analysis of growth in government spending over the 1970 99 time period are consistent with the hypothesis for middle and lower income nations aid represents an important determinant of government expansion looking at the tax and revenue side of the equation however reveals a more perverse pattern of response aid promotes not only increased spending but also reduced revenue generation the results have important implications from both a theoretical and policy perspective inter alia they point to the potentially self defeating nature of efforts to promote market oriented programs of state retrenchment via development assistance as well as to the importance of incorporating international transfers into future research on government spending

international patterns in military spending my main purpose in this article is to investigate the military spending correlates using international cross sectional data for 1984 this perspective broadly mirrors that of a maizels and m k nissanke who investigated the determinants of military spending for a cross section of developing countries and r p smith who examined a cross section of industrialized countries in contrast my effort embraces both developed and developing countries as well as market and centrally planned economies but distinguishes countries on the more relevant basis of whether they are in conflict and whether they belong to alliances such as the north atlantic treaty organization nato and the warsaw pact an advantage of cross sections such as this is that it makes it possible to distinguish broad patterns in defense spending across the world as a whole a disadvantage is that one cannot infer dynamic behavior from cross sections in which case strategic theories of arms expenditure cannot be investigated satisfactorily 2 the same applies to dynamic versions of the neoclassical theory of military expenditure 3 however international cross sections and national time series are more likely to be complements than substitutes in research in the next section i propose a simple model of military expenditure that is investigated in section iv by cross sectional data for 137 countries the model is based on the premise that military expenditure deters war and departs from previous theoretical efforts in that it applies state preference theory to determine the demand for military spending in section iii i consider other variables that in terms of the model may also affect military spending via its shadow price since the sample consists of cross sectional data i pay particular attention to various specification tests that are usually ignored these suggest that the results are not independent of the method used for normalizing

foreign assistance investment and defense a methodological study with an application to israel 1960 1979 this paper develops a method for examination of the relations among outlays on capital formation and national defense and receipts of foreign assistance in developing and other aid receiving countries this model and its results should be of interest to any policy analyst concerned with the effects of aid on the indigenous allocation choices by recipients since it allows one to trace out the effect of aid on these allocative decisions the essence of the method and its novelty is to exploit the price changing feature of foreign aid as seen from the recipient s viewpoint to obtain an estimate of the price responsiveness of the recipient country with the response to prices so determined ownand cross price elasticities with respect to defense investment consumption and so forth can be calculated and the corresponding complementarities or substitutabilities among these categories of demand inferred as will become clear this question is closely related to the question of the extent to which there is a de facto diversion of military or nonmilitary foreign aid to other uses 1 this method is applied to israel chosen because of the urgency of its security and development objectives the availability of data and the magnitude of its foreignassistance receipts however the method is applicable to ldcs in general many of which in a struggle to improve living standards and simultaneously guard against perceived security threats turn increasingly to developed states for assistance the effect of aid on investment and growth has concerned economists for a generation and the possibility that aid might be diverted into consumption has long been recognized as well 2 but trade offs between development and defense especially have concerned economists in recent years e benoit found strong positive relations be

do natural resources fuel authoritarianism a reappraisal of the resource curse a large body of scholarship finds a negative relationship between natural resources and democracy extant cross country regressions however assume random effects and are run on panel datasets with relatively short time dimensions because natural resource reliance is not an exogenous variable this is not an effective strategy for uncovering causal relationships numerous sources of bias may be driving the results the most serious of which is omitted variable bias induced by unobserved country specific and time invariant heterogeneity to address these problems we develop unique historical datasets employ time series centric techniques and operationalize explicitly specified counterfactuals we test to see if there is a long run relationship between resource reliance and regime type within countries over time both on a country by country basis and across several different panels we find that increases in resource reliance are not associated with authoritarianism in fact in many specifications we generate results that suggest a resource blessing

can repressive regimes be moderated through foreign aid in what circumstances should foreign aid be given to less developed countries with repressive rulers repressive rulers are assumed to control the national income and to trade it against the probability of staying in office which is assumed in turn to depend positively on popular wealth and repression a foreign donor aware of this process of optimization will pursue his international objectives by attaching conditions to his aid that alter the relative price of repression and popular wealth in the calculations of the tyrant the effectiveness of direct and in kind aid and the desirability of a carrot an stick aid policy depend on the direct and the interactive effects that popular wealth repression and the parameters of economic growth exert on the regime s stability and its level of income

directly unproductive profit seeking dup activities this paper propses directly unproductive profit seeking dup activities as a general concept that embraces a wide range of recently analyzed economic activities including the subset of rent seeking activities considered by krueger it then proceeds to provide a synthesis and generalization of the welfare theoretic analysis of such activities by developing a fourfold categorization of cases depending on the levels of distortions before and after the dup activity thus a unification and overview of the subject are achieved

statistical tragedy in africa evaluating the data base for african economic development measurement is increasingly at the centre of debates in african economic development some remarkable upward revisions of gdp which are signs of statistical systems improving caused the declaration of a statistical tragedy in africa this special issue evaluates the database for african economic development with articles on the quality of the data on gdp health and education poverty labour agriculture and income distribution

global oil glut and sanctions the impact on putin s russia abstract the russian economy is highly responsive to oil price fluctuations at the start of 2014 the country was already suffering from the weak economic growth partly due to the ongoing crisis in ukraine and western sanctions the recent plunge in global oil prices put even further strain on the russian economy this paper analyzes the dynamic relationship between oil price shocks economic sanctions and leading macroeconomic indicators in russia we apply a vector autoregression var to quantify the effects of oil price shocks as well as western economic sanctions on real gdp real effective exchange rate inflation real fiscal expenditures real consumption expenditures and external trade using quarterly data from 1999 1 until 2015 1 our results show a significant impact of oil prices on the russian economy we predict that russia s economic outlook is not very optimistic if sanctions remain until the end of 2017 the quarter to quarter real gdp will contract on average by 19 percent over the next two years

aid the public sector and the market in less developed countries a reply the article in this journal by mosley et al i987 concludes its analysis of aid effectiveness as demonstrating inability of development aid over more than twenty years to provide a net increment to overall growth in the third world p 636 this note purports to show that this conclusion which is ostensibly distressing as the authors claim is not warranted the section of the study which is the basis of the conclusion cited and the subject of this note is a cross section regression analysis full details of which are shown in mosley et al table 3 the note is concerned with the relation between the dependent variable specified as the growth rate of real gdp per cent per annum hereafter gdp and aid specified as a percentage of gdp hereafter aid the aid results with only two significant positive coefficients in one subsample certainly give no basis for claiming aid effectiveness in terms of gdp growth the intention in this note is to interpret the results which are assumed to be valid this is made possible by the fact that the authors have helpfully provided the full input set of mean values derived from the raw data from this it is possible to calculate the gdp aid relationship for each country for the second and third period the procedure for deriving these relationships is as follows for each country the mean values of the time series of gdp and aid are extracted from the data for i 960 70 and for i 970 80 using i 960 70 as the base the signs of the change in the levels of the gdp and aid mean values between periods are recorded this is repeated for i980 4 with i970 80 mean values as the base the relationship between the two signs is an indication of the effect of aid on gdp in the period in which the change in levels is effected thus in the case of an increase in aid being combined with a decrease in gdp the latter must have fallen relatively to the former and aid effectiveness is negative mutatis mutandis for the other three sign combinations thus generating the appropriate gdp aid relationship for each country in each period a frequency distribution of the four sign combinations relating to the full sample is presented in table i since the signs of the changes in the levels of gdp and aid are derived by making explicit the arithmetic relationship implicit in the data they form a valid base from which to draw conclusions without requiring any test of

the african growth miracle measures of real consumption based on the ownership of durable goods the quality of housing the health and mortality of children the education of youths and the allocation of female time in the household indicate that sub saharan living standards have for the past two decades been growing about 3 4 3 7 percent per year that is three and a half to four times the rate indicated in international data sets

from tragedy to renaissance improving agricultural data for better policies abstractagricultural development is an essential engine of growth and poverty reduction yet agricultural data suffer from poor quality and narrow sectoral focus there are several reasons for this 1 difficult to measure smallholder agriculture is prevalent in poor countries 2 agricultural data are collected with little coordination across sectors and 3 poor analysis undermines the demand for high quality data this article argues that initiatives like the global strategy to improve agricultural and rural statistics bode well for the future moving from devarajan s statistical tragedy to kiregyera s statistical renaissance will take a continued long term effort by individual countries and development partners

the causality between energy consumption and economic growth in turkey abstract this paper applies the causality test to examine the causal relationship between primary energy consumption ec and real gross national product gnp for turkey during 1970 2006 we employ unit root tests the augmented dickey fuller adf and the philips perron pp johansen cointegration test and pair wise granger causality test to examine relation between ec and gnp our empirical results indicate that the two series are found to be non stationary however first differences of these series lead to stationarity further the results indicate that ec and gnp are cointegrated and there is bidirectional causality running from ec to gnp and vice versa this means that an increase in ec directly affects economic growth and that economic growth also stimulates further ec this bidirectional causality relationship between ec and gnp determined for turkey at 1970 2006 period is in accordance with the ones in literature reported for similar countries consequently we conclude that energy is a limiting factor to economic growth in turkey and hence shocks to energy supply will have a negative impact on economic growth

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

is foreign aid fungible evidence from the education and health sectors this paper adopts a new approach to the issue of foreign aid fungibility in contrast to most existing empirical studies panel data are employed that contain information on the specific purposes for which aid is given this allows linking aid that is provided for education and health purposes to recipient public spending in these sectors in addition aid flows that are recorded on a recipient s budget are distinguished from those that are not recorded on budget and the previous failure to differentiate between on and off budget aid is shown to produce biased estimates of fungibility sector program aid is the measure of on budget aid whereas technical cooperation serves as a proxy for off budget aid the appropriate treatment of off budget aid leads to lower fungibility estimates than those reported in many previous studies specifically in both sectors and across a range of specifications technical cooperation which is the largest component of total education and health aid leads to at most a small displacement of recipient public expenditures

reassessing tax and development research a new dataset new findings and lessons for research there is growing concern with the weaknesses of economic statistics relating to developing countries and the risks that poor data have generated misleading research findings and poor policy advice cross country tax data offer a striking example with existing datasets frequently highly incomplete analytically imprecise plagued by errors and sharply lacking in transparency this paper introduces the new government revenue dataset from the international centre for tax and development which provides a more reliable transparent and comprehensive basis for cross national research this new dataset has initially been used to re examine major questions about the relationships between tax and aid elections economic growth and democratization the results deepen some previous conclusions and call others seriously into question notably the assertion that aid dependence consistently undermines domestic revenue efforts above all the research demonstrates the value of the new dataset the broader sensitivity of many results to changes in data quality and coverage and the consequent importance of expanded attention to and investments in data quality

oil prices and current account a structural analysis for the turkish economy abstract although there has been an increasing number of studies about the effects of oil prices on the macroeconomic performances the literature on the interaction between oil prices and current account is limited especially for oil importing developing countries this paper analyzes the impact of oil prices on the current account balances for the turkish economy using a structural vector autoregression model our model allows us to identify the net effect of oil prices on current account balances after controlling for other factors such as output gap and exchange rate misalignment the results show that the response of current account ratio to oil price shock increases gradually up to the first three months and then starts to decrease which indicates a significant effect of oil price shocks in the short run moreover when the obtained structural shocks are employed in a simple regression analysis the parameter regarding the oil price shocks is found to be negative and statistically significant the final section discusses the policy implications of the results

global imbalances globalization demography and sustainability if you sum up the current account deficits of all nations that are running deficits in the world economy the u s deficit accounts for about 70 percent of the total in any country s national accounts it will hold true as an identity that the current account deficit the excess of payments m to the rest of the world for goods services investment income and unilateral transfers over receipts x from the rest of the world for similar items exactly equals apart from measurement errors which may be substantial the excess of aggregate expenditure e for goods and services over national output y which in turn equals the excess of investment i over savings both public t g and private s in symbols

growth and oil price a study of causal relationships in small pacific island countries this paper investigates the nexus between economic growth and oil price in small pacific island countries pics except papua new guinea none of the 14 pics has fossil any fuel resources consequently the other 13 pics are totally dependent on oil imports for their economic activities since pics have limited foreign exchange earning capacities as they have a very narrow range of exports and are highly dependent on foreign aid high oil prices in recent months have seriously tested their economic resilience this paper applies the ardl bounds testing methodology to four selected pics samoa solomon islands tonga and vanuatu which have consistent and reliable time series of data with a view to assess the impact of oil price on economic growth the findings are that oil price gross domestic product and international reserve are cointegrated in all the four pics further both in the long and short runs we observe that there is a uni directional relationship as causality linkage runs only from oil price and international reserves to economic growth the paper makes some policy recommendations

structural break unit root and the causality between energy consumption and gdp in turkey abstract this paper tries to investigate a series of unit root and causality tests to detect causality between the gdp and energy consumption in turkey employing hsiao s version of granger causality method for the 1950 2000 period the conventional unit root tests indicate the series are i 1 whereas the endogenous break unit root tests proposed by zivot and andrews zivot e and andrews d w k 1992 further evidence on the great crash the oil price shock and the unit root hypothesis journal of business and economics statistics 10 251 270 and perron perron p 1997 further evidence on breaking trend functions in macroeconomic variables journal of econometrics 80 355 385 reveal that the series are trend stationary with a structural break therefore it is inappropriate to take the first difference of the data to achieve stationarity the main conclusion of this study is that there is no evidence of causality between energy consumption and gdp in turkey based on the detrended data

arima forecasting of primary energy demand by fuel in turkey abstract forecasting of energy demand in emerging markets is one of the most important policy tools used by the decision makers all over the world in turkey most of the early studies used include various forms of econometric modeling however since the estimated economic and demographic parameters usually deviate from the realizations time series forecasting appears to give better results in this study we used the autoregressive integrated moving average arima and seasonal arima sarima methods to estimate the future primary energy demand of turkey from 2005 to 2020 the arima forecasting of the total primary energy demand appears to be more reliable than the summation of the individual forecasts the results have shown that the average annual growth rates of individual energy sources and total primary energy will decrease in all cases except wood and animal plant remains which will have negative growth rates the decrease in the rate of energy demand may be interpreted that the energy intensity peak will be achieved in the coming decades another interpretation is that any decrease in energy demand will slow down the economic growth during the forecasted period rates of changes and reserves in the fossil fuels indicate that inter fuel substitution should be made leading to a best mix of the country s energy system based on our findings we proposed some policy recommendations

fiscal decentralization and government size an extension this paper analyzes one method governments employ to circumvent the discipline of a competitive system of fiscal federalism intergovernmental collusion in the form of intergovernmental grants grants it is argued serve to encourage the expansion of the public sector by concentrating taxing powers in the hands of the central government and by weakening the fiscal discipline imposed on governments forced to self finance their expenditures the results reported suggest that intergovernmental grants do encourage growth in the public sector the results offer further support for the use of monopoly government assumptions in public sector modeling

exploring the oil price and real gdp nexus for a small island economy the fiji islands the goal of this paper is to examine the relationship between real gdp and oil prices using time series data for the period 1970 2005 our main finding is that an increase in oil has a positive albeit inelastic impact on real gdp inconsistent with the bulk of the literature we argue that this is not a surprising result for the fiji islands our central argument focuses on two aspects of the fijian economy 1 the fact that actual output in fiji has been around 50 per cent less than potential output thus fiji s actual output has not reached a threshold level at which oil prices can negatively impact output and 2 a rise in oil prices filters through to value added which in turn is reflected in a larger actual output

when the data source writes the conclusion evaluating agricultural policies statistics describe realities but they also shape them since they are used to design or support policies as such accurate statistics are important using the agricultural sector in rwanda as a case study we demonstrate that dubious statistics can spread quickly according to data from the food and agricultural organization fao yields have increased by 60 per cent since the implementation of large scale agricultural reforms while other datasets point towards more modest gains yet estimates in line with those of the fao dominate the official discourse we suggest that the discrepancies between datasets may be explained by the difficulties of collecting accurate agricultural statistics combined with an incentive to overestimate yields to show that the reforms have worked

the influence of the international oil prices on the real effective exchange rate in romania in a wavelet transform framework article i nfo the purpose of this paper is to assess the empirical influence of oil prices on the real effective exchange rate in romania in a wavelet transform framework more precisely we investigate to what extent oil prices impact the real effective exchange rate in an eastern european transition country characterised by a low level of retail fuel prices and by an important growth rate of these prices as compared to the other eu countries for this purpose we use a discrete wavelet transform approach and scale by scale granger causality tests we find that oil prices have a strong influence on the real effective exchange rate in the short run but also for large time horizons these results are important considering the fact that in a classical granger causality linear framework for the entire sample we find that oil prices have no influence on the real effective exchange rate the findings remainrobust whenresampling the initial 1986 2009period orwhen weuse analternative continuous wavelet transform in addition we discover that mainly the positive shocks associated with an increase in oil prices have an impact upon the real effective exchange rate movements in the short and long runs

the changing structure of africa s economies data from the groningen growth and development center s africa sector database and the demographic and health surveys reveals that much of africa s recent growth and poverty reduction has been associated with a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture this decline is most pronounced for rural females over the age of 25 who have a primary education it has been accompanied by a systematic increase in the productivity of the labor force as it has moved from low productivity agriculture to higher productivity services and manufacturing although the employment share in manufacturing is not expanding rapidly in most of the low income african countries the employment share in manufacturing has not peaked and is still expanding albeit from very low levels more work is needed to understand the implications of these shifts in employment shares for future growth and development in africa south of the sahara

energy consumption and gdp in turkey is there a co integration relationship energy consumption and gdp are expected to grow by 5 9 and 7 annually until 2025 in turkey this paper tries to unfold the linkage between energy consumption and gdp by undertaking a co integration analysis for turkey with annual data over the period 1970 2003 the analysis shows that energy consumption and gdp are co integrated this means that there is a possibly bi directional causality relationship between the two we establish that there is a unidirectional causality running from gdp to energy consumption indicating that energy saving would not harm economic growth in turkey in addition we find that energy consumption keeps on growing as long as the economy grows in turkey

africa s economic performance limitations of the current consensus historical and micro survey evidence as well as the standard data from international organizations support less pessimistic conclusions on africa s development performance than those reached by many social scientists the changes that have benefited women over the last four decades are highlighted a discussion of growth in agricultural production follows however the complexity and the brutality of processes of social and economic change in sub saharan african economies are also stressed the theoretical implications of these complexities have not been adequately analyzed by world bank economists the bank s recent efforts to reassess its policies are therefore unlikely to achieve the results anticipated

is foreign aid fungible the case of indonesia this paper considers whether foreign aid given for specific categories of expenditure is fungible among them and whether aid reduces tax effort by the recipient government models developed to analyze the fiscal relations among different levels of government in the united states are applied to analysis of the impact of foreign aid econometric analysis of data for indonesia reveals that aid is largely spent as the donors intended that aid does not lead to a reduction in tax effort and that aid is not diverted to nondevelopment current expenditures copyright 1990 by royal economic society

the fungibility of u s military and non military assistance and the impacts on expenditures of major aid recipients abstract this paper examines the impact of u s military and non military assistance on the allocation of public and private sector spending for eight major recipients over the 1972 1987 period the model assumes that an aid recipient s effective post assistance budget constraint is a priori unknown and must be estimated two versions of the model are tested in version a the data is converted into real u s dollars using official exchange rates in version b the data is converted using purchasing power parity exchange rates provided by summers and heston 1991 major findings are the same for both versions u s aid is highly fungible with a significant portion channeled to the private sector where it finances current consumption relatively more than investment

bicameral legislatures and fiscal policy john stuart mill s observation in the mid 19th century is clearly outdated the two chamber question receives scant attention in modern political economy the absence of continued debate might simply reflect a general satisfaction with the dual chambered structure as a desirable democratic institution most developed democracies and all but one of the american states have adopted a bicameral legislative structure in this paper we stress the many variations in bicameralism even among the american states and the effects these variations have on policy making and fiscal outcomes put simply bicameralism is not an all or none institution instead bicameralism is a variable institution that alters the identity of the median legislator within each chamber and determines the similarity of the dominant coalitions between the two chambers in this perspective the impact of bicameralism on policy comes principally from the different bases of representation across the two chambers moreover the analysis stresses that the degree of bicameralism changes regularly as a consequence of the redistricting process the remainder of the paper is organized as follows section 2 reviews the main conceptual arguments underlying the function of a bicameral organization section 3 examines implications for fiscal policy using data from the american states we develop several measures of bicameralism using detailed constituency data on economic and demographic characteristics at the level of state legislative districts we then use these measures to examine the effect of interdistrict constituent homogeneity on total state government spending as well as on the major com