financialisation and justice in the city a commentary intensification of the transformation of real property into financial instruments has worsened urban inequality in the past several decades increased financialisation in itself does not create uneven development and property investment cycles since these phenomena have always been hallmarks of real estate development under capitalism rather it is the combination of financialisation with neoliberal ideology globalisation and the constriction of state sponsored social welfare and housing affordability programs that underlies the inequities produced by property investment progressive policy makers can potentially utilise financial instruments in order to achieve greater justice if they are able to challenge neoliberal hegemony

mean reversion in real exchange rates evidence and implications for forecasting abstract the stationarity of real exchange rates over the recent flexible exchange rate period is an issue that has long bedeviled researchers in international finance using a constrained multivariate framework this paper provides the strongest evidence yet that real exchange rates were mean reverting over the 1973 93 period we also investigate shifts in long run real exchange rates which may be important for the purpose of forecasting out of sample forecasting shows that the random walk model is outperformed by a mean stationary model especially at long horizons in addition there are substantial forecasting benefits from using a multivariate approach

a confirmatory analysis of the unit root hypothesis for oecd consumption income ratios this article investigates the existence of a unit root in the consumption income ratio for a sample of 23 oecd countries over the period 1960 to 2005 for that purpose we first use recently developed unit root tests with good size and power second we employ the more powerful panel unit root tests of pesaran 2003 and smith et al 2004 that take the null of nonstationarity and a bootstrap version of the test of hadri 2000 that takes stationarity as the null hypothesis overall our confirmatory analysis renders clear cut evidence that oecd consumption income ratios contain a unit root

a multicountry characterization of the nonstationarity of aggregate output the authors compute the scaled varlogram the variances of kth differences scaled by the variance of first differences of the log of annual per capita real aggregate output gdp or gnp as measured by 1 the long series for the united states and united kingdom 2 angus maddison s 1982 long series for twelve countries and 3 the postwar ifs data for thirty two countries simulations show that the scaled varlogram of real output is nearly always more consistent with the data being generated by parsimonious difference stationary than trend stationary univariate processes in fact the data reveal some excess nonstationarity relative to parsimonious arima models the power of the scaled varlogram to discriminate between trend stationary and difference stationary processes is somewhat greater than that of a dickey fuller type f test copyright 1990 by ohio state university press

monetary union in west africa who might gain who might lose and why we develop a model in which governments financing needs exceed the socially optimal level because public resources are diverted to serve the narrow interests of the group in power from a social welfare perspective this results in undue pressure on the central bank to extract seigniorage monetary policy also suffers from an expansive bias owing to the authorities inability to precommit to price stability such a conjecture about the fiscal monetary policy mix appears quite relevant in africa with deep implications for the incentives of fiscally heterogeneous countries to form a currency union we calibrate the model to data for west africa and use it to assess proposed ecowas monetary unions fiscal heterogeneity indeed appears crit ical in shaping regional currency blocs that would be mutually beneficial for all their members in particular nigeria s membership in the configurations currently envisaged would not be in the interests of other ecowas countries unless it were accompanied by effective containment on nigeria s financing needs jel classification e58 e61 e62 f33 union monetaire en afrique de l ouest qui pourrait gagner qui pourrait perdre et pourquoi les auteurs developpent un modele dans lequel les besoins financiers des gouvernements depassent le niveau socialement optimal parce que des ressources pub liques sont detournees de maniere aservir les interets etroits du groupe au pouvoir dans une perspective de bien etre social cela entraine des pressions indues sur la banque centrale pour qu elle extraie du seigneuriage la politique monetaire souffre

does inflation targeting improve fiscal discipline abstract we explore the performances of inflation targeting it adoption in terms of fiscal discipline fd while most existing studies focus exclusively on the role of fd as a precondition for it adoption using a sample of developing and developed countries we show that it adoption exerts a positive and significant effect on fd a result robust to a wide variety of alternative specifications in addition this effect is statistically significant only in developing countries a result that may fuel the current debate regarding the relevance of it adoption in general and particularly for developing countries

the financialisation of rental housing a comparative analysis of new york city and berlin this paper compares how recent waves of private equity real estate investment have reshaped the rental housing markets in new york and berlin through secondary analysis of separate primary research projects we explore financialisation s impact on tenants neighbourhoods and urban space despite their contrasting market contexts and investor strategies financialisation heightened existing inequalities in housing affordability and stability and rearranged spaces of abandonment and gentrification in both cities conversely cities themselves also shaped the process of financialisation with weakened rental protections providing an opening to transform affordable housing into a new global asset class we also show how financialisation s adaptability in the face of changing market conditions entails ongoing but shifting processes of uneven development comparative studies of financialisation can help highlight geographically disparate but similar exposures to this global process thus contributing to a critical urban politics of finance that crosses boundaries of space sector and scale

a panic analysis on regional and sectoral inflation the spanish case this article studies the stochastic properties of several inflation rates for the spanish economy using the consumer price index cpi for the 17 regions and 12 groups of goods and services and the producer price index ppi for 26 industrial sectors to this end we employ the panel analysis of nonstationarity in idiosyncratic and common components panic approach proposed by bai and ng 2004 2010 this methodology enables us to decompose the observed inflation rate series into a common and an idiosyncratic component thus allowing us to identify the exact source of nonstationarity our analysis provides strong evidence of the presence of a common stochastic trend driving the observed series forming the panel of cpi based inflation rates for the regions this coupled with the presence of a jointly stationary idiosyncratic component implies the existence of pairwise cointegration across the regional cpi based inflation rates which show a clear pattern of convergence over time this gives an indicat

commodity price instability and economic goal attainment in developing countries abstract this paper reviews the theoretical and empirical micro and macro foundations for the frequent claims that instabilities in international commodity markets have deleterious effects on goal attainment in primary commodity exporting developing countries this review leads to the conclusion that the available evidence does not support these claims the paper concludes with speculation on why such claims are so strong despite the lack of supporting evidence perhaps it is because of measurement problems and perhaps because of small but articulate groups with vested interests in overstating the problem

the effects of volatility in the terms of trade on output growth new evidence abstract this paper examines the empirical evidence for the hypothesis that there is a negative relationship between terms of trade volatility and output growth it finds a statistically significant link between income terms of trade volatility and lower growth rates when the degree of volatility in the income terms of trade is decomposed into its components fluctuations in real exports are of a magnitude similar to those in the relative price of tradables similarly the volatility in the net barter terms of trade is equally affected by variations in the price of exports and of imports any policies aimed at stabilizing the terms of trade or any of its components need to take account of this

humanitarian crises and adolescent well being knowledge gaps and prospects adolescence constitutes the second and final window of human growth and a period of specific vulnerabilities such as early pregnancy early marriage hiv infection suicide violence alcohol and drugs only a limited body of research investigates the effects of humanitarian crises on the human capital and well being of adolescents the evidence focuses on the short term effects of conflict and to a lesser extent natural disasters on education physical health and nutrition but not on mental health most analyses examine the situations of individuals exposed in utero and young childhood but rarely during adolescence typically missing are robust empirical identification strategies and estimates on heterogeneous effects across age or gender the lack of quality data and challenges in defining adolescence establishing causality or ensuring ethical research explain the knowledge gaps possible ways to expand the evidence base include mixing georeferenced data on individual location with georeferenced data on crises sharpening quasi experimental analytical techniques and reconsidering the current timing of demographic data collection now spanning 4 or 5 year intervals the failure to make such adjustments will end by ignoring specific vulnerabilities among adolescents and render sustainable progress in well being globally narrowing inequalities and guaranteeing human rights to all more difficult to achieve

does real u k gdp have a unit root evidence from a multi century perspective we employ linear and nonlinear unit root tests to examine the stationarity of five multi century historical u k series of real output compiled by the bank of england three series span 1270 to 201

purchasing power parity and unit root tests using panel data abstract this paper reports the results of unit root tests for real exchange rates using a panel framework this panel approach provides greatly improved power compared to conventional univariate time series unit root tests we obtain evidence supporting ppp over the recent flexible exchange rate period for g 6 and oecd countries we show explicitly that failure to find such evidence in previous research was due to the low power of the tests

the overvaluation of purchasing power parity abstract recent panel studies of purchasing power parity have reported strong evidence of mean reversion in real exchange rates however these studies fail to control for cross sectional dependence in the data this failure has dramatic consequences raising the significance level of tests with a nominal size of 5 percent to as much as 50 percent it is shown in this paper that controlling for cross sectional dependence no evidence against the random walk null can be found in panels of up to 64 real exchange rates this finding cannot be attributed to low power as there is ample power in panels of this size to reject the unit root null

a re examination of real interest rate parity empirical investigation based on consumer price index based real interest rates is used to conclude that real interest rate parity is not supported in this paper the authors employ three panel based unit root tests provided by andrew levin and chien fu lin 1992 kyung so im hashem m pesaran and yongcheol shin 1995 and g s maddala and shaowen wu 1996 to examine the stationarity of real interest differentials using monthly observations on euro market rates they support the mean reverting property of real interest differentials and hence the real interest rate parity this finding is consistent with the observation that international integration of financial markets has increased dramatically since 1979

are real gdp levels nonstationary evidence from panel data tests potential nonstationarity of important macroeconomic variables and unit root tests are now a standard procedure in empirical analyses while there are many findings of unit roots in macroeconomic variables using the popular augmented dickey and fuller 1979 test this test has low power against near unit root alternatives recently panel data procedures have been proposed as an avenue to increased power this paper applies panel unit root tests to international real gdp and real gdp per capita data the results overwhelmingly indicate that international real gdp and real gdp per capita levels are nonstationary

identifying terms of trade shocks in a developing country using a sign restrictions approach using annual data for botswana from 1960 to 2012 we examine the responses of macroeconomic variables to four generalized positive terms of trade shocks global demand globalizing sector specifi

the pollution concern in the era of globalization do the contribution of foreign direct investment and trade openness matter abstract this analysis aims to treat the contribution of the foreign direct investment inflows and trade openness to environmental degradation drawing on the data for 27 african countries over the period from 1990 to 2013 we develop an empirical model based on a set of panel methods this approach includes westerlund 2007 panel cointegration technic common correlated effects mean group cce mg estimation procedure and the granger causality test in terms of long term causality our findings reveal bidirectional long term causality between co2 nox emissions gdp trade openness and foreign direct investment besides in the short run the results recorded a unidirectional causality running from gdp to co2 and from fdi to co2 however bidirectional causality nexus was detected between trade openness and co2 additionally the findings portray bidirectional causality between gdp and nox and between trade openness and nox while a unidirectional causality from foreign direct investment to nox our analysis substantiates the importance of the foreign direct investment inflows and trade openness in mitigating the adverse effect of heavy pollutant activities and resolving the environmental puzzle growing without polluting consistent with the millennium development goals mgds of the un background

unit root and trend breaks in per capita output evidence from sub saharan african countries abstractthis article examines the nonstationary properties of per capita real output in 28 sub saharan african ssa countries covering the period 1960 2014 the sequential testing approach proposed by kejriwal and lopez 2013 econometric reviews 32 8 892 927 is used to categorize ssa countries into growth shift level shift and linear trend hypotheses based on the presence or not of breaks in slope and or level of the trend function the break dates are associated to major historical or economic events such as sociopolitical crisis commodity price fluctuations on international market the discovery and the exploitation of mineral deposits or unfavourable environmental and climatic conditions the empirical evidences of appropriate unit root tests fail to reject the unit root hypothesis in all the countries suggesting that a shock would have a permanent effect on growth process and stabilization policies may be implemented in dealing with income fluctuations

aggregate spending and the terms of trade is there a laursen metzler effect this paper investigates the spending and current account effects of terms of trade shifts in a model where households maximize utility over an infinite planning period in the framework developed here an economy specialized in production must experience a fall in aggregate spending and a current surplus as a result of an unanticipated permanent worsening in its terms of trade the paper s model thus provides a setting in which the current account deficit predicted by laursen and metzier harberger and others fails to materialize

trade openness and environmental quality international evidence we examine the relationship between trade openness and the environment in a cross country panel using the emission of particulate matter pm10 as the basic indicator of environmental quality the panel cointegration test results show a long run relationship between particulate matter emissions trade openness and economic growth we find that increased trade openness leads to environmental degradation for the global sample however the results differ according to the income of countries trade openness has a benign effect on the environment in high income countries but a harmful effect in middle and low income countries these results are generally robust to different measures of trade openness and environmental quality interestingly and significantly the results are consistent with the popular notion that rich countries dump their pollution on poor countries finally we find evidence of a feedback effect between trade openness and particulate matter emissions for the global sample as well as different income groups of countries

non stationarities in macro economic time series further evidence and implications two sources of non stationarities in the mean of macro economic time series are investigated the empirical evidence for several countries clearly implies that differencing is to be preferred to the assumption of a deterministic linear time trend this result is somewhat weaker with respect to the analogous choice between seasonal differencing and seasonal dummy variables it is recommended that the time series properties of the variables considered in empirical work be carefully checked because the estimated relationships may heavily depend on the chosen detrending procedure les non stationarites dans ies chroniques macro economiques resultats supplmentaires et implications l auteur examine deux sources de non stationarite dans la mnoyenne des chroniques macroeconomiques les resultats d analyses de donnees pour plusieurs pays montrent clairement qu on doit preferer l usage d un processus de differences finies a l emploi d une tendance lineaire deterministe ce resultat est un peu moins robuste pour ce qui est du choix analogue entre l utilisation de differences saisonnieres par rapport a

the macroeconomy of angola breaks and persistence in angolan macro data using long range dependence techniques we examine the order of integration of angola s macro variables from a fractional viewpoint based on a small open economy model the series examined are money reserves credit money supply lending rate exchange rates cpi gdp oil revenues and government expenditure for the period of january 2000 to december 2013 the results suggest that the variables are nonstationary with orders of integration equal to or higher than 1 suggesting nonmean reverting behaviour structural breaks reveal that the series reflect the imf intervention in angola in 2003 to control inflation policy implications are derived

are real exchange rates nonstationary evidence from a panel data test it is well documented that real exchange rates between the united states and many industrialized countries in the post bretton woods period are integrated this result implies that purchasing power parity ppp does not hold even as a long run relationship this paper demonstrates that the failure to reject the unit root hypothesis may result from the low power of existing univariate test procedures i test for unit roots in real exchange rates by employing a more powerful panel based procedure using both cpi and wpi real dollar exchange rate data i strongly reject the null hypothesis of a unit root my results provide overwhelming support for the long run ppp under the current float copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

hysteresis in east asian unemployment high performing asian economies are quite distinctive with efficient flexible and responsive labour markets comparing the persistence of unemployment in east asian economies to that in western countries is difficult due to the data s short time spans and possible structural breaks this article employs advanced unit root tests to deal with these problems and fails to reject hysteresis in the unemployment rates of the high performing asian countries even after taking into account structural change an alternative explanation of different productivity growth for the hysteresis phenomenon of the asian countries is proposed herein

long run trends in internal migrations in italy a study in panel cointegration with dependent units the objective of this paper is to examine the long run determinants of internal migrations from southern italy in order to accomplish this task the paper develops a bootstrap test for panel cointegration analysis with dependent units monte carlo simulations show that the test based on the continuous path block bootstrap has good power and size properties and is robust to both short and long run dependence across units the empirical analysis points to income in the sending region as a key factor of the decline of migrations with unemployment and income differentials playing only a minor role copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

mean reversion in interest rates new evidence from a panel of oecd countries previous studies show that the standard univariate unit root tests cannot reject the hypothesis that interest rates follow integrated processes in this paper the authors pool interest rate data of twelve oecd countries and implement a multivariate test it is found that the unit root hypothesis can be decisively rejected copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

exchange rate fluctuations and labour market adjustments in canadian manufacturing industries we estimate the link between exchange rate fluctuations and the labour input of canadian manufacturing industries the analysis is based on a dynamic model of labour demand and the econometric strategy employs a panel two step approach for cointegrating regressions

explaining the declined affordability of housing for low income private renters across western europe the private rented sector prs recently enjoyed a revival in particular in the years before and after the great financial crisis gfc at the same time however affordability concerns have come to the fore the main aim of this paper is to explain trends in housing affordability for lower income households in the prs across western european countries from a supply versus demand perspective to this end we 1 related trends in housing affordability to wider changes in housing systems welfare regimes demographic indicators and housing market financialisation and 2 decomposed affordability trends in terms of rents and incomes controlling for compositional shifts we incorporated the spatial dimension by distinguishing between urban and rural regions although we could not explicitly test for the more fine grained mechanisms relating housing market financialisation to increased unaffordability of prs housing our findings nevertheless warrant future research into this topic in particular in countries with strong financialisation ireland the netherlands spain and portugal decreasing affordability arises from the fact that during the period 1995 2007 private rent increases were not compensated for sufficiently by income growth we furthermore found that across urban regions between 1995 and 2007 affordability worsened through demand pressure arising from in migration changes after the gfc up to 2013 were more limited and diverse

trade shocks and macroeconomic fluctuations in africa this paper examines the role of external shocks in explaining macroeconomic fluctuations in african countries we construct a quantitative stochastic dynamic multi sector equilibrium model of a small open economy calibrated to represent a typical african economy in our framework external shocks consist of trade shocks modeled as fluctuations in the prices of exported primary commodities imported capital goods and intermediate inputs and a financial shock modeled as fluctuations in the world real interest rate our results indicate that while trade shocks account for roughly 45 percent of economic fluctuations in aggregate output financial shocks play only a minor role we also find that adverse trade shocks induce prolonged recessions

the competitive conditions in the oecd manufacturing industry the goal of this study was to assess the intensity of competition in the oecd manufacturing industry by using the panzar and rosse index over the period 1970 2011 for this purpose we use the fully modified ols method and second generation unit root analysis to investigate the level of competition across two digit manufacturing sectors the results are robust and consistent with similar studies leading to the rejection of perfect collusion and perfect competition while providing evidence in favour of monopolistic competition similarly to other empirical studies h statistics are shown to be heterogeneous across manufacturing sectors we argue that more concentrated sectors such as food and beverages motor vehicles and furniture have low levels of h statistic being thus less competitive than other industries i e computers transportation equipment printing and chemicals where the h statistic is closer to unity lastly our analysis will be a useful policy tool to achieve structural micro economic

hysteresis in unemployment empirical evidence from taiwan s region data based on panel unit root tests in this study we test the hysteresis hypothesis in unemployment for taiwan s 21 regional data sets using the levin et al 2002 im et al 2003 and taylor and sarno 1998 panel based unit root tests for the june 1993 to september 2001 period the results from all three tests provide evidence that based on taiwan s regional unemployment data the hysteresis hypothesis can justifiably be rejected

stochastic trends and economic fluctuations are business cycles mainly the result of permanent shocks to productivity this paper uses a long run restriction implied by a large class of real business cycle models identifying permanent productivity shocks as shocks to the common stochastic trend in output consumption and investment to provide new evidence on this question econometric tests indicate that this common stochastic trend cointegration implication is consistent with postwar u s data however in systems with nominal variables the estimates of this common stochastic trend indicate that permanent productivity shocks typically explain less than half of the business cycle variability in output consumption and investment copyright 1991 by american economic association

the nonstationarity of aggregate output some additional international evidence in this paper the stationarity of aggregate output is examined using the scaled variogram for a sample of twelve countries it is argued that if the true data generating process of output is stationary around a deterministic trend with a change in mean and or growth rate the results of previous studies are biased once the authors allow for a one time exogenous shock the conclusions are indeed less clear cut and for some countries even reversed copyright 1994 by ohio state university press

renewable and non renewable electricity consumption environmental degradation and economic development evidence from mediterranean countries abstract in this article we develop an empirical model to investigate the causal link amid renewable and non renewable electricity consumption gdp and carbon emissions by using a panel of 9 mediterranean countries over the period 1980 2014 using the pmg panel ardl and panel econometric technics heterogeneity and cross sectional dependence among the panel were considered to explore the long and short run dynamic relationships as well as the validity of a proposed model the results provide panel empirical evidence that there is short term bidirectional causality between gdp renewable electricity consumption and co2 emissions and between non renewable electricity consumption gdp and renewable electricity consumption for the long term causal relationship the result indicates that there is bidirectional causality between non renewable electricity consumption and co2 emissions however there is evidence of unidirectional causal relationships from gdp to co2 emissions and non renewable electricity consumption and from renewable electricity consumption to co2 emissions the findings imply that non renewable electricity consumption and economic growth stimulate co2 emissions in southern and northern mediterranean countries while renewable electricity reduces them this empirical evidence suggests that expansion of renewable energy sources is a viable strategy for addressing energy security and reducing carbon emissions to protect the environment for future generations

more powerful panel data unit root tests with an application to mean reversion in real exchange rates unit root tests seeking mean or trend reversion are frequently applied to panel data we show that more powerful variants of commonly applied tests are readily available moreover power gains persist when the modifications are applied to bootstrap procedures that may be employed when cross correlation of a rather general sort among individual panel members is suspected copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

multiple breaks terms of trade shocks and the unit root hypothesis for african per capita real gdp summary this paper presents an investigation of the unit root hypothesis for per capita real gdp series in 46 african countries from maddison 2003 over the period spreading during 1950 and 2001 toward this end we employ highly flexible panel techniques which incorporate multiple mean and slope shifts in the output series our findings are clearly supportive of regime wise trend stationarity in output after 1 allowing for cross dependence and multiple breaks and 2 removing four countries that exert undue influence on the whole panel remarkably our main results hold true for alternative per capita real gdp proxies retrieved from the penn world table 6 2 as well as for different country groups constructed on the basis of the country s participation in regional integration processes interestingly the timing of the breaks broadly coincides with terms of trade shocks associated with large fluctuations in the price of primary commodities based on our results we draw some policy prescriptions that point to the need for managing adequately terms of trade booms and busts to avoid large swings in africa s aggregate output

the unit root hypothesis for aggregate output may not hold after all new evidence from a panel stationarity test with multiple breaks author affiliation diego romero avila pablo de olavide university department of economics carretera de utrera km 1 41013 seville spain dromtor upo es acknowledgment the author would like to thank seminar participants at pablo de olavide university and dg economics of the european central bank and two anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions 1 introductionsince the seminal work by nelson and plosser 1982 researchers have paid considerable attention to the presence of stochastic trends in macroeconomic variables that work also changed the way macroeconomists think about secular trends and short run fluctuations in business cycles since the existence of a unit root in output purports that shocks are permanent short run fluctuations cannot be explained by the traditional view as deviations around a deterministic trend that represents the secular component of the series instead the trend function itself can fluctuate as a result of permanent shocks king et al 1991 found that supply factors are important in explaining economic fluctuations but may not be the lone source of short run fluctuations campbell and mankiw 1987 stressed that demand shocks may also be the source of permanent shocks to output the existence of a high degree of persistence in output has important implications in macroeconomics for example the keynesian view that most shocks to output are transitory and output fluctuations are temporary deviations from the secular trend is inconsistent with a unit root in output on the contrary the real business cycle view conceives fluctuations as largely the result of real permanent shocks essentially of a technological nature this has important implications for economic policy since stabilization policies lose their effectiveness when variations of output are mainly permanent thus running counter to the keynesian view much of the empirical literature has focused on the nonstationarity properties of real u s gross national product gnp to cite a few studies perron and phillips 1987 schwert 1987 campbell and mankiw 1987 and perron 1988 fail to reject the null hypothesis of a unit root in real u s gnp these results have not gone unchallenged christiano and eichenbaum 1990 and rudebusch 1993 highlighted the low power of standard unit root tests of the augmented dickey and fuller 1979 type to distinguish between the trend stationary and unit root behavior in aggregate output the development of cross country data sets such as the long gross domestic product gdp series provided by maddison 1989 and the penn world table pwt constructed by summers and heston 1990 has allowed researchers to provide international evidence on the unit root behavior in aggregate output for instance wasserfallen 1986 found a unit root in gnp series for some organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries over the postwar era kormendi and meguire 1990 confirmed the existence of a unit root in output for twelve oecd countries over the period 1870 1985 1 however the seminal work of perron 1989 uncovered the fact that nonstationarity may conceal the existence of stationarity with structural change showing that standard unit root tests tend to misinterpret trend stationarity with a structural break as a unit root by exogenously imposing a structural break in real u s gnp perron 1989 was able to strongly reject the unit root hypothesis however zivot and andrews 1992 provided slightly less evidence of a unit root in real u s gnp using a test that allowed for a structural break that was endogenously determined from the data in an international context zelhorst and de haan 1994 1995 found evidence for oecd countries that over long time periods where the presence of structural change becomes more likely the null of a unit root in output tends to be rejected in favor of regime wise stationarity

the nexus between carbon emissions energy consumption and economic growth in middle east countries a panel data analysis abstract the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis assumes that there is an inverted u shaped relationship between environmental degradation and income per capita in other words as a country grows it is assumed that its environmental quality improves in this study we aim to test the ekc hypothesis for 12 middle east countries during the period 1990 2008 by employing recently developed panel data methods our results provide evidence contrary to the ekc hypothesis we found evidence favorable to the u shaped ekc for 5 middle east countries whereas an inverted u shaped curve was identified for only 3 middle east countries furthermore there appear to be no causal links between income and co 2 emissions for the other 4 countries regarding the direction of causality there appears to be a unidirectional causality from economic growth to energy consumption in the short run in the long run however the unidirectional causality chain runs from energy consumption and economic growth to co 2 emissions we also suggest some crucial policy implications depending on these results

the ppp debate multiple breaks and cross sectional dependence abstract this study implements panel unit root ppp tests accommodating level and trend breaks and cross sectional dependence in the presence of breaks there is evidence of a currency and price index effect additionally accounting for cross sectional dependence overturns support for ppp

renewable energy consumption and unemployment evidence from a sample of 80 countries and nonlinear estimates this article contributes to the discussion on the dynamic nexus of renewable energy consumption and unemployment by incorporating nonlinear cointegration and causality analysis using a sample of 80 countries spanning the period 1990 2013 and the advanced generation of unit root cointegration and nonlinear granger causality methodological approaches in panel data we obtain mixed results about the impact of renewable energy consumption on unemployment although the total findings document a positive impact of renewable energy consumption on unemployment disaggregated data across specific regions such as asia and latin america highlight the favourable effect on unemployment implying that the effect of renewable energy consumption on jobs creation depends on the cost of adopting renewable energy technologies and energy efficiencies that seem to vary across the regions under investigation

are output fluctuations transitory according to the conventional view of the business cycle fluctuations in output represent temporary deviations from trend the purpose of this paper is to question this conventional view if fluctuations in output are dominated by temporary deviations from the natural rate of output then an unexpected change in output today should not substantially change one s forecast of output in say five or ten years our examination of quarterly postwar united states data leads us to be skeptical about this implication the data suggest that an unexpected change in real gnp of 1 percent should change one s forecast by over 1 percent over a long horizon

investigating environmental kuznets curve in china aggregation bias and policy implications abstract aggregation bias may lead to a wrongly estimated environmental kuznets curve ekc and misguide the policy makers this paper aims to test the existence of aggregation bias in the environmental kuznets curve with the sulfur dioxide so2 emission the empirical methods robust to cross sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity reveals that the estimation of so2 ekc in china suffers from aggregation bias the results with the disaggregate data cannot support the ekc estimated at the aggregate level the finding of aggregation bias has several policy implications first the government should not be misled by the false relationship between the pollutant emission and the real gdp per capita at the aggregate level second the local governments should play more important roles in making environmental protection policies since the more disaggregate data can mitigate the aggregation bias to provide enough incentives to the local government the chinese national government should align the interests of the local governments with those of the national government on the other hand the findings indicate that china can stick to the policy of encouraging foreign direct investment openness and financial development since they have not influenced the so2 emission in china

co2 emissions energy consumption and economic growth in the asean 5 countries a cross sectional dependence approach abstract we re examine the relationship between co2 emissions energy consumption ec and economic growth gdp for the five main association of southeast asian nations asean 5 countries over the period 1980 2016 our main contention is that the findings in previous studies that have examined the relationship between co2 ec and gdp in the asean 5 are biased because they fail to account for cross sectional dependence cd we show that conventional tests applied to our dataset suggest a misleading conclusion about the environmental kuznets curve ekc and granger causal relationship between co2 ec and gdp in the presence of cd when we apply a new panel test of granger non causality that addresses cd and heterogeneity we find considerable heterogeneity we find unidirectional granger causality running from gdp to co2 for malaysia the philippines singapore and thailand unidirectional causality running from gdp to ec in indonesia malaysia and thailand unidirectional causality running from ec to gdp in singapore and bidirectional causality between gdp and ec in the philippines we also find support for the ekc hypothesis for the asean 5 countries

cointegration how short is the long run abstract when testing for cointegration and faced with short sample periods it is common for researchers to turn to more frequently sampled observations that is to move from annual to quarterly or monthly data in order to increase the number of observations we argue that such a gain in the degrees of freedom is more apparent than real essentially cointegration is a long run concept and hence requires long spans of data to give tests for cointegration much power rather than merely large numbers of observations using monte carlo simulations we demonstrate this for four popular tests for cointegration

are real gdp levels trend difference or regime wise trend stationary evidence from panel data tests incorporating structural change the unit root hypothesis for international real gdp and real gdp per capita has been the subject of extensive investigation using panel methods that incorporate structural change we reject the unit root null in favor of the alternative of trend stationarity with one or two changes in the slope for two panels with postwar data and one or two changes in both the slope and the intercept for a panel with long horizon data we conclude that real gdp levels are better characterized as regime wise trend stationary than as either trend stationary without structural change or difference stationary with unit roots

terms of trade shocks in africa are they short lived or long lived abstract this paper examines the persistence of shocks to the terms of trade using annual data on 42 sub saharan african countries for the period 1960 96 instead of using unit root tests to distinguish between stationary and random walk processes for the terms of trade this paper characterizes the persistence of shocks using point and interval estimates of the half lives of terms of trade shocks using median unbiased mu estimation techniques that remove the downward bias of standard least squares ls estimators we find that the cross country average of the half lives of terms of trade shocks is about 6 years it is also found that the estimated persistence of african terms of trade shocks varies widely for about one half of the countries their half lives are short lived less than 4 years while for one third of the countries their half lives are long lived permanent the majority of african countries are found to have terms of trade that typically experience finitely persistent transitory shocks which is consistent with the reversion of terms of trade to their long run trends

compensatory aid and debt relief a case study of uganda abstract we propose a contingency financing framework to assist low income countries in the achievement of debt sustainability the framework relies on an accounting method to quantify external shocks to the balance of payments and provides compensatory financing to offset their impact we apply the framework to the case of uganda during the period 1988 2002 and find that it would have been highly effective in identifying and offsetting the adverse liquidity implications of shocks to the country s trade balance

dynamics between energy output openness and financial development in sub saharan african countries abstractthis study aims to establish the connection between energy use economic output financial development and trade based on the panel data of 15 sub saharan african ssa countries during the period from 1983 to 2010 one full main panel and two subpanels were created by incorporating low income and middle income countries the panel cointegration test results indicate a long run relationship between the variables the mean group mg estimators show that energy consumption financial development capital and international trade have significant impacts on economic output in the case of middle income countries the granger causality analysis reveals that rising economic output leads to higher energy consumption but this is not true vice versa this means that energy conservation measures are unlikely to have adverse impacts upon economic output on the other hand there is a complementary relationship between financial development and energy consumption in this case energy conservation measures

dynamic persistence of primary commodity prices this article examines the persistence of shocks to international commodity prices from 1900 to 2008 using the updated grilli yang index the main innovation of this study is that it determines whether commodity prices are characterized by multiple changes in persistence specifically bootstrap methods are used to estimate persistence and the associated half life shocks are calculated we find that the persistence of shocks can vary widely depending on the individual commodity and the time period the results suggest that policy makers need to exercise caution when introducing measures to cushion the effect of shocks to world commodity prices

convergence in sub saharan africa a nonstationary panel data approach given the development of time series econometrics and nonstationary data analysis st aubyn empirical economics 24 23 44 1999 demonstrates a new paradigm for testing income convergence or better defined income stability namely testing the stationarity of pair wise income differentials in this paper a panel data set of sub saharan african countries is constructed and panel cointegration and unit root tests are used to investigate the convergence properties of incomes and standards of living within africa overall little evidence is found to substantiate claims of convergence across africa although in some cases smaller convergence clubs within africa may be found in addition the use of nonstationary panel data techniques is proposed for the testing and establishing of coherent convergence clubs

age of marriage weather shocks and the direction of marriage payments we study how aggregate economic conditions affect the timing of marriage and particularly child marriage in sub saharan africa and in india in both regions substantial monetary or in kind transfers occur with marriage bride price across sub saharan africa and dowry in india in a simple equilibrium model of the marriage market in which parents choose when their children marry income shocks affect the age of marriage because marriage payments are a source of consumption smoothing particularly for a woman s family as predicted by our model we show that droughts which reduce annual crop yields by 10 to 15 and aggregate income by 4 to 5 have opposite effects on the marriage behavior of a sample of 400 000 women in the two regions in sub saharan africa they increase the annual hazard into child marriage by 3 while in india droughts reduce such a hazard by 4 changes in the age of marriage due to droughts are associated with changes in fertility especially in sub saharan africa and with declines in observed marriage payments our results indicate that the age of marriage responds to short term changes in aggregate economic conditions and that marriage payments determine the sign of this response this suggests that in order to design successful policies to combat child marriage and improve investments in daughters human capital it is crucial to understand the economic role of marriage market institutions

macroeconomic fluctuations in developing countries some stylized facts this paper documents the main stylized features of macroeconomic fluctuations and business cycle regularities for a group of 12 developing countries cross correlations between domestic industrial output and a large group of macroeconomic time series including government revenue and expenditure wages inflation money velocity private sector credit international trade and exchange rates are presented the effects of industrial country economic conditions on output fluctuations in these countries are also analyzed the robustness of the results is examined using three detrending procedures a modified hodrick prescott filter the baxter king band pass filter and a nonparametric technique overall the results show some similarities between macroeconomic fluctuations in developing and industrial countries e g procyclical real wages and counter cyclical variation in government expenditure but also some important differences in business cycle characteristics e g countercyclical variation in the velocity of monetary aggregates

african terms of trade and the commodity terms of trade close cousins or distant relatives this paper examines whether there is a relationship between the commodity terms of trade the price of primary commodities relative to the price of manufactures and the net barter terms of trade of 42 sub saharan african countries for most countries there is little evidence of a stable long run relationship between the two terms of trade series accordingly the practice in the literature of proxying for movements in any given country s terms of trade by using an aggregate index of relative commodity prices is inappropriate and is likely to engender misleading policy conclusions

hydroelectricity consumption and economic growth nexus evidence from a panel of ten largest hydroelectricity consumers abstract this paper explores the long run and causal relationships between hydroelectricity consumption and economic growth for a panel of the 10 largest hydroelectricity consuming countries over the period 1965 2012 the countries include brazil canada china france india japan norway sweden turkey and the u s a using the bai and perron 2003 9 tests for cointegration the results indicate that real gdp per capita and hydroelectricity consumption per capita appear to be cointegrated around a broken intercept granger causality results from a nonlinear panel smooth transition vector error correction model suggest different results depending on the regimes which we identified based on structural break tests the test identified three breaks at 1988 2000 and 2009 for the pre 1988 period there is evidence of unidirectional causality running from real gdp per capita to hydroelectricity per capita in both the short and long run over the post 1988 period there exists evidence of bidirectional causality between hydroelectricity energy consumption per capita and real gdp per capita in both the short and the long run the results imply the existence of a feedback hypothesis with both hydroelectricity consumption and growth promoting each other in more recent periods as the importance of hydroelectricity as a renewable energy has become more prominent

does gnp have a unit root a re evaluation abstract stock and watson 1986 test the hypothesis that real per capita gnp has a unit root by using a test statistic due to phillips 1985 which incorporates a non parametric correction for the serial correlation induced by system and error dynamics the version of this test that is used by stock and watson does not accomodate the presence of a drift and to compensate they detrend the series by extracting a 1 5 annual trend growth we use a version of this class of non parametric tests developed by phillips and perron 1986 which allows for an estimated drift and reassess the stock and watson findings

the terms of trade the real exchange rate and economic fluctuations this paper examines the relationship between terms of trade and business cycles using a three sector intertemporal equilibrium model and a large multicountry database results show that terms of trade shocks account for nearly one half of actual gdp variability the model explains weak correlations between net exports and terms of trade the harberger laursen and metzler effect and produces large and weakly correlated deviations from purchasing power parity and real interest rate parity terms of trade shocks cause real appreciations and positive interest differentials although productivity shocks have opposite effects the puzzle that welfare gains of international asset trading are negligible is left unresolved copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

why has africa grown slowly we distinguish between policy and destiny explanations of africa s slow growth during the past three decades policies were poor high export taxation and inefficient public service delivery and destiny was adverse landlocked tropical locations and terms of trade deterioration during the 1990s africa s economic policies improved although with considerable variation both between countries and between policies trade and exchange rate policies improved much more than service delivery thus the differing explanations of past slow growth imply different predictions for growth in the coming decade we argue that poor public economic services are likely to be the binding constraint

unit roots and persistence in the nominal interest rate a confirmatory analysis applied to the oecd this paper investigates the stochastic properties of long term and short term nominal interest rates for the oecd over the post war era for that purpose we employ univariate unit root tests as well as panel unit root and stationarity tests that explicitly allow for cross sectional dependence overall we find overwhelming evidence that the nominal interest rate contains a unit root which may be driven by a stochastic common factor the computation of half lives through impulse response functions also points to a high degree of persistence this has important implications for the cointegration analysis of the fisher equation the uncovered interest parity and the term structure jel classification

new panel unit root tests of ppp abstract we use the new panel unit root tests im k s pesaran m h shin y 1995 testing for unit roots in heterogenous panels wp 9526 dae university of cambridge revised march 1997 to analyse the stationarity of real exchange rates for the g10 economies and switzerland our results for monthly data 1973 96 indicate mean reversion in real exchange rates and a half life of under three years for one off shocks

volatility spillover between oil and agricultural commodity markets abstract this study examines volatility transmission between oil and selected agricultural commodity prices wheat corn soybeans and sugar we apply the newly developed causality in variance test and impulse response functions to daily data from 01 january 1986 to 21 march 2011 in order to identify the impact of the food price crisis the data are divided into two sub periods the pre crisis period 01 january 1986 to 31 december 2005 and the post crisis period 01 january 2006 21 march 2011 the variance causality test shows that while there is no risk transmission between oil and agricultural commodity markets in the pre crisis period oil market volatility spills on the agricultural markets with the exception of sugar in the post crisis period the impulse response analysis also indicates that a shock to oil price volatility is transmitted to agricultural markets only in the post crisis period this paper thereby shows that the dynamics of volatility transmission changes significantly following the food price crisis after the crisis risk transmission emerges as another dimension of the dynamic interrelationships between energy and agricultural markets

how does trade openness influence budget deficits in developing countries abstract this paper analyses the effects of trade openness on budget balances by distinguishing the effects of natural openness from those of trade policy revealed indicators of natural openness and trade policy are computed using gmm system estimator the econometric analysis focuses on 66 developing countries over 1974 98 the results show that trade openness increases a country s exposure to external shocks this enforces the negative impact on budget balances of terms of trade instability additionally trade openness influences budget balances through several other channels corruption income inequalities etc then natural openness and trade policy have opposite effects the former deteriorates budget balances whereas the latter enhances them

is there a unit root in the inflation rate evidence from sequential break and panel data models summary using sequential trend break and panel data models we investigate the unit root hypothesis for the inflation rates of thirteen oecd countries with individual country tests we find evidence of stationarity in only four of the thirteen countries the results are more striking with the panel data model we can strongly reject the unit root hypothesis both for a panel of all thirteen countries and for a number of smaller panels consisting of as few as three countries the non rejection of the unit root hypothesis for inflation is very fragile to even a small amount of cross section variation 1997 john wiley sons ltd

commodity prices and growth in africa a frican economies export primary commodities and most export little else policymakers as well as economists and historians of african economic development have seen these exports as both a hope and a curse the following parable tells the story once upon a time a servant of the ruler discovered a miraculous plant which grew readily in that country and whose seeds could be woven into fine cloth so desirable was this fabric that it became prized all over the world and fetched a high price after two score years the plant accounted for most of the country s trade with the world the ruler ordered the peasants to grow the plant paid them only a fraction of its price and he and his nobles became fabulously wealthy because the ruler wished to be remembered as a great ruler and as the father of his country he used his wealth to build a great army and brought machines from foreign countries to make the fine goods that previously could only be obtained from foreign merchants but the machines often broke down and the goods that they made were of poor quality and after the ruler died they were left to rust under the ruler s successor there was a war in a foreign land where the plant also grew so that there was a great shortage and its price increased threefold in only three seasons the new ruler spent his newfound riches on fantastic extravagance while immense sums were expended on public works after the manner of the east and on productive works carried out in the wrong way or too soon not even the threefold increase in prices could support these expenditures and the country soon found itself deeply in debt when the war ended and the price fell the country could no longer pay the interest on its debt or borrow more money even after it had sold its only useful public work to a foreign power so that power sent a mission to the country the publication of whose report from which the above

searching for stationarity purchasing power parity under the current float abstract using panel data methods we investigate long run purchasing power parity by testing for unit roots in real exchange rates of industrial countries under the current float the evidence against the unit root hypothesis is stronger for larger than for smaller panels for monthly than for quarterly data and when the german mark rather than the united states dollar is used as the base currency while we find that accounting for serial correlation considerably weakens the evidence against the unit root null the results as a whole are consistent with long run purchasing power parity

terms of trade fluctuations and economic growth in developing economies abstract the effect of terms of trade fluctuations on capital accumulation is investigated in a simple open economy stochastic growth model imported inputs make domestic capital more productive but export prices are uncertain the model s output process has a random walk component so even transient price shocks have permanent effects on output levels the size of the random walk component depends on the country s trade share the supply response of exports and other structural parameters also more variable export prices generally reduce expected domestic investment these results are consistent with the estimated variance ratios and impulse response functions for a number of ldcs

unit root tests on real wage panel data for the g7 abstract using a unit root test for panel data we find that real wage innovations in most g7 economies are temporary rapidly mean reverting and have no permanent component results are sensitive to an identical cross equation restriction on all series

demand for insurance and within kin group marriages evidence from a west african country abstract we ask whether parents have incentives to marry their children to a member of the kin group in order to better insure against adverse idiosyncratic income shocks exploiting original panel data from a household survey collected in senegal in 2006 2007 and 2011 2012 we find that daughters within kin group marriage helps their parents household to better smooth food consumption when a parent has fallen ill this better smoothing is notably driven by the fact that households having married a daughter within the kin group receive relatively more transfers our results indicate that parents demand for insurance can explain part of their demand for marrying within the kin group their daughter and extend the literature on inter linkages between marriage decisions and demand for insurance

energy consumption economic growth and co2 emissions in middle east and north african countries this article extends the recent findings of liu 2005 ang 2007 apergis et al 2009 and payne 2010 by implementing recent bootstrap panel unit root tests and cointegration techniques to investigate the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions energy consumption and real gdp for 12 middle east and north african countries mena over the period 1981 2005 our results show that in the long run energy consumption has a positive significant impact on co2 emissions more interestingly we show that real gdp exhibits a quadratic relationship with co2 emissions for the region as a whole however although the estimated long run coefficients of income and its square satisfy the ekc hypothesis in most studied countries the turning points are very low in some cases and very high in other cases hence providing poor evidence in support of the ekc hypothesis co2 emission reductions per capita have been achieved in the mena region even while the region exhibited economic growth over the period 1981 2005 the econometric relationships derived in this paper suggest that future reductions in co2 emissions per capita might be achieved at the same time as gdp per capita in the mena region continues to grow

the ppp debate price matters abstract we implement panel unit root ppp tests that allow for cross sectional dependence between 15 oecd economies 1973 03 1998 12 the main variation in the results stems from using the cpi or ppi indexes rather than from ignoring or allowing for cross sectional dependence

structural breaks and electricity prices further evidence on the role of climate policy uncertainties in the australian electricity market the primary objectives and the strategies of a national electricity market are the efficient delivery of network services and the electricity infrastructure to meet the long term consumer s interests therefore the objective of this study is to explore whether electricity prices across the six australian states display instability such instability is closely associated with the presence of structural breaks in relevance to policy events on australian carbon policies the study makes use of weekly australian wholesale electricity prices spanning the period from june 8th 2008 to march 30th 2014 along with linear and non linear unit root testing methodologies the results provide supportive evidence that the australian electricity market can be described as a less stable electricity market which implies that a high degree of market power is exercised by generators across regional markets these findings are expected to have substantial consequences for the effectiveness of carbon dioxide mitigating policies especially when there is uncertainty as to whether the planned environmental policy is put in place for the lifespan of undertaken investments