fiscal structures and economic growth international evidence i introduction a large and growing body of literature searches for the determinants of economic growth employing cross country regression analysis e g kormendi and meguire 1985 grier and tullock 1989 barro 1990 1991 1992 romer 1989 1990 levine 1991 and levine and renelt 1992 1 the cross country regression approach implicitly assumes that the growth process possesses similar structural properties across the countries in the sample structural differences be they political economic social or other between countries therefore do not condition the growth process or if they do then the effects are randomly distributed with zero mean if structural differences between countries do matter significantly and non randomly in the growth process then the existing cross country research is potentially flawed attempts are sometimes made to control for such differences by including dummy variables for different regions of the world e g dummy variables for african latin american and other groups of countries within the literature on the determinants of economic growth some papers e g landau 1983 1985 1986 kormendi and meguire 1985 ram 1986 koester and kormendi 1989 barth keleher and russek 1990 easterly and rebelo 1993 and fischer 1993 consider the effects if any of government expenditure and revenue on economic growth overall the findings of these studies paint a mixed picture the relationship between growth and government is sometimes significant and positive sometimes significant and negative and sometimes not significant although these studies consider many different fiscal variables they do not as a rule examine the effects of these fiscal variables in a systematic way that controls for the mode of financing they generally overlook for example how an increase in government consumption expenditure is financed is it with higher taxes and which taxes or is it with lower spending and which spending finally is it with a larger deficit controlling for these factors may lead to different findings about the effect of an increase in government consumption expenditure on economic growth borrowing from some work on the effect of fiscal structure on national economic growth within the united states in helms 1985 mofidi and stone 1990 and miller and russek 1993 we introduce the government budget constraint into the regression equations that examine the determinants of economic growth as a result we directly address the three financing questions raised in the previous paragraph in this framework we consider the growth process using pooled times series cross section data and comparing the results from fixed and random effects econometric techniques 2 these techniques attempt to accommodate structural differences between countries and across time we also compare the performance of the more standard ordinary least squares regression approach with that of the fixed and random effect models ii an overview of international fiscal structures before presenting our model and statistical findings a brief overview of the growth and fiscal characteristics of the countries in our sample provides some additional information for those not familiar with the data which otherwise would not be revealed by our analysis 3 this information can contribute in a limited way to the debate about the effects of government on economic growth although it is not a substitute for modeling the growth process for the sample as a whole the growth rate of real per capita gross domestic product gdp averaged 1 35 per year during 1975 to 1984 with a coefficient of variation of 3 52 by comparison the average growth rate in the united states was 1 45 the five fastest growth countries were botswana 6 72 indonesia 4 19 korea 6 32 sri lanka 3 20 and thailand 4 31 the five slowest growth countries were el salvador 1

the impact of government debt expenditure and taxes on aggregate investment and productivity growth in this paper we evaluate empirically the impact of fiscal policy on two key determinants of long term growth i e private investment and productivity growth we mostly focus on a panel of 20 oecd economies from 1970 to 2009 although we also present some estimates based on data for 80 developing economies our findings suggest that high public debt adversely affects both aggregate investment spending and productivity growth through distortions related to the size of the public sector we also find weak evidence of some non linear effects on productivity with government debt becoming more detrimental in advanced economies when above 85 90 of gdp

a multiplier decomposition method to analyze poverty alleviation abstract the objective of this paper is to present a multiplier decomposition method focusing on poverty alleviation the decomposition captures the various mechanisms and linkages through which a production sector s output contributes to poverty alleviation within a socioeconomic system represented by a social accounting matrix sam it is shown that a multiplier can be broken down into two multiplicative effects the distributional and interdependency effects the decomposition method is applied to the case of indonesia a key policy implication is that the human capital of the poor needs to be enhanced if they are not to be sealed off from the industrialization process

exploring the effect of producer services agglomeration on china s energy efficiency under environmental constraints abstract this paper makes an empirical analysis of the effect of producer services agglomeration on china s energy efficiency under environmental constraints eee by using spatial durbin model the results show that at the national level the urbanization agglomeration of producer services not only improves the local eee significantly but also has an obvious spatial spillover effect on the surrounding regions while the localization agglomeration of producer services is only beneficial to the improvement of the local eee from the regional perspective both the urbanization and localization agglomeration of producer services show significant promotion effect and spatial spillover effect on china s eee in the east region and the promotion effect of the urbanization agglomeration of producer services is greater while the improvement of eee in the central and west regions mainly depend on the mar externality of producer services agglomeration and its spatial spillover effects are not obvious moreover the above empirical results exhibit strong robustness based on these empirical findings this paper puts forward some specific suggestions for improving china s eee so as to achieve the multi win of economic growth energy conservation and environmental protection the study contributes to improving the environmental quality and speeding up the construction of beautiful china

does decentralization contribute to efficiency evidence from oecd countries abstractthis article provides evidence on the relationship between fiscal decentralization and technical efficiency we begin the first stage of this study with a data envelopment analysis to obtain technical efficiency estimates for a sample of 23 oecd countries over the period 1992 2009 in a second stage we explore the effects of fiscal decentralization and other control variables on technical efficiency the results including all the control variables reveal a statistically significant negative relationship between fiscal decentralization of public expenditure and technical efficiency

when does growth trickle down to the poor the indian case a theoretical analysis and several econometric tests have been undertaken to examine whether the trickle down effect took place in rural india over a long time period we found little evidence to suggest that the trickle down effect had occurred at all our analysis suggests that the emergence of capital labour substitution was primarily responsible for preventing growth from reducing poverty the decline in poverty and a higher growth rate that took place during the late 1970s and 1980s were largely a result of government anti poverty measures teamed with the more equitable distribution of credit and inputs to smaller and marginal farmers

estimating consumption deprivation in india using survey data a state level rural urban analysis before and during reform period this paper assesses deprivation in india employing a measure proposed by sitaramam and using consumption data at the household level as cereals constitute a staple food and form a major portion of expenditure on food the deprivation measure considered here is deprivation in cereal consumption the total expenditure at which the engel curve for cereals turns from concave to convex is taken as the cut off to determine the deprived households it is shown that cereal deprivation at the all india level exhibits a declining trend over the period 1987 88 and 1999 2000 in the rural sector while there is little change in the urban sector further this decline in cereal deprivation seems to have been slowing down during the reform period the estimates of deprivation are poorly correlated with the hci and pgi at state level both in rural and urban sectors they however have better temporal correlations with those poverty measures we offer some explanation for these observed differences in alternate deprivation indices the trends in cereal deprivation are accompanied in some cases by a decline in real terms in maximum cereal consumption of each group of consumers whether this is an improvement or otherwise of the living standards of the poor must await further analysis of per capita food consumption in general with an analysis of prices and quantities of various food items it is hoped that this kind of study on deprivation of essential commodities may increase our understanding of poverty and even suggest direct intervention strategies

farm productivity and rural poverty in india armed with new data we return to an old question from the pages of this journal to what extent do india s rural poor share in agricultural growth combining data from 24 household sample surveys spanning 35 years with other sources we estimate a model of the joint determination of consumption poverty measures agricultural wages and food prices we find that higher farm productivity brought both absolute and relative gains to poor rural households a large share of the gains was via wages and prices though these effects took time the benefits to the poor were not confined to those near the poverty line

caste and tribe inequality evidence from india 1983 1999 abstract despite policies targeting scheduled castes sc and scheduled tribes st there remain large disparities of living standards between sc st and non sc st households in india the sc st households may be poorer because they possess lower human and physical capital but they may also earn lower returns to these assets this study finds that 30 50 of the welfare disparities are attributable to different returns such structural differences between the sc and the non sc st are partly because the sc earn lower returns to schooling a large part of the structural disparities between the st and the non sc st comes from the fact that the areas where the st live are different from those where the non sc st live in addition the st tend to earn lower returns even with controls for geographical conditions

caste female labor supply and the gender wage gap in india boserup revisited abstractthe gender wage gap is notable not just for its persistence and ubiquity but also for its variation across regions and countries a natural question is how greater workforce participation by women matters to female wages and the gender wage gap within india a seeming paradox is that gender differentials in agricultural wages are the largest in southern regions of india that are otherwise favorable to women ester boserup hypothesized that this is due to greater labor force participation by women in these regions this is not obvious as greater female labor supply could depress male wages as well other factors also need to be accounted for especially since women have fewer opportunities for nonfarm employment this article undertakes a formal test of the boserup proposition we find that differences in female labor supply are able to explain 55 of the gender wage gap between northern and southern states of india the article also finds that women gain from greater nonfarm employment even if

quality trade and growth abstract this paper analyzes the roles of product quality and increasing returns in international division of labor and economic development because the qualities of different intermediate goods are highly complementary in producing the quality of the final good a poor economy will choose to be in autarky if its average level of human capital is sufficiently low thus the heterogeneity of human capital may hamper the division of labor further by linking quality trade and growth this model simultaneously explains the east asian miracle and the empirical finding of conditional convergence

aggregable price taking firms abstract nonlinear quantity aggregation rules are examined for price taking firms facing disparate prices the class of aggregable firm level technologies is shown to be characterized by a generalization of the gorman polar form restricted profit function examples are constructed to show how this nonlinear aggregation problem may be applied in empirical settings

financial development and growth in sub saharan africa do legal origin and cfa membership matter this article examines whether relations between legal origin financial development and economic growth that hold worldwide hold in british and french legal origin sub saharan africa ssa as well we also test for the differential impacts on financial development and on growth of communaute financiere africaine cfa currency union membership within french legal origin ssa our panel regressions and descriptive measures agree with the findings of british legal origin advantage with respect to financial development in addition financial development contributes positively to economic growth in british legal origin ssa as it does worldwide within french legal origin ssa we find that currency union constraints tend to hinder financial development in cfa countries beyond the negative impacts of french legal origin moreover contributions to the growth of various indicators of financial development in french legal origin ssa are negative or insignificant irrespective of cfa membership

accumulation of human capital in ldcs in the presence of unemployment this paper takes up an aggregative growth framework to study how human and physical capital evolve over time as households allocate their investment between the two assets in the context of unemployment of educated labor it develops a general equilibrium model of an economy with two sectors a composite good sector and a schooling sector where output is subject to increasing returns to scale a temporary equilibrium for this economy depends on the endowments of physical and human capital as well as on the output elasticity of returns to scale and the price elasticity of education the dynamic evolution of this economy is explored in terms of the accumulation of the two types of capital a rise in education subsidy increases the demand for education at the cost of investment in physical capital and could lead to inefficient substitution between skilled and unskilled workers in the long run copyright 1994 by the london school of economics and political science

ict and transport infrastructure development an empirical analysis of complementarity abstractthis paper provides an empirical framework to assess the nonlinear complementary linkage effects that arise from the interaction between motorway capital and information and communications

increasing returns product quality and international trade this paper examines the roles of quality and increasing returns in trade it implies that there is intense intra industry trade among economies with similar levels of per capita income which increases both the quality and the quantity of consumption however there may be no trade in manufactured goods between rich and poor countries because of the disparity in their optimal qualities of consumption and the high complementarity of the qualities of intermediate goods in production thus it helps explain the observed trade patterns moreover the model shows that a smaller country is more likely to engage in international trade

price aggregation when price taking firms prices vary in many cases heterogeneous prices occur in price taking environments in empirical work an aggregate price index is often created from such prices and used to explain aggregate supply and derived demands we show that consistent aggregation places strong restrictions on functional forms which may be used to describe behaviour unlike the case of aggregation of consumer income but similar to the case of aggregation of wages these functional forms are inconsistent with standard microtheory

targeting public investments by agro ecological zone to achieve growth and poverty alleviation goals in rural india abstract this paper shows that improved technology and rural infrastructure have made important contributions to agricultural growth and poverty reduction in india however these effects have varied widely across agro ecological zones in the past the government has devoted more resources to irrigated areas and this has led to significant production growth and poverty reduction in those areas however as investments in irrigated areas continue to increase their marginal returns diminish and it is now in many of the rainfed areas including some of lower agricultural potential where the marginal returns from additional government investments in technology and infrastructure are largest

agricultural growth poverty reduction and agro ecological zones in india an ecological fallacy abstract in an article in this journal that is part of an oevre that has been widely cited shenggen fan peter hazel and t haque 2000a present evidence that government investments in india now have greater effects on poverty in rainfed than irrigated regions this note suggests that parts of the methodology on which this claim is based are unclear and possibly suffer from an ecological fallacy even after clarification of their method by the authors some doubts remain as to whether the results quoted support the original claim

making nama work supporting adjustment and development nama liberalisation alone will not be sufficient to achieve the development goals of the doha round the structure of developing countries economies and weaknesses in their infrastructure and institutions mean that adjustment to liberalisation is often costly and export responses slow to make nama work developing countries will need technical and financial support to raise their ability to adapt to greater openness and globalisation pressures and to increase their export capabilities although developing countries should decide how to raise their ability to adjust and to increase exports bilateral donors and multilateral agencies will need to fund nama support programmes the wto however is not the appropriate or competent international agency to provide or disburse such funding it can provide technical advice and offers a negotiating vehicle for industrial countries to signal that the development aims of the doha round are recognised in substantive terms if industrial countries support developing countries nama related adjustment costs in addition to offering nama tariff cuts the chances of a successful doha agreement and genuine pro development outcomes will be boosted significantly

the effects of openness trade orientation and human capital on total factor productivity abstract we study the effects of openness trade orientation and human capital on total factor productivity for a pooled sample of developed and developing countries total factor productivity emerges from a parsimonious specification of the aggregate production function potential determinants of total factor productivity include measures of openness trade orientation and human capital higher openness benefits total factor productivity outward oriented countries experience higher total factor productivity over and above the positive effect of openness human capital generally contributes positively to total factor productivity in poor countries however human capital interacts with openness to achieve a positive effect

can public sector employment spur human capital acquisition abstract in a general equilibrium model of a product and an education sector we add government employment of educated labor for public goods provision and for political economy reasons education subsidy may cause fewer public goods and retard the product sector

what will take the con out of econometrics the paper begins with the question of whether leamer s extreme bounds analysis eba really does take the con out of econometrics by analytically demonstrating that the extreme bounds are simply functions of the f statistic for the deletion of variables from a regression we conclude that the information provided by eba represents no advance over that available from traditional methods furthermore there is a degree of arbitrariness in eba which exactly parallels the selective reporting of regressions it was designed to supplant the last part of the paper attempts a positive response to its title by following a well defined series of modelling steps we maintain that cooley and le roy s eba derived conclusions concerning the interest elasticity of money demand owe more to a faulty methodology than to the data this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

environmental regulation and technology transfers this paper analyzes the situation in which a national government introduces environmental regulations within the framework of an international duopoly with environmental regulations an environmental tax imposed by the government in the home country can induce a foreign firm with advanced abatement technology to license it to a domestic firm without this technology furthermore when the domestic firm s production technology is less efficient than that of the foreign firm the foreign firm may freely reveal its technology to the domestic firm these improvements through the voluntary transfer of technology imply that environmental regulations have positive impacts on innovation resume reglementation environnementale et transferts de technologie ce texte analyse le cas d un gouvernement national qui etablit des reglementations environnementales dans le cadre d un duopole international avec reglementations environnementales le gouvernement national impose une taxe environnementale au plan domestique qui peut induire une firme etrangere qui dispose d une technologie avancee qui reduit l impact environnemental a vendre une licence permettant d utiliser cette technologie a une firme domestique qui ne l a pas de plus quand la technologie de production de la firme domestique est moins efficace que celle de la firme etrangere la firme etrangere peut reveler sa technologie a la firme domestique ces ameliorations a travers les transferts volontaires de technologie impliquent que les reglementations environnementales ont des impacts positifs sur l innovation

government spending growth and poverty in rural india using state level data for 1970 93 a simultaneous equation model was developed to estimate the direct and indirect effects of different types of government expenditure on ruralpoverty and productivity growth in india the results show that in order to reduce rural poverty the indian government shoul d give highest priority to additionalinvestments in ruralroads and agricul turalresearch these types of investment not only have much larger poverty impacts per rupee spent than any other government investment but also generate higher productivity growth apart from government spending on education which has the third l argest marginalimpact on ruralpoverty and produc

why has economic growth been more pro poor in some states of india than others abstract we use 20 household surveys for india s 15 major states spanning 1960 1994 to study how the sectoral composition of economic growth and initial conditions interact to influence how much growth reduced consumption poverty the elasticities of measured poverty to farm yields and development spending did not differ significantly across states but the elasticities of poverty to urban and rural non farm output varied appreciably and the differences were quantitatively important to the overall rate of poverty reduction states with higher elasticities did not experience higher rates of non farm growth the non farm growth process was more pro poor in states with initially higher literacy higher farm productivity higher rural living standards relative to urban areas lower landlessness and lower infant mortality

does renewable and or non renewable energy consumption matter for total factor productivity tfp growth evidence from the brics abstract studies proved that output growth is mainly associated with the total factor productivity tfp growth and variables that affect the tfp have an important explanatory power on output in this regards the aim of this study is to examine the causal relationship between different types of energy consumption and tfp growth in the brics from 1992 to 2012 a panel bootstrap granger causality test by konya 2006 68 was employed to investigate the direction of possible connection between energy consumption and tfp growth results show that no remarkable causal link exists between renewable energy consumption and tfp growth in the brics however in the case of non renewables energy consumption creates a positive externality that contributes economic development in brazil and south africa by the growth of tfp as well as energy use itself in this respect policies that promote coal and non renewable electricity consumption in south africa and natural gas consumption in brazil may be beneficial for their economic development

literacy sharing assortative mating or what labour market advantages and proximate illiteracy revisited abstract this paper explores the relationship between household literacy and the labour market outcomes of illiterate household members which basu narayan and ravallion 2002 report using household income and expenditure data from bangladesh bnr attribute a considerable wage premium for proximate illiterate women in off farm employment to labour productivity gains from intra household literacy sharing this wage premium also suggests that women may be more efficient recipients of literacy externalities than men we propose that any such relationship might not be due to higher labour productivity but may have other explanations such as systematically different and unobserved attributes of illiterate females married into literate households we also pay attention to the negative selection of illiterate females into non farm wage employment which contrary to received wisdom suggests that household literacy may not be unambiguously progressive for females we propose that the widely reported finding that

toward a theory of induced institutional innovation in this paper we elaborate a theory of institutional innovation in which changes in the demand for institutional innovation are induced by changes in relative resource endowments and by technical change we illustrate from agricultural history how changes in resource endowments and technical change have induced changes in private property rights and in the development of non market institutions we also consider the impact of advances in social science knowledge and of cultural endowments on the supply of institutional change in a final section we present the elements of a model of institutional innovation that maps the relationships among resource endowments cultural endowments technology and institutions

bilateral fdi flows productivity growth and convergence the north vs the south summary controlling for the aggregation bias in fdi flows and the home and host country heterogeneity within and between northern and southern countries we explore the effects of bilateral fdi flows on host country productivity growth and on the productivity convergence dynamics between the host and the productivity frontier country using bilateral fdi flows data from 108 host and 240 home countries over 1990 2012 and employing a variety of estimation techniques together with a rich battery of robustness tests we find no significant effect of bilateral fdi flows on either host country productivity growth or on the productivity gap between the host and the frontier country we also show that these findings are not sensitive to the direction of fdi flows which are south south south north north south or north north in a decomposition exercise we also fail to find any significant effect of bilateral or aggregate fdi flows on physical capital growth yet we find some evidence of a positive effect of fdi flows on human capital growth but just in one direction south south last but not least we fail to find any productivity growth or convergence effect at the sectoral level including agricultural industry or services sectors

economic liberalization and indian economic growth what s the evidence india s growth and poverty performance over the last three decades has been a subject of great curiosity unlike the east asian countries india s growth spurt is not associated with exceptionally high domestic savings or foreign capital inflows or manufacturing exports so what triggered the change in the growth trajectory did the market liberalization policies of the 1990s help how have the initial conditions shaped the process and how has the indian model impinged on india s central problem of mass poverty this paper surveys the literature and offers its own assessment of the drivers of change jel i32 o13 o14 o15 o21 o47

what has luck got to do with it a regional analysis of poverty and agricultural growth in rural india this article explores the role of agro ecological factors associated with agricultural growth and poverty outcomes in india using a new operationalisation of agro ecological factors and incorporating within state variations in poverty and other variables we show that agricultural growth and poverty reduction appear to depend on underlying agro ecological conditions which are favourable to the spread of irrigation and hence agricultural development which in turn in associated with poverty reduction promotion of agriculture in less favoured areas in unlikely to have similar effects on agriculture in less favoured areas is unlikely to have similar effects on agricultural growth even if the effects of agricultural growth on poverty remain similar unless conditions for irrigation are favourable or rainfall is sufficiently abundant and reliable this suggests that considerable caution may be needed in drawing policy conclusions from empirical analysis by state alone and without regard to their underlying f

why have some indian states done better than others at reducing rural poverty the unevenness of the rise in rural living standards in the various states of india since the 1950s allowed the authors to study the causes of poverty they modeled the evolution of average consumption and various poverty measures using pooled state level data for 1957 91 they found that poverty was reduced by higher agricultural yields above trend growth in nonfarm output and lower inflation rates but these factors only partly explain relative success and failure in reducing poverty initial conditions also mattered states that started the period with better infrastructure and human resources with more intense irrigation greater literacy and lower infant mortality rates had significantly greater long term rates of consumption growth and poverty reduction by and large the same variables that promoted growth in average consumption also helped reduce poverty the effects on poverty measures were partly redistributive in nature after controlling for inflation the authors found that some of the factors that helped reduce absolute poverty also improved distribution and none of the factors that reduced absolute poverty had adverse impacts on distribution in other words there was no sign of tradeoffs between growth and pro poor distribution

urbanization human capital and cross country productivity differences abstract in this paper we empirically examine the effects of health education and urbanization on the total factor productivity tfp of a large number of countries we find that both urbanization and health indicators life expectancy infant mortality rate and the risk of malaria significantly affect tfp education has an insignificant effect on tfp coefficients of indicators of health and urbanization remain highly significant even after controlling for endogeneity

divergence in india income differentials at the state level 1970 97 abstract we examine india s regional disparities in economic performance between 1970 97 our preliminary analysis shows that in absolute terms initially poorer states grew at slower rates than initially wealthier ones and that there is also evidence of increasing dispersion of income levels across the states our econometric analysis investigates the possibility of club convergence and conditional convergence although we do not find evidence of the former we can suggest some of the factors associated in the latter our research also indicates that the onset of economic policy reform in 1991 significantly intensified growth differentials between the states

impact of openness on growth in different country groups this paper evaluates the impact of openness on growth in different country groups using a panel of 79 countries over the period 1970 98 it distinguishes itself from many existing studies in three aspects firstly both trade and fdi are included as measures of openness secondly countries are classified into high middle and low income groups to compare the roles of trade and fdi in these groups thirdly the possible problems of endogeneity and multicollinearity of trade and fdi are carefully dealt with in a panel data setting the main findings are as follows total trade has a general positive impact on growth in all country groups although the impact from imports is not significant in high income countries fdi has a positive impact on growth in high and middle income countries but not in low income countries with the existing absorptive capabilities low income countries can benefit from both exports and imports but not from fdi these findings suggest that trade and fdi affect growth through different channels and under different conditions the paper also discusses important policy implications

what can new survey data tell us about recent changes in distribution and poverty it has been claimed that in recent times the poor have lost ground both relatively and absolutely even when average levels of living have risen this article tests that claim using household surveys for 67 developing and transitional economies over 1981 94 it finds that changes in inequality and polarization were uncorrelated with changes in average living standards distribution improved as often as it worsened in growing economies and negative growth was often more detrimental to distribution than positive growth overall there was a small decrease in absolute poverty although with diverse experiences across regions and countries almost always poverty fell with growth in average living standards and rose with contraction

the impact of poor health on total factor productivity a number of recent studies have illustrated the link between health and economic growth this paper argues that a key mechanism through which health affects growth is via total factor productivity tfp we first estimate tfp based on a production function and then estimate the determinants of tfp paying particular attention to three indicators of health that are particularly problematic in developing regions malnutrition malaria and water borne diseases we find the impact of poor health on tfp to be negative significant and robust across a wide variety of specifications

the kuznets process and the inequality development relationship abstract in his classic paper on economic growth and income inequality kuznets discussed the process of population shift from traditional to modern activities as the basis for a theory of distributional change during the course of development in this paper we present a formalization of the kuznets process conduct a general analysis of distributional change under this process and derive the functional forms of and conditions for a turning point in the inequality development relationship for six commonly used indices of inequality the functional form appropriate to each index is then estimated using cross section data on 60 developing and developed countries finally some extensions to the initial formalization of the kuznets process are considered

bringing income distribution in from the cold the title of this presidential address is chosen to highlight the way in which the subject of income distribution has in the past been marginalised for much of this century it has been very much out in the cold there are signs that in the 1990s it is being welcomed back and i shall be referring to recent research but i would like to use this occasion to give further impetus to the re incorporation of income distribution into the main body of economic analysis this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a delayed revolution environment and agrarian change in india slow growth of agricultural income has contributed to poor economic growth and poverty in india in modern times the condition was weakened by green revolutions in the last third of the twentieth century conventional accounts attribute the stagnation to institutions created during colonial rule in india this article suggests instead that it derived from an environmental constraint the green revolutions succeeded partly because state aid enabled peasants to overcome the constraint in some regions

explaining international and intertemporal variations in income inequality this paper explores the propositions that income inequality is relatively stable within countries and that it varies significantly among countries a new and expanded data set provides broad support for both propositions drawing on a political economy and capital market imperfection arguments to explain the intertemporal and international variation in inequality the empirical analysis shows that the predicted variables associated with the first argument a measure of civil liberties and the initial level of secondary schooling and the second argument a measure of financial depth and the initial distribution of land are indeed important determinants of inequality this paper explores two propositions regarding income inequality they are first income inequality is relatively stable within countries and second it varies significantly across countries to illustrate note that the gini coefficient in india remained almost constant for forty years 1951 92 with mean 32 6 and standard deviation 2 0 2 in contrast the variation in gini coefficients across countries is large 61 9 in honduras in 1968 compared with 17 8 in bulgaria in 1976 if substantiated these propositions have potentially significant implications for poverty the significance of the first is obvious barring any fundamental socio political change poverty reduction will depend crucially on the rate of economic growth given this the significance of the second is that in inegalitarian economies the poor will enjoy a smaller share of any national increment in income than in more egalitarian ones drawing on a new and expanded data set on inequality deininger and squire 1996a the first of the paper s three sections conducts standard statistical tests of the two propositions the sample comprises 573 observations on the most common measure of inequality the gini coefficient for 49 developed and developing countries covering the period 1947 94 the results broadly confirm our two propositions specifically analysis of variance anova shows that about 90 of the total variance in the gini coefficients

do effective state business relations matter for economic growth evidence from indian states summary effective state business relations are a set of highly institutionalised responsive and public interactions between the state and the business sector this paper examines the impact of effective state business relations on economic growth across indian states over the period 1985 2006 we propose a measure that captures the various dimensions of effective state business relations at the sub national level and estimate standard growth regressions using dynamic panel data methods our results show that effective state business relations contribute significantly to economic growth and appear to be driven by the intensity of the interactions between the state and the private sector

can high inequality developing countries escape absolute poverty do the poor face the same prospects for escaping poverty in high inequality developing countries as in low inequality countries is it possible for inequality to be so great as to stifle prospects of reducing absolute poverty even when other initial conditions and policies are favorable to growth household survey data for developing countries suggest that initial distribution does affect how much the poor share in rising average incomes higher initial inequality tends to reduce growth s impact on absolute poverty by the same token higher inequality diminishes the adverse impact on the poor of general economic contraction combining this evidence with that from recent investigations of inequality s effect on growth the author finds that if inequality is high enough countries that would have very good growth prospects at low levels of inequality may see little or no overall growth and little progress in reducing poverty or even a worsening on both counts the data the author uses suggest that such cases do occur the precision with which key parameters have been estimated makes it difficult to say with confidence how common such cases are but they appear to be in the minority what appear to be the best available estimates suggest that about one fifth of the spells between surveys he analyzed were cases in which poverty was rising yet positive growth in the mean and hence falling poverty is predicted at zero inequality inequality can be high enough to result in rising poverty despite good underlying growth prospects

dynamic linkages between diffusion of information communication technology and labour productivity in south asia at present diffusion of information communication technology ict is a significant area of concern for sustainable development and growth of a country regions with abundant labour such as south asia require significant improvements in the diffusion of ict to achieve higher productivity for their labour which in turn can increase the pace of economic growth in this context the objective of this study is to investigate whether ict could be used to improve labour productivity for countries in south asia this study first investigates the general status of diffusion of ict among south asian countries the initial results based on descriptive statistics indicate that there is a significant gap among the south asian countries with maldives having the highest ict facilities second using robust panel data methodologies this study concludes that south asia s drive for higher productivity of its abundant labour force can substantially be improved in the long run by increasing diffusion of ict in the prese

the existence of input and output aggregates in aggregate production functions in this paper we make two contributions to the literature on aggregating inputs and outputs in economy production functions first we present necessary and sufficient conditions for aggregating efficiently allocated goods under general assumptions on the technology second we present a general theorem on the conditions for the existence of aggregates of both efficiently allocated goods and arbitrarily allocated goods we use this theorem to elucidate the role of efficiency in determining the existence of aggregates