the determinants of chinese visitors to australia a dynamic demand analysis although china has progressively become an important inbound tourism market for australia its demand elasticities have been little studied to date this study examines the determinants of chinese visitors to australia using a dynamic time series estimator interesting findings include a high income elasticity as a source of the continuous doubledigit growth rates in chinese arrivals that australia has experienced over the past two decades together with relatively high total trip price elasticities for both short run and long run a trend of chinese outbound to australia is also identified from a policy perspective the results confirm that keeping a low cost of visiting australia both ground and travel costs is a good strategy to secure greater numbers of chinese tourists

co integration analysis of quarterly european tourism demand in tunisia abstract the purpose of this study is to identify the factors that affect the destination choice process in addition to prices and income factors the supply factor is introduced as an explanatory variable in the econometric model co integration analysis and error correction models ecms are used to estimate the long run tourism demand elasticities and to forecast the quarterly european tourism demand for a 1 year ahead horizon the main finding of this study is that the behaviour of european tourists varies from one country to another the co integrating relationships show that the large elasticity magnitude may be the reflection of the relatively expensive services often sought after by tourists from these countries the estimated values of the supply elasticity corroborate the supply induced demand hypothesis finally compared to the basic structural model and using the root mean squared error the ecm provides more precise forecasts

national institutions and subnational development in africa we investigate the role of national institutions on subnational african development in a novel framework that accounts both for local geography and cultural genetic traits we exploit the fact that the political boundaries in the eve of african independence partitioned more than two hundred ethnic groups across adjacent countries subjecting similar cultures residing in homogeneous geographic areas to different formal institutions using both a matching type and a spatial regression discontinuity approach we show that differences in countrywide institutional structures across the national border do not explain within ethnicity differences in economic performance as captured by satellite images of light density the average non effect of national institutions on ethnic development masks considerable heterogeneity partially driven by the diminishing role of national institutions in areas further from the capital cities

pre reformation roots of the protestant ethic we hypothesize that cultural appreciation of hard work and thrift the protestant ethic according to max weber had a pre reformation origin the proximate source of these values was according to the proposed theory the catholic order of cistercians in support we rst document an impact from the order on growth within the epicenter of the industrial revolution english counties that were more exposed to cistercian monasteries experienced faster productivity growth from the 13th century onwards consistent with a cultural in uence this impact is also found after the monasteries were dissolved in the 1530s second we nd that the values emphasized by weber are relatively more pervasive in european regions where cistercian monasteries were located historically and that the legacy of the cistercians can be detected in present day employment rates across european sub regions

the origins of ethnolinguistic diversity this study explores the determinants of ethnolinguistic diversity within as well as across countries shedding light on its geographic origins the empirical analysis conducted across countries virtual countries and pairs of contiguous regions establishes that geographic variability captured by variation in regional land quality and elevation is a fundamental determinant of contemporary linguistic diversity the findings are consistent with the proposed hypothesis that differences in land endowments gave rise to location specific human capital leading to the formation of localized ethnicities jel j15 j24 z13

inequality and fractionalization we present evidence that ethnic fragmentation explains variations in per capita income institutions and schooling better than income inequality when both are treated as endogenous to do so we identify instruments for ethnic fractionalization and income inequality based on historical experience using instrumental variables estimation we find that ethnic fractionalization explains the level of income both when income inequality is included as a control in the estimation and when it is not however we find no evidence that income inequality affects the level of income when ethnic fractionalization is properly treated as an endogenous variable we have similar findings when other development outcomes such as schooling or proxies for institutional quality are used as dependent variables these results are robust to various controls and changes in the sample size and suggest that some of the previous findings regarding the effect of income inequality on development should be attributed to ethnic fractionalization

do better schools matter parental valuation of elementary education the evaluation of numerous school reforms requires an understanding of the value of better schools given the difficulty of calculating the relationship between school quality and student outcomes i turn to another method and use house prices to infer the value parents place on school quality i look within school districts at houses located on attendance district boundaries houses then differ only by the elementary school the child attends i thereby effectively remove the variation in neighborhoods taxes and school spending i find that parents are willing to pay 2 5 percent more for a 5 percent increase in test scores this finding is robust to a number of sensitivity checks

is diversity detrimental ethnic fractionalization public goods provision and the historical legacies of stateness existing research has shown that highly diverse countries tend to provide less public goods this article argues by contrast that the relationship is spurious both contemporary ethnic heterogeneity and low public goods provision represent legacies of a weakly developed state capacity inherited from the past classical theories of state formation are then tested to show that favorable topography and climate high population densities as well as a history of warfare are conducive to state formation using an instrumental variable approach i show that previous ethnic diversity is not consistently an impediment to the formation of indigenous states and thus to contemporary public goods provision empirically this article uses three different measurements of public goods provision and data on pre colonial levels of state formation in asia and africa to test these various hypotheses

tourism demand forecasting models choice of appropriate variable to represent tourists cost of living abstract price is generally regarded as a major determinant of demand tourism has two price elements the cost of travel to the destination and the cost of living for tourists in the destination previous studies where econometric forecasting models have been developed for international tourism demand usually take the consumer price index in a country to be a proxy for the cost of tourism in that country owing to lack of appropriate data this article attempts to evaluate the performance of proxy variables compared with a specific tourists cost of living variable within the context of tourism demand forecasting models

regionalism ethnic diversity and variation in public good provision by national states this article argues that variation in public good provision is determined by the salience of demographic and economic regionalism conceptualized as the presence of multiple large population centers and distinct economic units within a single country s borders two mechanisms divergent public good preferences and regional self sufficiency underpin this relationship evidence of these mechanisms as central to low public good provision is found in case studies of ecuador and colombia two countries that score high on standard measures of ethnic diversity and that saw little public good provision during the first century after independence a region wide examination of post independence south america and an investigation of change over time in venezuela provide further support for the claim that regionalism affects public good provision a plausible case for this aspect of geography as a cause of low public good provision poses a challenge to the scholarship attributing it to ethnic diversity

the relation between price and marginal cost in u s industry a contradiction in a recent article in this journal hall 1988 examined productivity shocks at the industry level derived from constant returns to scale production functions in which firms were assumed to be competitive hall had two important conclusions first he showed that productivity shocks i e solow residuals were correlated with aggregate demand variables implying that the former are not exogenous impulses second his results implied that firms persistently charge prices above marginal costs making inappropriate the constant returns to scale competitive production function assumed in many theoretical frameworks because of the importance of hall s findings the article has led to many extensions evans 1992 confirms the empirical finding of significant correlations between productivity shocks and aggregate demand variables burnside eichenbaum and rebelo 1993 show that this correlation can be explained by introducing labor hoarding into a theoretical model with competitive firms and constant returns to scale production functions the markups above marginal cost are explained by eden and griliches 1991 and galeotti and schiantarelli 1991 by modifying the theoretical production function caballero and lyons 1992 using the hall data and methodology examine the possibility of external economies in the aggregate manufacturing production finally waldmann 199 1 argues in this journal that the

production function regressions returns to scale and externalities a number of recent papers have used simple linear regressions in an attempt to identify market structure the extent of returns to scale and possible external effects in u s manufacturing industries the results obtained from these regressions have important implications for several branches of modern macroeconomics as a result the macro literature frequently cites specific numerical evidence from caballero and lyons 1992 and hall 1990 which suggests that there are quantitatively significant increasing returns to scale or external effects in u s manufacturing in contrast it is the argument of this paper that this evidence is not convincing the most robust evidence suggests that the typical u s manufacturing industry displays constant returns with no external effects on the other hand there is significant heterogeneity across industries

on the salience of ethnic conflict ray acknowledges support from the national science foundation under grants 0421852 and 0617827 esteban is a member of barcelona economics xrea and is grateful for support from the generalitat de catalunya and the cicyt sej 2006 00369 this research is part of the polarization and conflict research project cit2 ct 2004 506084 funded by the european commission dg research sixth framework program

remodeling international tourism demand old theory and new evidence abstract the purpose of this study is to advance the tourism demand theory by excluding simultaneous effects of exchange rates and prices in empirical models formulating an alternative pricing modus operandi consistent with recent research in the area and demonstrating the efficacy of the use of an industrial production index ipi as a proxy for income a panel fully modified ordinary least squares fmols method is employed to estimate the inbound tourism demand for turkey study findings suggest that the inclusion of exchange rates and prices as mutually exclusive components can be misleading the ipi is not a good proxy for income and country specific coefficients need to be analyzed to accurately explain determinants of tourism demand for countries in the panel

the institutional and psychological foundations of natural resource policies abstractthe pressures of political interests which drive the resource curse are well understood but ordinary citizens are usually cast both as the innocent victims of this process and as the potential solution if only governments could be made more accountable to them this paper draws upon recent developments in social psychology to discuss the formation of mass opinions on two aspects of resource ownership one is the spatial assignment of ownership between local and national claims which has been a significant cause of conflict the other is the assignment of revenues between current consumption and future investment which has usually been excessively biased towards the former i suggest why in the absence of an active government communications policy to offset them known psychological biases may interact with resource discoveries to generate mass opinions which contribute to these problems

post 1500 population flows and the long run determinants of economic growth and inequality we construct a matrix showing the share of the year 2000 population in every country that is descended from people in different source countries in the year 1500 using this matrix we analyze how post 1500 migration has influenced the level of gdp per capita and within country income inequality in the world today indicators of early development such as early state history and the timing of transition to agriculture have much better predictive power for current gdp when one looks at the ancestors of the people who currently live in a country than when one considers the history on that country s territory without adjusting for migration measures of the ethnic or linguistic heterogeneity of a country s current population do not predict income inequality as well as measures of the ethnic or linguistic heterogeneity of the current population s ancestors an even better predictor of current inequality in a country is the variance of early development history of the country s inhabitants with ethnic groups originating in regions having longer histories of agriculture and organized states tending to be at the upper end of a country s income distribution however high within country variance of early development also predicts higher income per capita holding constant the average level of early development

explaining divergence in the long term effects of precolonial centralization on access to public infrastructure services in nigeria abstract although the literature has discussed the benefits of precolonial centralization for development in africa the findings and the mechanisms provided do not explain the heterogeneity in access to public services of formerly centralized regions using new survey data from nigeria a significant negative association between precolonial centralization and access to certain public services is observed while the mechanisms driving these patterns are complex i use historical evidence to suggest that the negative association may be partly driven by centralized regions whose leaders failed to comply with the autocratic federal regime and whose jurisdictions may have been subsequently punished by underinvestment in these services with impacts lasting until today the results are robust to extensive controls and multiple empirical tests to differentiate among alternative explanations for the finding

beyond the stars it is frequent to hear in economic seminars or read in academic papers that an effect is economically significant or economically important yet the economic literature is vague on what economic importance means and how it should be measured in this paper i show that existing measures of economic importance are flawed and misused i derive a new metric that measures in percentage terms the contribution of each explanatory variable to deviations in the dependent variable ceteris paribus as an illustration the method is applied to study the determinants of migration and the determinants of fertility

local political business cycles evidence from philippine municipalities abstract this paper establishes the existence of short term political business cycles in the philippines over the period 2003 2009 examining a balanced panel of 1143 municipalities shows that employment levels increase in the two pre electoral quarters and drop sharply in the two quarters following elections further results are consistent with the cycles being generated by incumbents attempts to increase their chances of re election cycles are stronger in sectors that incumbents are more able to influence and when they expect stronger electoral competition evidence suggests that these cycles are detrimental to development

decomposition of australian tourist expenditure abstract the economic contribution that tourists make to their host depends upon the total amount of their expenditure as tourists this paper looks at the annual changes in the amount of expenditure by international tourists in australia over the period 1985 to 1995 by decomposing these changes into components attributable to the three factors of numbers of tourists their length of stay and their average expenditure insight is gained into how crucial the growth in numbers has been and in particular how important has been the growth in the number of asian holiday makers the research also finds that there have been general declines in the length of stay and the average expenditure for most categories of tourist

climatic fluctuations and the diffusion of agriculture this research examines the climatic origins of the diffusion of neolithic agriculture across countries and archaeological sites the theory suggests that a foraging society s history of climatic shocks shaped the timing of its adoption of farming specifically as long as climatic disturbances did not lead to a collapse of the underlying resource base the rate at which hunter gatherers were climatically propelled to experiment with their habitats determined the accumulation of tacit knowledge complementary to farming consistent with the proposed hypothesis the empirical investigation demonstrates that conditional on biogeographic endowments climatic volatility has a hump shaped effect on the timing of the adoption of agriculture

the impact of ethnic diversity on microenterprise start ups until recently factors determining the decisions made by microfinance institutions mfis to extend loans to business start ups had not been explored recent evidence shows that mfi performance wi

what drives the historical formation and persistent development of territorial states the importance of the length of state history for understanding variations in income levels and growth rates across countries has received a lot of attention in the recent literature on long run comparative development the literature however is silent about its origins this paper explores the determinants of statehood by considering the potential roles of an early transition to fully fledged agricultural production the adoption of state of the art military innovations and the opportunity for economic interaction with the regional economic leader the results demonstrate that only the association between economic interaction and the rise and development of the state is statistically robust

external effects in u s procyclical productivity abstract in this paper we highlight a new dimension of the aggregate procyclical productivity phenomenon we show that estimates of the degree of returns to scale are larger for manufacturing as a whole than for two digit industries since this difference must be due to factors that are only internalized at the most aggregate level we term it an external effect this result rules out explanations based on own input variation such as true increasing returns and unmeasured factor utilization tied to own activity as the sole explanations for aggregate procyclical productivity we explore several potential explanations of this external effect

the use of cpi for tourism prices in demand modelling abstract the non fare components or tourism prices are often proxied by consumer price indices cpi in tourism demand models the argument for this is that tourism prices move in close concert with general consumer prices it is not immediately obvious that this is true as tourist spending differs from general consumer spending this paper investigates the evidence for the use of cpi for tourism prices employing a variety of methods and data for 10 important tourist destinations price series for major tourist expenditure items were estimated these were found with a few exceptions to correlate very highly with the destination s cpi the high correlations persisted even after linear time trend effects were removed from the series in the case of australia detailed data on tourist origins numbers spending breakdowns and on price changes were used to derive sound tourism price indices for major origins of tourists to australia the tourism price series were found to correlate very highly with the australian cpi the results confirm that it is reasonable to use cpi as a proxy for tourism prices in demand models however interpretation of the estimated coefficient is problematical

returns to scale in canadian manufacturing an interprovincial comparison this paper measures the degree of returns to scale at the two digit standard industrial classification sic in canadian manufacturing employing both gross output and value added data using a model developed by r j caballero and r k lyons the study distinguishes between internal and external returns to scale the caballero and lyons model is extended by disaggregation to the provincial level in order to measure the returns to scale of geographic provincial concentration the empirical results suggest that in canada there are increasing returns that are primarily national rather than internal to the province or the industry

determinants of the demand for us exports and imports of tourism this study estimates real income and relative price elasticities of demand for us exports and imports of tourism with annual data from 1973 2002 overall there is empirical support for the model of tourism expenditure with one exception the estimated parameters have the correct signs and most are significantly different from zero the us trading partners appear to be more sensitive to the determinants of international tourism than is the us the greater response of the us trading partners to changes in real income may account for the us running surpluses on its tourism balance during 16 of the 29 years of our sample period

forecasting international tourist flows to macau abstract the vector autoregressive var modelling technique is used to forecast tourist flows to macau from eight major origin countries regions over the period 2003 2008 the existing literature shows that the var model is capable of producing accurate medium to long term forecasts and also separate forecasts of the explanatory variables are not required a further justification for using the var technique is that it permits an impulse response analysis to be performed in order to examine the ways in which the demand for macau tourism responds to the shocks in the economic variables within the var system the implications of this analysis are discussed the forecasts generated by the var models suggest that macau will face increasing tourism demand by residents from mainland china since the needs of chinese tourists tend to be different from those from other origin countries regions especially western countries the business sectors in macau need to pay considerable attention to catering for the needs of chinese tourists

increasing returns and externalities in uk manufacturing myth or reality i apply the method of caballero and lyons to industry level data for uk manufacturing i find evidence for a positive external effect arising from the expansion of manufacturing as a whole but expansion at the sectoral level was found not to generate external effects nor was any evidence found for increasing returns which are internal to the industry here returns appear to be constant i argue that external effects at the level of aggregate manufacturing cannot be explained away as due to measurement error or cyclical effects however alternative explanations such as economy wide shocks cannot be totally excluded

holding on ethnic divisions political institutions and the duration of economic declines abstract we analyze the duration of large economic declines and provide a theory of delayed recovery we show theoretically that uncertain post recovery incomes lead to a commitment problem which limits the possibility of cooperation in ethnically heterogeneous countries strong constraints on the executive solve this problem by reducing the uncertainty associated with cooperative behavior we test the model using standard data on linguistic heterogeneity and detailed data on ethnic power configurations our findings support the central theoretical prediction countries with more constrained political executives experience shorter economic declines the effect is large in ethnically heterogeneous countries but virtually non existent in homogeneous societies our main results are robust to a variety of perturbations regarding the estimation method the estimation sample measures of heterogeneity and measures of institutions

the political economy of public goods some evidence from india we are interested in how public goods get allocated by a centralized state we use data on public goods and social structure from parliamentary constituencies in rural india to understand the allocation of these goods over the 1970s and 1980s national policies and political agendas during this period emphasized universal access to basic amenities and financed a rapid expansion in rural infrastructure we find evidence of considerable equalization in many of these facilities reflecting perhaps the importance of these commitments among the historically disadvantaged social groups those that mobilized themselves politically gained relative to the others measures of social heterogeneity that have been emphasized in the recent empirical literature on public goods are relevant but not overwhelming in their importance

internal borders ethnic based market segmentation in malawi summary ethnic diversity is associated with poorer economic development but why i argue that market segmentation is one mechanism linking diversity to economic underdevelopment when ethnic groups are geographically segregated and trust is concentrated within groups markets will be tend to be segmented along ethnic lines i evaluate this argument using maize price data from seventy malawian markets over 14 years and combine it with census data on the spatial distribution of ethnic groups i find that maize price differences a key indicator of market segmentation are indeed larger for ethnically dissimilar markets even after taking sub national administrative borders geographic barriers and climatic differences into account these statistical findings are complemented by interview data from farmers and traders in three markets across malawi which highlight the centrality of trust in small scale maize trading as well as a preference for coethnic trading partners together these findings suggest that ethnic diversity and ethnoregional segregation in particular can have a negative impact on market integration an important driver of food security and long term economic development

the historical slave trade and firm access to finance in africa access to finance helps explain the link between the historical african slave trade and current gross domestic product we first present mistrust weakened institutions and ethnic fractionalization as plausible historical channels linking the slave trade to modern finance and development we then show i the slave trade is consistently linked to reduced access to the formal and trade credit needed by modern firms ii this shortage particularly reduces capital investment in smaller firms not in business groups and iii the slave trade cannot explain most other business obstacles suggesting that long term societal shocks are exceptionally important for finance received december 16 2014 editorial decision june 29 2017 by editor philip strahan

a tourism demand function for the okanagan bc abstract this study examines the relative importance of the existing determinants of tourism demand in the okanagan because national coefficients cannot be used intercnageable with regional coefficients it is hypothesized that the values of the okanagan demand elasticities are likely to be lower than that of the province and the nation five major markets for okanagan tourism with identified and separate regressions run to determine the relative importance of the determinants of demand for okanagan tourism with respect to these markets empirical results indicate that national coefficient will tend to overestimate the regional coefficient values contrary to the results of other studies for the nation as a whole the exchange rate and travel cost did not seem to be significant determinants of okanagan tourism receipts

fractionalization entrepreneurship and the institutional environment for entrepreneurship the vast majority of the literature on ethnicity and entrepreneurship focuses on the construct of ethnic entrepreneurship however very little is known about how ethnic heterogeneity affects entrepreneurship and the institutional arrangements affecting entrepreneurship this study attempts to fill the gap and thus examines the effect of ethnic heterogeneity on various outcomes associated with entrepreneurship and the institutional environment for entrepreneurship using indices of ethnic and linguistic fractionalization we show that ethnic heterogeneity negatively influences entrepreneurship we argue that potential channels that can explain the negative effect of fractionalization on entrepreneurship include trust social network and innovation among others this study provides a new perspective on the existing debate that seeks to understand why the levels of entrepreneurial success vary across countries

the demand for tourism in north east england with special reference to northumbria an empirical analysis abstract this paper examines the trends of tourism in north east england in particular we focus on the area of northumbria to show the potential of tourism for economic development in the region within this analysis we concentrate on the demand for tourism in the region and in particular we are concerned with tourism by uk residents in northumbria domestic tourism the long run relationship between domestic tourism demand and a number of economic factors effecting this demand is considered using the johansen and juselius 1990 1992 multivariate cointegration analysis an error correction model is then proposed for short run forecasting of domestic demand for tourism in northumbria

competition in tourism among the mediterranean countries this paper examines tourism competition among the mediterranean countries with particular emphasis on greece the estimated model includes as explanatory variables an income index a price index of the host country a price index of the competitors spain portugal and italy and exchange rate the results show that the main determinants of greece s tourism demand are both price indexes and exchange rate they also show that spain seems to be greece s main competitor

sources of productivity growth an empirical analysis with german sectoral data many theoretical analyses of the sources of economic growth focus on knowledge spillovers and scale economies to explain growth endogenously the contribution of this paper is to shed some light on these arguments by an empirical investigation based on a production function framework sectoral production functions are estimated with annual german data of 51 sectors from 1960 90 the estimates reveal that both a pure solow growth model and a solow model augmented with human capital cannot account for the observed productivity increases the model should be extended by allowing for inter industry spillovers and scale economies at the aggregate level as well as for scale economies associated with human capital at the sectoral level the business cycle affects observed productivity changes in the short run and in the long run

persistence of gender inequality the role of ethnic divisions gender inequality remains a fundamental challenge for global policymakers given that it has detrimental implications for growth and human capital formation however studies examining the roots of

climate and the emergence of global income differences the latitude gradient in comparative development is a striking fact as one moves away from the equator economic activity rises while this regularity is well known it is not well understood in the present paper we take a step towards unpacking this gradient perhaps the strongest correlate with absolute latitude is the intensity of ultraviolet radiation uv r which epidemiological research has shown to be a cause of a wide range of diseases we establish that uv r is strongly and negatively correlated with economic activity both across and within countries we propose and test a mechanism that links uv r to current income differences via the impact of disease ecology on the timing of the take off to sustained growth

the influence of distance and prices on the choice of tourist destinations the moderating role of motivations abstract the literature of tourist destination choice pays great attention to the direct impact of the attributes of distance to the destination and prices of the destination but does not reach any consensus around them regarding their inhibitory or attraction effect alternatively our study proposes that the effects of distance and prices are moderated by tourist motivations at the moment of choosing a destination which leads us to make hypotheses to explain this decision through the interaction between destination attributes and the personal motivations of the individual tourists the methodology applied estimates random coefficient logit models which control possible correlations between different destinations and consider tourist heterogeneity the empirical application carried out in spain on a sample of 2127 individuals shows that the dissuasive influence of distance and prices on the selection of destinations is moderated by motivations in the sense that the motivations have a direct increasing the dissuasive effect or inverse reducing the dissuasive effect moderating effect on the influences of distance and prices

internal versus external economies in european countries in this paper sectoral production functions are estimated with a two digit disaggregation for eight european countries corresponding to the period 1978 1992 distinguishing between internal economies of scale and intersectoral external effects in order to avoid the possibility that the regressions carried out by way of panel data techniques are spurious the integration order of each variable has been identified using unit root similarly the hausman procedure has been applied to test the exogeneity of the variables and determine whether the most appropriate estimations should be sur or three stage least squares

determinants of demand for international tourist flows to turkey abstract this article describes the development and findings of a set of models used to identify the most important of the following selected variables influencing international tourist flows to turkey per capita income relative prices relative exchange rate promotional expenditure the turkish government has invested a substantial amount in promoting foreign tourism and special events eg political unrest the demand for travel was measured both by the number of tourists and by the total tourist expenditure data were obtained from secondary sources and analysis was by least squares multiple regression income price and exchange rate were found to be important factors but the impact of promotional expenditure was minimal

irrigation and autocracy irrigated agriculture makes societies more likely to be ruled by authoritarian regimes ancient societies have long been thought to follow this pattern we empirically show that irrigation affects political regimes even in the present to avoid endogeneity we use geographical and climatic variation to identify irrigation dependent societies we find that countries whose agriculture depended on irrigation are about six points less democratic on the 21 point polity2 scale than countries where agriculture has been rainfed we find qualitatively similar results across regions within countries we argue that the effect has historical origins irrigation allowed landed elites in arid areas to monopolize water and arable land this made elites more powerful and better able to oppose democratization consistent with this conjecture we show that irrigation dependence predicts land inequality both at the country level and in premodern societies surveyed by ethnographers

historical origins of firm ownership structure the persistent effects of the african slave trade this paper uses evidence from the historical african slave trade to extend prior theory linking modern firm ownership structure to institutions and social capital we argue that institutions and so

entertaining malthus bread circuses and economic growth we augment a simple malthusian model by allowing agents to consume something besides food whereas food in our case bread is both enjoyable and necessary for survival the other good circuses is pure entertainment it has absolutely no impact on survival but does enhance the quality of life with this very simple modification we show that whereas food supply may remain at subsistence technological change will have a great impact on the consumption of everything else most strikingly though the population remains bound by a malthusian constraint sustained improvements to living standards can no longer be ruled out we also argue that our model better fits the known historical facts the widely held belief that growth prior to the industrial revolution was flat is based largely on historical measures of food production although food supply throughout history may have been and for most individuals still is at or near subsistence levels technological advancements have brought greater convenience and comfort to wealthy and poor alike a possibility that malthus himself conceded in his later and often ignored work therefore our model not only describes historical growth patterns and demographic transitions better than traditional malthusian models but is also more in line with malthus later thinking jel classification numbers b10 i31 j1 n1 o30

cultural diversity and economic growth evidence from the us during the age of mass migration we exploit the large inflow of immigrants to the us during the 1870 1920 period to examine the effects that within county changes in the cultural composition of the us population had on output growth we construct measures of fractionalization and polarization to distinguish between the different effects of cultural diversity our main finding is that increases in cultural fractionalization significantly increased output while increases in cultural polarization significantly decreased output we address the issue of identifying the causal effects of cultural diversity by using the supply push component of immigrant inflows as an instrumental variable

the impact of crisis events and macroeconomic activity on taiwan s international inbound tourism demand abstract the number of inbound tourism arrivals directly impacts the tourism industry and the government agency investments therein therefore policymakers need to improve their understanding of how crisis events affect the demand for inbound tourism from the first quarter of 1996 to the second quarter of 2006 taiwan experienced four major disasters at approximately two year intervals these disasters included the asian financial crisis in 1997 the 21st september 1999 earthquake the 11th september 2001 attacks in the united states and the outbreak of sars in 2003 this paper examines the impact of crisis events on the demand for tourism in order to establish a better understanding of changes and trends in the demand for international tourism this paper uses the auto regression distributed lag model by pesaran shin and smith pesaran m h shin y smith r j 2001 bounds testing approaches to the analysis of long run relationship journal of applied econometrics 16 289 326 to examine the negative impact of these disasters on the demand for inbound tourism this paper also explores the influence of variables such as foreign exchange rates incomes relative prices and transportation costs on the dynamics of the demand for inbound tourism this paper finds that a long term equilibrium exists among all variables indicating that macroeconomic variables may be used to determine the rise or fall of the number of inbound tourism arrivals income and foreign exchange rates are both significant explanatory variables in terms of incurred losses the number of inbound tourism arrivals suffered the greatest decline during the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome sars followed by the 21st september 1999 earthquake and the 11th september 2001 attacks the impact of the asian financial crisis was relatively mild this paper finds that any impact on safety whether domestic or international negatively affects tourism demand the impact of financial crises on tourism demand is less significant ensuring the safety and health of tourists is the key to maintain demand for inbound tourism

value diversity and regional economic development we investigate the link between culture and regional economic development within european countries considering a variety of cultural values we provide evidence that it is the degree of diversity in these values at the regional level that strongly correlates with economic performance rather than the prevalence of specific values in particular we show that greater value diversity is negatively associated with regional economic performance within countries which also relates to lower institutional quality and poorer public goods provision these patterns are robust even when diversity is measured based on values expressed by emigrants residing outside of their region of origin this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

the role of ethnic diversity in sustainable environmental growth new evidence across different income regions we examine the relationship between ethnic diversity and environmental quality proxied by carbon dioxide formula presented emissions ethnic diversity is captured using indices of ethnic fractionalization adopting a supply demand framework which introduces a model for economic growth we find that ethnic fractionalization reduces formula presented emissions the negative effect of ethnic diversity on formula presented emissions is also consistent across middle and low income countries as well as high income countries however results suggest that ethnic diversity has a negative effect on growth in middle and low income countries but a positive effect on growth in high income countries our findings prove robust to alternative estimation methods

population and conflict medical innovations during the 1940s quickly resulted in significant health improvements around the world countries with initially higher mortality from infectious diseases experienced larger increases in life expectancy population and subsequent social conflict this cross country result is robust across alternative measures of conflict and is not driven by differential trends between countries with varying baseline characteristics a similar effect is also present within mexico initial suitability conditions for malaria varied across municipalities and anti malaria campaigns had differential effects on population growth and social conflict both across countries and within mexico increased conflict over scarce resources predominates and this effect is more pronounced during times of economic hardship specifically in countries with a poor growth record and in drought stricken areas in mexico at least during this time period a larger increase in population made social conflict more likely

knowledge development in tourism tourism demand research abstract could tourism demand research be criticized as data hammering with little or no concern for theory development and testing this paper addresses this question by analyzing published studies on tourism demand for their contribution to knowledge building in the field results reveal that tourism demand research remains in its infancy

climate and the slave trade african societies exported more slaves in colder years lower temperatures reduced mortality and raised agricultural yields lowering slave supply costs our results help explain african participation in the slave trade which predicts adverse outcomes today we use an annual panel of african temperatures and port level slave exports to show that exports declined when local temperatures were warmer than normal this result is strongest where african ecosystems are least resilient to climate change cold weather shocks at the peak of the slave trade predict lower economic activity today we support our interpretation using the histories of whydah benguela and mozambique

the short term price effect of a tourist tax through a dynamic demand model the case of the balearic islands abstract tourist taxes have become an important source of revenue for many tourist destinations taxes on accommodation are upheld by their proponents as a way of shifting the local tax burden on to non residents while the travel industry claims that these levies do significant damage to their level of competitiveness the objective of this paper is to identify the market s sensitivity to price changes in travel related services or groups of services assuming that one of the main factors that influences travel decisions is the information on the destination that consumers receive in order to include this effect the study applies a combination of a diffusion model and a traditional economic utility theory model to tourists visiting the balearic islands spain from the united kingdom germany france and the netherlands

modelling us tourism demand for european destinations abstract an almost ideal demand system model is used to examine us demand for tourism in european destinations the model provides policy makers with useful information concerning the sensitivity of tourism demand to changes in relative prices exchange rates and expenditure the results show that price competitiveness is important for us demand for france italy and spain but is relatively unimportant for the uk france and italy are regarded as substitutes by us tourists as are spain and italy as us expenditure rises the market shares of spain and the uk decline while france and italy benefit the demand modelling and forecasting indicate that in the absence of a tourism price index the choice between alternative price indices does not have a significant effect on the results

increasing returns labour utilization and externalities procyclical productivity in the united states and japan this paper investigates procyclical productivity and attempts to discriminate among several competing explanations the study focuses on the united states and japan since the different industrial relations in these two economies serve to cast a sharper light on the procyclical productivity debate labour hoarding evaluated through the introduction of a labour utilization proxy proves to be an important influence the interpretation of the role of external economies remains an open issue

genetic diversity and the origins of cultural fragmentation despite the importance attributed to the effects of diversity on the stability and prosperity of nations the origins of the uneven distribution of ethnic and cultural fragmentation across countries have been underexplored building on the role of deeply rooted biogeographical forces in comparative development this research empirically demonstrates that genetic diversity predominantly determined during the prehistoric out of africa migration of humans is an underlying cause of various existing manifestations of ethnolinguistic heterogeneity further exploration of this uncharted territory may revolutionize the understanding of the effects of deeply rooted factors on economic development and the composition of human capital across the globe

poor institutions rich mines resource curse in the origins of the sicilian mafia with weak law enforcement institutions a positive shock to the value of natural resources may increase demand for private protection and opportunities for rent appropriation through extortion favouring the emergence of mafia type organisations we test this hypothesis by investigating the emergence of the mafia in twentieth century sicily where a severe lack of state property rights enforcement coincided with a steep rise in international demand for sulphur sicily s most valuable export commodity using historical data on the early incidence of mafia activity and on the distribution of sulphur reserves we document that the mafia was more present in municipalities with greater sulphur availability

on the number and size of nations this paper studies the equilibrium determination of the number of countries in different political regimes and in different economic environments with more or less economic integration we focus on the trade off between the benefits of large jurisdictions and the costs of heterogeneity of large and diverse populations our model implies that i democratization leads to secessions ii in equilibrium one generally observes an inefficiently large number of countries iii the equilibrium number of countries is increasing in the amount of economic integration

self reinforcing agglomerations an empirical industry study we test for the existence of endogenous agglomeration forces using structural econometric models after showing generally how to establish the existence of agglomeration forces empirically we undertake an industry study of the maritime industry in norway the results suggest that there are significant economies of scale in the maritime industry these economies of scale are mainly found in sub groups of a set of nine maritime industries this indicates that the maritime industry consists of two self reinforcing agglomerations but that there are few mechanisms actually keeping the two together jel classification c33 d24 o47 r11 r12

an econometric study of tourism demand the aids model of us and european tourism in mediterranean countries the almost ideal demand system aids model was used to estimate tourism expenditure allocation by us and west european countries among a range of mediterranean destinations the approach has the advantage of an explicit basis in consumer expenditure theory and by modelling the changes in the budget shares of expenditure among destinations provides new information relative to that provided by the traditional single equation approach the estimated model was econometrically satisfactory although symmetry and homogeneity were rejected in line with the findings of past studies of consumer demand the expenditure elasticities demonstrated considerable differences in tourism demand preferences between origin countries and between traditional and newly developing destinations the own and cross price elasticities indicated the importance of effective prices in determining the allocation of expenditure among destinations

competitiveness of international tourism in taiwan us versus japanese visitors this paper intends to identify the factors determining the relative competitiveness of taiwan s international tourism among a group of seven east asian countries using data on visitors from the usa and japan the major message which emerged from this study is that there are sharp differences between factors affecting us visitors and japanese visitors specifically we found 1 the decline of taiwan s market share in japan has been mainly due to appreciation of nt dollars and changing preferences whereas they are not crucial factors in the us market 2 qualitative supply side factors indeed could have decisive influences on the market share however their effect is again origin dependent the open door policy of china is the only important determinant of taiwan s competitiveness in the us market while it has no impact on the japanese visitors

skill transferability migration and development evidence from population resettlement in indonesia we use a natural experiment in indonesia to provide causal evidence on the role of location specific human capital and skill transferability in shaping the spatial distribution of productivity from 1979 1988 the transmigration program relocated two million migrants from rural java and bali to new rural settlements in the outer islands villages assigned migrants from regions with more similar agroclimatic endowments exhibit higher rice productivity and nighttime light intensity one to two decades later we find some evidence of migrants adaptation to agroclimatic change overall our results suggest that regional productivity differences may overstate the potential gains from migration

culture ethnicity and diversity we investigate the empirical relationship between ethnicity and culture defined as a vector of traits reflecting norms attitudes and preferences using surveys of individual values in 76 countries we find that ethnic identity is a significant predictor of cultural values yet that within group variation in culture trumps between group variation thus in contrast to a commonly held view ethnic and cultural diversity are unrelated we explore the correlates of cultural diversity and of the overlap between culture and ethnicity finding that the level of economic development is positively associated with cultural diversity and negatively associated with the overlap between culture and ethnicity finally although only a small portion of a country s overall cultural heterogeneity occurs between groups this does not imply that cultural differences between groups are irrelevant indeed we find that civil conflict becomes more likely when there is greater overlap between ethnicity and culture