dynamics of energy related co2 emissions in china during 1980 to 2002 the relative importance of energy supply side and demand side effects abstract based on a newly developed model that integrates energy production transformation and consumption processes this paper compares the relative importance of some traditionally recognized factors operating on the energy demand side with a body of newly defined factors on the supply side in terms of their contribution to trends in china s co2 emissions related to the total primary energy supply c tpes before 1996 changes in china s c tpes were mainly driven by changes on the energy demand side factors operating on the energy supply side played trivial roles during the period 1996 2000 however increasing demand side effects declined dramatically and at the same time decreasing effects from supply side expanded significantly such changes resulted directly in a decline in the c tpes the decreasing effects from international trade as well as statistical imbalances between supply and demand reinforced the declining trend the shrinkage of demand side effects mainly arose from the slowdown of economic growth and speed of decrease in energy intensity the expansion of supply side effects was principally attributed to the speed of decrease in gross unit consumption in transformation sectors especially in electricity sector therefore the acceleration of efficiency improvements in end use and transformation sectors accounted for the decline in the c tpes over the period 1996 2000

governance and agricultural productivity a cross national analysis abstract in this study we examine the relationship between governance and agricultural performance by employing the world bank s aggregate governance indicators based on a cross country panel sample two methods are employed to test the hypothesis that better governance fosters agricultural productivity the empirical results of both methods support the hypothesis as for the first method the estimation results of the widely used inter country aggregate agricultural production function show that a country with better governance can produce more agricultural outputs given the same amounts of agricultural inputs the same education level and the same climate condition as for the second method the empirical results of a structural equation model reveal that given the same amounts of agricultural capital stock and land an agricultural worker in a country with better governance produces more better governance can indirectly improve agricultural productivity by driving agricultural capital accumulation our empirical work lends support to the claim of hayami and ruttan hayami y ruttan v 1985 agricultural development an international perspective john hopkins university press baltimore that governance is a basic factor explaining the poor economic performance of many developing countries in order to improve the agricultural performance of many developing countries apart from physical and education investments more emphasis should be placed on improving the governance infrastructure of these countries

institutions and the convergence hypothesis the cross national evidence delong and others have shown that cross country convergence in per capita incomes is limited to samples of currently industrialized nations or universal literacy nations in particular income dispersion has failed to decline in groups of ex ante rich nations this study finds strong convergence in per capita incomes among nations with institutions namely secure property rights conducive to saving investing and producing incomes are shown to converge even within ex ante rich samples when measures of institutional quality are held constant

corruption s direct effects on per capita income growth a meta analysis corruption is a symptom of weak institutional quality and could have potentially adverse effects on economic growth however heterogeneity in reported findings makes it difficult to synthesize the evidence base with a view to test competing hypotheses and or support evidence based policy and practice to address this issue we have extracted 327 estimates of corruption s direct effect on per capita gdp growth from 29 primary studies following a peer reviewed and pre published systematic review protocol precision effect and funnel asymmetry tests indicate that corruption has a negative effect on per capita gdp growth after controlling for publication selection bias and within study dependence however multivariate meta regression analysis results indicate that the overall effect is not robust to inclusion of moderating variables through a general to specific procedure for model specification we report that the marginal effect of corruption on per capita gdp growth is more adverse when the primary study estimates relate to long run growth are based on low income country data only and extracted from journal papers the effect is less adverse in studies that use the international country risk guide corruption perceptions index and in those reporting estimates from two stage least squares estimations

why don t poor countries catch up a cross national test of an institutional explanation early neoclassical analyses predicted that poor countries would grow faster than wealthy countries because of technological advances and diminishing returns to capital in the latter the reverse has occurred poor countries are falling back rather than catching up we suggest here that deficient institutions underlie this divergence employing various indicators of institutional quality including the rule of law the pervasiveness of corruption and the risk of expropriation and contract repudiation we show that the ability of poor countries to catch up is determined in large part by the institutional environment in which economic activity in these countries takes place jel o00 o10

determinants of privatization prices generating government revenue is a common objective in privatization this paper asks what determines privatization prices using firm level data for all 236 mexican companies privatized between 1983 and 1992 there are three main reasons why net prices auction prices net of the cost of prior restructuring measures are low averaging 54 cents per dollar of assets first privatization prices are very sensitive to the level of competition in the auction and restrictions often limited participation second the privatization process took too long and lengthier privatizations are associated with lower premiums third firm prior restructuring measures absorbed an average of 33 percent of the auction price most restructuring measures do not increase price and delay privatization further net prices would have increased by 71 cents per dollar of assets if the government had emphasized speed succeeding in divesting assets in one year less than the average and firing the ceo were the only restructuring step taken

industry migration and growth in the south for at least the last two decades the south and southwest have been the fastest growing regions in the united states during this period we have witnessed considerable shifts in the location of economic activity and overall the movement has been decidedly toward the south since the early sixties when this southern migration began to accelerate an increasing amount of public attention has been directed to this topic so much so that it is now popularly referred to as the sunbelt phenomenon numerous explanations have been advanced to account for this rapid growth in the south but three explanations have persistently evoked an impressive level of debate first many have argued that a significant portion of this regional redistribution can be attributed to differentials in state and local taxing policies in particular the state corporate income tax these rates vary considerably across states but even more important is the observation that there have been significant changes in the structure of corporate taxes over the last few decades beginning in the early 1950s the relative tax rate for several southern states particularly those in the east south central and west south central divisions began to decline sharply on the other hand relative tax rates for three divisions new england the east north central and the midatlantic rose in the early sixties by 1970 the relative tax rate ranged from 0 60 in the west south central down from 1 20 in 1950 to 1 37 in the mid atlantic up from 1 15 in 1950 notwithstanding these stylized facts the consensus from previous empirical work on industry location suggests that state taxes have not influenced the direction or magnitude of industry migration however there are reasons to believe that acceptance of this conclusion may be premature for example in the early body of work results were based on simple correlations of tax levels and changes in either value added or employment 2 more recent attempts to empirically model corporate tax effects have arrived at somewhat ambiguous results carlton 1977 examining three 4 digit industries found that corporate tax differentials failed to explain any of the variation in new births of firms across smsas hodge 1979 while confirming carlton s results for the same industries discovered that taxes have significantly affected regional investment patterns in another industry not covered in carlton s study 3 why taxes mattered in one industry and not in the other three remained a matter of ad hoc speculation a second explanation alleges that states in the south have begun to exhibit a more favorable business climate although it is difficult to measure directly a state s business climate one important manifestation of that climate is its position with respect to the division of power between union and management in the collective bargaining process legal obstacles to union organization and bargaining power will be viewed by firms as a positive signal of a pro business environment the creation of legislative obstareceived for publication october 29 1981 revision accepted for publication april 16 1982 miami university the author is especially indebted to michael ward at the rand corporation for numerouls helpful discussions throughout the preparation of this study also the author benefited from the advice and comments of john antel robert cotterman lee lillard john lunn william j moore james smith finis welch and two referees of this review financial suppoi t was provided by the foundation for research in economics and education at ucla and the university of british columbia humanities and social sciences committee i the relative tax is defined as a state s tax rate divided by the average for all states as in most economic discussions it is relative price that matters 2 for a review of earlier work see due 1961 some of the studies reviewed include bloom 1955 campbell 1958 floyd 1952 and larson 1957 see also garwood 1952 3 most of the other empirical work focused exclusively on intt urban location decisions and hence had no reason to examine state corporate taxes however they found local tax differentials inter zonal were unimportant in determining intra urban movement for example see moses and williamson 1967 and schmenner 1978

a new bankruptcy procedure that uses multiple auctions abstract we propose a new bankruptcy procedure that makes use of multiple auctions the procedure is designed to work even when capital markets do not function well for example in developing economies or in economies in transition although it can be used in all economies

the lagged impact of state and local taxes on economic activity and political behavior politicians are frequently characterized as making fiscal decisions based on a shorter time horizon than is required for full taxpayer adjustment thus generating near term benefits and relatively high tax rates this argument requires a negative impact of taxes on economic activity distributed over a relatively long time period considerable empirical evidence suggests that state and local taxes do not significantly impact the geographic distribution of economic activity this analysis however finds a significant negative distributed lag impact of such taxes on capital formation the approach emphasizes interstate tax competition in formulating the cross section time series estimating equation

corruption fertility and human capital abstract we build an overlapping generations model in which reproductive households face a child quantity child quality trade off and bureaucrats are delegated with the task of delivering public services that support the accumulation of human capital by integrating the theoretical analyses of endogenous growth corruption and fertility choices we show that the negative relation between fertility and economic development may also be affected by differences in the magnitude of bureaucratic corruption

the incidence and persistence of corruption in economic development abstract economic development and bureaucratic corruption are determined jointly in a dynamic general equilibrium model of growth bribery and tax evasion corruption arises from the incentives of public and private agents to conspire in the concealment of information from the government these incentives depend on aggregate economic activity which in turn depends on the incidence of corruption the model produces multiple development regimes transition between which may or may not occur in accordance with recent empirical evidence the relationship between corruption and development is predicted to be negative

implicit taxes collected by state liquor monopolies state monopolization or taxation aresupposedly justified because of negativeexternalities from alcohol consumption butrecent research questions the efficacy ofsuch policies suggesting that their actualgoals may be revenue generation consideration of this hypothesis isfacilitated by estimates of the implicittaxes charged in monopoly states whichgenerally are substantially higher thantaxes in non monopoly states evidencethat monopolization and high taxes do notaffect the level of externalities is alsoexplained by adjustments that rationalindividuals make to avoid the consequencesof such policies thus providing furthersupport for the revenue maximizationhypothesis

impacts of urbanization on renewable energy consumption in china abstract in this paper we used the logarithmic mean divisia index method to investigate the impact of urbanization on renewable energy consumption growth recg the growth in renewable energy consumption is attributed to the urbanization effect energy mix effect energy intensity effect economic effect and population effect recg can be roughly divided into the slow growth stage the fluctuant growth stage and the accelerated growth stage the results showed that the energy mix effect economic effect and population effect positively affected recg however a significantly negative relationship was found between energy intensity and recg furthermore the contribution of urbanization differed in recg stages and urbanization contributed more to the total energy consumption growth than to recg this study would thus provide policymakers with insights about the link between urbanization and renewable energy consumption

using options to divide value in corporate bankruptcy abstract this paper revisits the proposal to use options in corporate bankruptcy that was put forward in bebchuk 1988 according to the proposed procedure corporate bankruptcy should be implemented through the distribution to participants of appropriately designed options the paper starts by discussing the goals that should guide the design of bankruptcy procedures the paper then explains how the options procedure can improve both ex post efficiency and ex ante efficiency the paper offers a refined version of the procedure and it also responds to questions that have been raised regarding the execution and desirability of the procedure the paper concludes by explaining the relationship between the options approach to corporate bankruptcy and the black scholes characterization of all corporate securities as options

effects of urbanisation on energy consumption in china as a key issue in china s economic development urbanisation creates increasing pressure on energy supply and the natural environment thus a better understanding of the relationship between urbanisation and energy consumption is necessary for chinese decision makers at various levels to address energy security and sustainable economic and social development this paper empirically investigates the effects of china s urbanisation on residential energy consumption rec and production energy consumption pec through a time series analysis the results show that compared with rural areas urbanisation slows per capita rec growth because of the economy of scale and technological advantages associated with urbanisation but has greater promotional effects on the growth of rec and the improvement of rec structure the economic growth caused by urbanisation most significantly contributes to an increase in pec whereas technological advancement was found to reduce the scale of pec except from 2001 to 2005 finally the structural effect of the energy supply increased rather than decreased china s pec and the effect of industrial structure adjustment on pec was found to be insignificant

electricity intensities of the oecd and south africa a comparison abstract this paper investigates the relationship between south africa s total electricity intensity and that of the oecd members a very important trade block these results will assist in ascertaining possible scope for improvement if such exists this is necessary as electricity is an essential input for production and hence it affects the competitiveness of the country calculating the electricity intensities defined as the ratio of electricity consumption to total output we found that south africa s electricity intensity has more than doubled between 1990 and 2007 all the oecd members excluding iceland weighted growth in electricity intensity was lower than that of south africa by a considerable margin the sectoral analysis showed that the majority of the south african sectors are more electricity intensive to improve its industrial competitiveness and as an additional benefit contribute towards achieving its stated commitments towards reduction of greenhouse gas emissions south africa will have to improve its total and sectoral electricity efficiency levels that not only were higher but also increasing at an alarming rate

democrats republicans and taxes evidence that political parties matter i estimate the influence of political parties on state tax burdens over a forty year period 1960 2000 holding constant a large number of state and voter characteristic variables i find that i tax burdens are higher when democrats control the state legislature compared to when republicans are in control ii the political party of the governor has little effect after controlling for partisan influences in the state legislature i explain how both findings are consistent with median voter theory my results suggest that after five years of democratic control of the legislature state government would be approximately 3 to 5 percent larger than if republicans controlled the legislature during that same period with the better specifications producing estimates in the higher end of this range

contributions of oliver hart and bengt holmstrom to contract theory oliver hart and bengt holmstrom were awarded the 2016 sveriges riksbank prize in economic sciences in memory of alfred nobel for their fundamental contributions to contract theory this article offers a short summary and discussion of their path breaking work

the politics of legal reform as a result of the emerging market crises of the last decade and a large body of academic research on the influence of investor protection in the development of capital markets and economic growth there is a growing consensus that reforming the legal infrastructure supporting business should be an important component of reforms in many developing countries but the consensus is unwieldy as there are still many forces against reform and little agreement about what constitutes feasible legal reforms this paper has two parts in the first we identify the forces for and against legal reform and review the role these forces play in episodes of reform in the second we seek to further our understanding of what constitutes good laws and regulatory mechanisms and more importantly how to make them enforceable in different countries if legal reform is to succeed the commonly advocated principles of corporate governance in the international community must be brought down to the local political and judicial realities translating international corporate governance initiatives into clear and enforceable rights for creditors and shareholders that incorporate these constraints will be difficult but necessary bankruptcy law and corporate law reform need to be politically feasible and enforceable legal reforms should be complemented with carefully drafted judicial reforms as well as market based mechanisms that foster a culture of corporate governance

swedish co2 emissions 1993 2006 an application of decomposition analysis and some methodological insights this study undertakes a decomposition analysis to identify the drivers of carbon dioxide emissions change in the swedish business and industry sectors 1993 2006 on aggregate energy intensity decreased but this does not seem to have been very important for reducing emissions rather fuel substitution seems to have been more important which is in line with findings from the decomposition literature on sweden however at the sectoral level we find no clear pattern of the effect of fuel substitution and energy intensity on emissions we also draw some methodological conclusions decomposition analysis should be undertaken at the most disaggregate level possible assessing decomposition results by summing results over several time periods leads to biased results and decomposition analysis should not be based only on some initial and final years of a long time period furthermore we address the problem of double counting energy flows in decomposition analysis of aggregate effects when the energy sector is included and point out potential problems related to output measured in monetary terms

currency and financial crises in turkey 2000 2001 bad fundamentals or bad luck this paper attempts to explore the underlying causes of twin crises experienced by turkey in november 2000 and february 2001 we study an extensive set of leading indicators of crises that are drawn from the existing literature our results identify three sets of vulnerabilities in the turkish economy in triggering the financial crisis and bringing about the collapse of the turkish lira these are first the weak external position caused by excessive debt burden combined with the loss of competitiveness second the weak fiscal position resulting from the record levels of interest payments on domestic borrowing and most importantly third weaknesses in the financial and banking sector given these observations we argue that the success of financial sector reform is instrumental not only for putting the economy on a sustainable recovery path but also for reducing the likelihood of similar crises in the future the general lesson to be drawn from this experience is that a sound financial system is a pre condition for the successful operation of a fixed exchange rate regime

regional and sectoral attribution to percentage changes in the european divisia carbonization index abstract concerns on rising concentrations of co2 in the atmosphere and global warming have increased in recent years numerous environmental studies analyze the trends in co2 emissions and their main drivers in this paper we focus on the dynamics of the carbonization effect as a driving force for co2 emissions in the european union eu by implementing the sato vartia logarithmic mean divisia index method the trend of european emissions in the 2000 2010 period is factorized by both sector and country the analysis stresses the relevance of the carbonization and intensity effects in order to reduce emissions then based on so called attribution analysis we present a new theoretical framework that enables the attribution of both economic sector and individual eu member state to percentage changes in the carbonization index results show strong concentration of this reducing influence in some big economies in fact germany the united kingdom france and italy have contributed by more than 50 industry emerges as the most influential sector contributing to offset any improvement in the carbonization index our findings suggest strategies aiming at encouraging innovation technical change research on higher quality energies fuel substitution and installation of abatement technologies particularly in the industrial sector of large economies

the modest environmental relief resulting from the transition to the service economy a service transition is supposed to lead to the decline of energy intensity energy gdp we argue that this interpretation is overly optimistic because the shift to a service economy is somewhat of an illusion in terms of real production several recent studies of structural effects on energy intensity have made the error of using sector shares in current prices combined with gdp in constant prices which is inconsistent and ignores the different behaviour of prices across sectors we use the more correct method of sector shares in constant prices and make an attempt to single out the effect from the real service transition by using two complementary methods shift share analyses in current and constant prices and logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi for 10 developed and 3 emerging economies a service transition is rather modest in real terms the major driver of the decline in energy intensity rests within the manufacturing sector meanwhile the transition to a service sector had a small downward impact on energy intensity in 7 of the developed countries and no impact in the others for emerging economies like brazil mexico and india it is the residential sector that drives energy intensity down because of the declining share of this sector as the formal economy grows and as a consequence of switching to more efficient fuels less

public sector employee voter participation and salaries the hypothesis advanced by downs 1957 that rational utility maximizing citizens would calculate the benefits and costs of voting in deciding whether to vote often has been employed to argue that voter participation rates among government employees should exceed that of comparable private sector individuals the basic rationale for that prediction was laid out by downs 1957 254 who argued that those who stand the most to gain are the men who earn their incomes there higher voter participation rates for government employees coupled with an implied preference for the expansion of the public sector has also played a role in efforts to explain the growth of government borcherding bush and spann 1977 and bush and denzau 1977 in addition to benefiting from the supply of public goods and services as do all voters government employees are seen as benefiting from the expansion of government through an increase in their salaries in this paper the issue of voter participation rates for government employees is reexamined current population survey cps data tapes containing information on individual voter behavior for the 1984 and 1986 national elections are used to estimate a qualitative choice model 1 consistent with previous findings the results presented indicate that government employees as a group are more likely to vote than are private sector workers with similar socioeconomic and demographic characteristics wolfinger and rosenstone 1980 unlike previous studies however we distinguish between federal and state and local employees this distinction is important building on the downsian hypothesis that the cost and benefits of voting matter the arguments offered in the following section lead to the prediction that the probability of voting should be lower for federal employees than for state and local the empirical

attribution of changes in divisia real energy intensity index an extension to index decomposition analysis abstract in this paper we extend the methodology of index decomposition analysis ida in energy studies by quantifying the contribution of individual attributes to the percent change of factors such as the real energy intensity index and structural change index we apply the proposed method to the real energy intensity index in the multiplicative logarithmic mean divisia index m lmdi approach a major ida technique since the m lmdi is based on geometric mean type indices and chain computation we need some appropriate method to cope with the difficulties that arise we present a numerical illustration of the proposed method using the energy consumption and real value added data of the us manufacturing industry and compare the results obtained by the fisher real energy intensity index

estimating property tax base elasticity over time evidence on the revenue maximizing politician the laffer curve analysis suggests a possible policy conflict between short run revenue maximization and long run fiscal health this paper estimates short run and long run property tax base elasticity in order to test whether such a conflict exists for the property tax in central cities a stock adjustment model is used and separate time series estimates for four new york state central cities lend empirical support to such a conflict the results show that while disincentive effects associated with property tax rate increases are not strong enough to reduce proeprty tax revenue in the short run they are substantial enough to reduce long run revenue in all but one city the paper also tests for asymmetric response to property tax rate changes and finds significant results for only one city

decomposition of aggregate energy intensity changes in two measures ratio and difference decomposition analysis has been popular in energy demand analysis and has been found useful in policy related studies past studies include decomposition of changes of an aggregate indicator measured in terms of either ratios or differences into several pre defined contributing factors aggregate indicators that are often studied include total national energy demand energy demand in specific consuming sectors aggregate energy intensity and energy related carbon dioxide emissions however the possible linkages between the ratio measure and the difference measure including their decomposition results have seldom been analysed this paper examines this issue using the divisia decomposition technique and a unique pair of decomposition formulae numerical examples based on singapore and taiwan industrial electricity demand data are presented

institutional framework and economic development international evidence this paper examines the effect of quality of the institutional framework on economic development our empirical results support the hypothesis that good institutions improve efficiency and accelerate growth the positive effect of institutional quality is more pronounced with mutually reinforcing support of economic freedom our results also indicate that good institutions help developing countries grow faster to achieve conditional convergence we infer from the results that economic development requires not only physical and human capital formation but also freedom to choose and institutional support

consistent multi level energy efficiency indicators and their policy implications in order to cope with the global warming issue most of the asia pacific economic cooperation apec economies have made energy conservation policy a top priority in terms of their energy policies the energy efficiency indicators included in the present paper focus on the micro foundation aspects there are basically two types of energy efficiency indicators namely the economic thermodynamic energy efficiency indicators that use real gdp as the denominator and the physical thermodynamic energy efficiency indicators that are based on the output volume index while the common definitions and consistent methodology used in the present paper fulfill the iea pyramid eei concept the new methodology in this paper compares the decomposition effects between upstream and downstream industries when aggregating efficiency changes these decomposition effects can thereby provide valuable explanations for the energy conservation policy needed by energy policy and government administrators

decomposition of carbon intensity in electricity production technological innovation and structural adjustment in china s power sector abstract china s power generation accounted for 24 of the world s total output ranking first in 2015 as a suitable performance indicator carbon intensity of electricity reflects a variation in the average level of carbon emissions per unit of electricity generated as the largest carbon emitter among various industries power sector is in duty bound to reduce carbon emissions and achieve sustainable development great progress has been made in china s power sector which is reflected by the effects of technological innovation and structural adjustment with logarithm transformation and integral transformation three dimensional decomposition model is proposed to quantitatively measure the changed carbon intensity of electricity due to technological innovation and structural adjustment in the context of three dimensional model the variation of carbon intensity can be decomposed into absolute changes and or relative changes furthermore accumulative decomposition results are obtained by chain linked calculation rules finally the proposed models are implemented in china s power industry to reveal its historical progress during 1980 2014 some important conclusions are also found based on the decomposition results

bankruptcy law in latin america past and future this paper studies bankruptcy law in latin america focusing on the brazilian reform we start with a review of the international literature on this subject next we examine the economic incentives associated with several aspects of bankruptcy laws and insolvency procedures in general as well as the trade offs involved we follow this theoretical discussion with an empirical evaluation of the quality of current insolvency procedures in latin america we find that the region is governed by a set of laws that is inefficient even when compared with regions of lower per capita income this inefficiency has severe consequences for credit markets and the cost of capital next we focus on the recent brazilian bankruptcy reform analyzing its main components and possible effects the appendix describes difficulties of the reform process in brazil and lessons other latin american countries can learn from it

lmdi decomposition approach a guide for implementation since it was first used by researchers to analyze industrial electricity consumption in the early 1980s index decomposition analysis ida has been widely adopted in energy and emission studies lately its use as the analytical component of accounting frameworks for tracking economy wide energy efficiency trends has attracted considerable attention and interest among policy makers the last comprehensive literature review of ida was reported in 2000 which is some years back after giving an update and presenting the key trends in the last 15 years this study focuses on the implementation issues of the logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi decomposition methods in view of their dominance in ida in recent years eight lmdi models are presented and their origin decomposition formulae and strengths and weaknesses are summarized guidelines on the choice among these models are provided to assist users in implementation

the effect of state and local taxes on economic development a meta analysis economists and policy makers have long questioned the effect of state and local taxes on economic development according to schmenner 55 economists have long argued that taxes had little impact on business location decisions while development practitioners and elected officials ignored this advice and aggressively pursued development by using tax incentives more recent research using improved data and methodologies has begun to show that taxes can make a difference and the emerging consensus among economists now says that taxes do matter this changing view among researchers is perhaps best exemplified in a 1991 study by timothy j bartik 2 bartik examined 84 econometric studies completed since 1979 which assess the impact of state and local taxes on economic growth in the u s he concluded that the long run elasticity of business activity with respect to state and local taxes was between 10 and 60 for studies focusing on intermetropolitan or interstate business economic activity and between 1 0 and 3 0 for intrametropolitan areas however bartik s study did not control for a variety of study characteristics that may have influenced the measured elasticity this study builds upon bartik s analysis by performing a meta analysis of the studies bartik reviewed meta analysis is a method for statistically analyzing results across empirical studies though it has been little used by economists researchers in psychology education and health sciences have used meta analysis extensively this study uses a meta analytic technique suggested by stanley and jarrell 57 to analyze the studies reviewed by bartik the technique yields increased precision for our understanding of the relationship between state and local taxes and economic development the objective of this study is two fold first to derive a more precise estimate of the tax elasticity and second to determine how the inclusion and omission of key variables in the estimated equations influences the elasticity estimates

international business responses to institutional voids for nearly two decades scholars in international business and management have explored the implications of institutional voids for firm strategy and structure although institutional voids offer both opportunities and challenges they have largely been associated with firms efforts to avoid or mitigate institutional deficiencies and reduce the transaction costs associated with operating in settings subject to those institutional shortcomings the goal of this special issue is to advance scholarship on this topic by a exploring institutional voids that are new to the literature b providing a deeper assessment of the different ways in which firms respond to these voids and c utilizing diverse disciplines and theoretical approaches to do so in this introduction we first review and synthesize extant research on institutional voids tracking the evolution of institutional void scholarship since the inception of the concept khanna palepu journal of economic literature 45 2 331 372 1997 and providing our perspective on its contributions and limitations we then summarize the contributions of the articles included in this special issue in addition to identifying an array of institutional voids economic and social the articles highlight four different strategies for responding to them internalization substitution borrowing and signaling drawing on these we develop new insights on the implications of institutional voids for firm behavior we conclude with suggestions for future research

why not africa growth and welfare effects of secure property rights this paper presents the long run equilibrium and developmentdynamics in the neoclassical growth model and a simple modelof endogenous growth when property rights are absent theresults are compared to the outcome in a corresponding modelwith secure property rights the main findings are that thereexists a considerable gain in level and growth of consumptionfrom establishing secure property rights that economicperformance without property rights worsens with an increasingnumber of competing social groups and that the existence orabsence of property rights explains conditional convergence

towards a sustainable growth in latin america a multiregional spatial decomposition analysis of the driving forces behind co2 emissions changes abstract this paper aims to understand the driving forces behind the growth of co2 emissions in latin america as a region by groups of countries according to their behaviour in terms of growth of income and co2 emissions per capita and by countries during 1990 2013 the main drivers for the latin america region are the activity and the population effects followed by the fossil fuel and the carbonisation effects while the intensity effect is revealed as the only inhibitor the lessons from latin america s group of countries are the following first the necessary decoupling between the growth of co2 emissions and the economic activity has not taken place the population growth also being an important driver effect second the groups of countries with the highest co2 emissions growth show the highest population and fossil fuel effects this latter confirms the scant efforts made to reduce the weight of fossil fuels in the total primary energy supply third the energy intensity has become the most important inhibitor of co2 emissions for those countries that are not able to substitute fossil fuels so easily finally the desirable increase of less pollutant fossil fuels or even the increase of renewable energies has not yet been achieved