世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

Countries rich in natural resources constitute both growth losers and growth winners. We claim that the main reason for these diverging experiences is differences in the quality of institutions. More natural resources push aggregate income down, when institutions are grabber friendly, while more resources raise income, when institutions are producer friendly. We test this theory building on Sachs and Warner's influential works on the resource curse. Our main hypothesis – that institutions are decisive for the resource curse – is confirmed. Our results contrast the claims of Sachs and Warner that institutions do not play a role.

/pdf/institutions-and-the-resource-curse-1ui77n2ijh.pdf

Institutions and the Resource Curse

Are natural resources a “curse” or a “blessing”? The empirical evidence suggests either outcome is possible. The paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources. These include that a resource bonanza induces appreciation of the real exchange rate, deindustrialization and bad growth prospects, and that these adverse effects are more severe in volatile countries with bad institutions and lack of rule of law, corruption, presidential democracies, and underdeveloped financial systems. Another hypothesis is that a resource boom reinforces rent grabbing and civil conflict especially if institutions are bad, induces corruption especially in non-democratic countries, and keeps in place bad policies. Finally, resource rich developing economies seem unable to successfully convert their depleting exhaustible resources into other productive assets. The survey also offers some welfare-based fiscal rules for harnessing resource windfalls in developed and developing economies.

Natural Resources: Curse or Blessing?

http://feem-web.it/ess/ess07/files/bulte6_ln.pdf

Political foundations of the resource curse

This thesis presents three self-contained essays focusing on empirical questions in growth and development economics. Each article addresses specific questions on why countries perform differently. In particular, I analyse the effect of democracy on economic development, the relationship between natural resources and growth and the efficiency of foreign development assistance.In the first essay, Democracy, Consolidation and Growth, I analyse the effect of democracy on economic growth. In this context, I argue that an important aspect to consider is how consolidated political systems are. Put simply, I find that it is not only a question of how democratic countries are, but also how long they have been democratic. In other words, economic performance tends to improve with the duration of uninterrupted democracy. The performance of autocracies, on the other hand, tends to deteriorate over time. However, for newly established political systems, there seems to be a cost of being democratic. This implies that democracies only bear their fruit after some time. The analysis has important policy implications: To overcome initial straits, international assistance focused on democratic consolidation may be important, and a very good investment in fostering long-run development.The second essay, Resource Curse or not: A Question of Appropriability (together with Anne Boschini and Jesper Roine), is concerned with the relation between natural resources and economic development. For most laymen, as well as for most economists, it would seem reasonable that countries richly endowed in natural resources also benefit from this wealth. However, a large literature has found a systematic negative effect of natural resource abundance on economic growth. We suggest that this so-called resource curse is not determined by resource endowments alone, but rather by the interaction between the type of resources a country possesses, and the quality of institutions in the country. This combination of factors determines what we call the appropriability of a resource. The concept of appropriability captures the likelihood of natural resources leading to rentseeking, corruption or conflicts which, in turn, will harm economic development. Our results suggest that, if institutions are good enough, the curse may be turned into a blessing. This may explain why some countries, such as Norway and Botswana, tend to benefit from their resources, while others, such as Angola and Sierra Leone, do not.The third and final essay of this thesis, Foreign Sectoral Aid Fungibility, Growth and Poverty Reduction, is a contribution to the aid-efficiency literature, which is concerned with the question of whether aid helps or hinders economic development. Foreign development assistance is often targeted on specific public expenditure sectors. If this aid is not used in the sector for which it was granted (e.g. health, education) it is said to be fungible, and donors may end up financing something completely different from what they intended (e.g. military expenditures). The major concern about sectoral fungibility is that the alternative use of aid may be less productive or less socially useful. However, measuring fungibility is not sufficient to determine whether foreign sectoral aid fungibility is actually harmful. What is important is how the funds treated as fungible are used. The essay starts by obtaining estimates of fungibility for 57 countries. The results suggest that sectoral aid is indeed largely treated as fungible by recipient countries. Next, to assess the economic and health effects of fungibility, these estimates are incorporated into an empirical model of aid and growth as well as into a model of aid and infant mortality. Altogether, I find no evidence of more fungible sectoral aid leading to worse performance.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/56356/1/369890000.pdf

Resource Curse or Not: A Question of Appropriability*

https://www.hhs.se/contentassets/7ebe9233ca0a4341b2728fd50fa32194/2012-the-resource-curse-and-its-potential-reversal.pdf

The Resource Curse and its Potential Reversal

In this paper, we test the argument that the sizeable reduction in aggregate aid levels in the 1990s was due to the end of the Cold War. We test two different models using a dynamic econometric specification on a panel of 17 donor countries, spanning the years 1970–97. We find aid to be positively related to military expenditures in the former Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, but not in the 1990s, suggesting that the reductions in aid disbursements are driven by the disappearance of an important motive for aid. We also study the effect on aid allocation, but here we do not find any robust effects of the end of the Cold War.

/pdf/foreign-aid-an-instrument-for-fighting-communism-4cdvascotv.pdf

Foreign aid: An instrument for fighting communism?

We model team formation as a random matching process influenced by agents’ preferences for team size and gender composition. We then test if the coauthorship pattern in articles published during 1991–2002 in three top economics journals is gender neutral, exploiting variation in female presence across subfields. Controlling for author, team, and field characteristics, we find that the gender gap in the propensity to coauthor with a woman increases in the presence of women in the subfield. We also find that women single author significantly more than men. These findings allow us to reject gender neutrality in team formation in economics.

/pdf/is-team-formation-gender-neutral-evidence-from-coauthorship-4pgfqrx38o.pdf

Is Team Formation Gender Neutral? Evidence from Coauthorship Patterns

We investigate if voluntary team formation is gender neutral. To this end, we model team formation as a random matching process influenced by the agents' preferences for team size and gender composition and derive how team formation depends on the gender ratio in the population of prospective team mates. We then test if the coauthorship pattern in articles published 1991-2002 in three top Economics journals is gender neutral, exploiting the variation in female presence across subfields of Economics. Our main finding is that gender sorting in coauthorship increases in the presence of women. In particular, we find that the gender gap in the propensity to coauthor with a woman increases in the presence of women in the subfield. We also find that women single author significantly more than men. These findings allow us to reject gender neutrality in team formation.

Anne Boschini

Papers

Resource Curse or Not: A Question of Appropriability*

The Resource Curse and its Potential Reversal

Foreign aid: An instrument for fighting communism?

Is Team Formation Gender Neutral? Evidence from Coauthorship Patterns

Is Team Formation Gender Neutral? Evidence from coauthorship patterns