世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

From Efficient Markets Theory to Behavioral Finance

For many decades Ireland's output per capita ranked about twenty-fourth among the world's industrial nations. Suddenly, in the mid-1990's Ireland started to move up, from twenty-second in 1993 to eighteenth in 1997 and an amazing ninth in 1999. The many facets of Irish success over these years, from a disproportionate representation in popular music to the largest current account surplus in the industrial world, caught the public imagination at home and abroad. This article examines the startling turnaround in Irish economic performance that began in the mid 1980's. Ireland is not alone in having experienced severe macroeconomic imbalances in the past quarter century, but their amplitude has been greater than in almost any other OECD country. The early 1980's saw the worst extremes. In 1981 inflation was 21 percent, the current account deficit was about 15 percent of GNP. and public sector borrowing was running at an even higher rate. The attempt to rein in the twin deficits caused taxation to jump by 10 percentage points of GNP in seven years, while overt unemployment soared to 16 percent of the labor force in 1986 and net emigration approached 1 percent of the population.

Catching up with the leaders: the Irish hare

The Dragon's Gift. The Real Story of China in Africa, Deborah Brautigam, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2009). xiii + 397 pp. US$29.95 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-19-955022-7. Deborah Brautigam, a well-inf...

The Dragon's Gift. The Real Story of China in Africa

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/113760/1/cesifo_wp5439.pdf

Aid on Demand: African Leaders and the Geography of China's Foreign Assistance

https://www.haverford.edu/sites/default/files/Department/Economics/Kilby-Aid-Democracy-Redux.pdf

Aid and democracy redux

The 1980s recession in the UK: A business cycle accounting perspective

This paper reviews the evidence on the relationship between openness and inflation. There is a robust negative relationship across countries, first documented by Romer (1993), between a country's openness to trade and its long-run inflation rate. However, a key part of the standard explanation for this relationship—that central banks have a smaller incentive to engineer surprise inflations in more-open economies because the Phillips curve is steeper—seems at odds with the facts. While the United States is still not a very open economy by conventional measures, there are channels through which global developments may influence the nation's inflation. We document evidence that global resource utilization may play a role in U.S. inflation and suggest avenues for future research.

Openness and inflation

[Acknowledgment]We are grateful to Christopher Kilby, Saul Lizondo, Chris Papageorgiou, the Strategy, Policy, and Review Departments' Low-Income Countries group, the Africa Department's Macro Modeling, Debt, and Growth Network, and two anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions. Kersting gratefully acknowledges financial support by the Center for Global Leadership at the Villanova School of Business.1. IntroductionEconomists still struggle to explain the large differences in output per worker across countries. The view that these differences are mostly the result of variations in investment rates has now largely been abandoned, as cross-country evidence suggests that total factor productivity (TFP) rather than capital accumulation accounts for observed per capita income differences (Hall and Jones 1999). The largely unexplained cross-country differences in TFP led to Prescott's (1998) call for a "theory of TFP." In response, barriers to innovation, imitation, and adoption (e.g., Parente and Prescott 2000) and institutions (e.g., Acemoglu and Johnson 2005) have often been offered as explanations for low TFP in poorer countries. The global crisis and the resulting uncertainty have reinforced concerns about growth prospects in many low-income countries. After a decade of almost-universally solid growth performance, the medium-term outlook for many low-income countries appears increasingly uncertain. At the same time, the growth potential in many countries with low TFP remains dim, even beyond the full conclusion of this crisis.If TFP drives growth, its determinants are the key to development prospects in low-income countries. Some country-specific direct determinants of TFP--geography, history, or institutions such as the prevalent legal system--are fixed or slow-moving, and the degree to which policy can influence these conditions is limited. Others, such as innovation or the level of financial development, can respond to both foreign and domestic forces--external shocks, globalization, or government policy. In this view, TFP is not primarily the result of the endowment of a country, but instead a direct result of purposeful actions by economic agents, and as such can be influenced by policy.Innovation activity leads to technological progress in two distinct ways. Purposeful research and development can result in the invention of completely new products and processes. This kind of innovative activity moves the global technological frontier and still mainly occurs in developed countries. However, innovation also consists of the adoption and adaptation of existing technology, which can close the gap between countries converging toward the global technological frontier and those on the leading edge, pushing the world frontier. Innovation shares a strong connection with the provision of financial services. Invention and adoption of technology are costly and risky activities, which require financing. It is therefore natural to study the impact of a country's financial development on TFP via the innovation channel.1In this article, we follow that agenda in two separate steps. (i) How do firm-specific actions--in particular, innovation--affect firm productivity? (ii) What is the role of a country's level of development (both financial and general) in facilitating higher productivity? Using firm-level data taken from the Enterprise Surveys covering over 14,000 firms in 63 countries, we first establish a connection between a firm's innovative activities and its productivity. We control for country, industry, and firm-specific factors. The countries in our data include low-, middle-, and high-income countries, while the firms span all sizes, with a focus on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME). Innovation is defined broadly as the introduction of new production processes or product lines, so that it includes the adaptation of existing technology. We find that, other things being equal, firms that have introduced a new process or product are more productive. …

Firm Productivity, innovation and Financial Development

This paper reviews the evidence on the relationship between openness and inflation. There is a robust negative relationship across countries, first documented by Romer (1993), between a country’s openness to trade and its long-run inflation rate. However, a key part of the standard explanation for this relationship - that central banks have a smaller incentive to engineer surprise inflations in more-open economies because the Phillips curve is steeper - seems at odds with the facts. While the United States is still not a very open economy by conventional measures, there are channels through which global developments may influence the nation’s inflation. We document evidence that global resource utilization may play a role in U.S. inflation and suggest avenues for future research.

Erasmus Kersting

Papers

Aid and democracy redux

The 1980s recession in the UK: A business cycle accounting perspective

Openness and inflation

Firm Productivity, innovation and Financial Development

Openness and Inflation