世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

Output per worker varies enormously across countries. Why? On an accounting basis, our analysis shows that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker--we find a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries. At a deeper level, we document that the differences in capital accumulation, productivity, and therefore output per worker are driven by differences in institutions and government policies, which we call social infrastructure. We treat social infrastructure as endogenous, determined historically by location and other factors captured in part by language.

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Why Do Some Countries Produce so Much More Output Per Worker than Others

This paper analyzes a newly assembled data set consisting of subjective indices of corruption, the amount of red tape, the efficiency of the judicial system, and various categories of political stability for a cross section of countries. Corruption is found to lower investment, thereby lowering economic growth. The results are robust to controlling for endogeneity by using an index of ethnolinguistic fractionalization as an instrument.

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Corruption and Growth

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

Does finance affect economic growth? A number of studies have identified a positive correlation between the level of development of a country's financial sector and the rate of growth of its per capita income. As has been noted elsewhere, the observed correlation does not necessarily imply a causal relationship. This paper examines whether financial development facilitates economic growth by scrutinizing one rationale for such a relationship; that financial development reduces the costs of external finance to firms. Specifically, we ask whether industrial sectors that are relatively more in need of external finance develop disproportionately faster in countries with more developed financial markets. We find this to be true in a large sample of countries over the 1980s. We show this result is unlikely to be driven by omitted variables, outliers, or reverse causality.

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Financial Dependence and Growth

Development assistance is the combination of money, advice, and conditions from rich nations and international financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund designed to achieve economic development in poor nations. This article argues that development assistance was based on three assumptions that, with the benefit of hindsight (although a wise few also had foresight), turned out to be mistaken.

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Was Development Assistance a Mistake

A simple model shows that when an outside agent forces a reduction in a government's conventional deficit (debt accumulation), the government will respond by lowering its asset accumulation or by increasing hidden liabilities. That leaves net worth unchanged, so fiscal adjustment is an illusion. Fiscal adjustment is an illusion when it lowers the budget deficit or public debt but leaves the government's net worth unchanged, says Easterly. Conventional measures of the budget deficit largely measure the change in explicit public sector liabilities (debt). A more appropriate measure of the deficit would be the change in public sector net worth, but many criticize this concept as impossible to measure. Easterly takes a positive, rather than normative, approach to the net worth definition of fiscal balance. A simple model shows that when an outside agent forces a reduction in a government's conventional deficit (debt accumulation), the government will respond by lowering its asset accumulation or by increasing hidden liabilities. That leaves net worth unchanged, so fiscal adjustment is an illusion. He performs some simple empirical tests on the observational predictions of the model, examining a sample of countries with World Bank and International Monetary Fund adjustment programs and case studies of Maastricht Euro countries. The results confirm the model predictions: Fiscal adjustment in these countries was at least partly an illusion. This paper - a product of Macroeconomics and Growth, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to study the political economy of policymaking. The author may be contacted at weasterly@worldbank.org.

When is Fiscal Adjustment an Illusion

https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/39139/1/MPRA_paper_39139.pdf

Rhetoric versus Reality: The Best and Worst of Aid Agency Practices

Although fiscal adjustment was urged on developing countries during the 1980s to lead them out of economic malaise, considerable uncertainty remains about the relations between fiscal policy and macroeconomic performance. To illustrate how financial markets, private spending, and the external sector react to fiscal policies, the behavior of holdings of money and public debt, private consumption and investment, the trade balance, and the real exchange rate is modeled for a sample of ten developing countries. The studies find strong evidence that over the medium term, money financing of the deficit leads to higher inflation, while debt financing leads to higher real interest rates or increased repression of financial markets, with the fiscal gains coming at increasingly unfavorable terms. Consumers respond differently to conventional taxes, unconventional taxes, and debt financing, in ways that make fiscal adjustment the most effective means of increasing national saving. Private investment-but not private consumption- is sensitive to the real interest rate, which rises under domestic borrowing to finance the deficit. Contrary to the popular presumption, in some countries private investment increases when public investment decreases. There is strong evidence that fiscal deficits spill over into external deficits, leading to appreciation of the real exchange rate. Fiscal deficits and growth are self-reinforcing; good fiscal management Fiscal deficits and growth are self-reinforcing; good fiscal management preserves access to foreign lending and avoids the crowding out of private investment, while growth stabilizes the budget and improves the fiscal position. The virtuous circle of growth and good fiscal management is one of the strongest arguments for a policy of low and stable fiscal deficits.

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Fiscal deficits and macroeconomic performance in developing countries

The record of the aid agencies over time seems to indicate weak evidence of progress in response to learning from experience, new knowledge, or changes in political climate. The few positive results are an increased sensitivity to per capita income of the recipient (although it happened long ago), a decline in the share of food aid, and a decline in aid tying. Most of the other evidence – increasing donor fragmentation, unchanged emphasis on technical assistance, little or no sign of increased selectivity with respect to policies and institutions, the adjustment lending-debt relief imbroglio – suggests an unchanged status quo, lack of response to new knowledge, and repetition of past mistakes.

— William Easterly

William Easterly

Papers

Was Development Assistance a Mistake

When is Fiscal Adjustment an Illusion

Rhetoric versus Reality: The Best and Worst of Aid Agency Practices

Fiscal deficits and macroeconomic performance in developing countries

Are aid agencies improving