Developing country

About: Developing country is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 38046 publications have been published within this topic receiving 826572 citations. The topic is also known as: developing countries.

Effects of Financial Globalization on Developing Countries: Some Empirical Evidence

Abstract: The recent wave of financial globalization since the mid-1980s has been marked by a surge in capital flows among industrial countries and, more notably, between industrial and developing countries. While these capital flows have been associated with high growth rates in some developing countries, a number of countries have experienced periodic collapse in growth rates and significant financial crises over the same period, crises that have exacted a serious toll in terms of macroeconomic and social costs. As a result, an intense debate has emerged in both academic and policy circles on the effects of financial integration for developing economies. But much of the debate has been based on only casual and limited empirical evidence.

Technological Accumulation and Industrial Growth: Contrasts Between Developed and Developing Countries

Abstract: Several areas of economic analysis have given renewed attention during the 1980s to the long run importance of technological learning and technical change. These issues have become a central feature in the new trade and growth theories (e.g. Krugman, 1986; Lucas, 1988; Grossman and Helpman, 1990; Romer, 1986, 1990). They have emerged as one of the major factors explaining differences among the developed countries in growth and trade performance (e.g. Fagerberg, 1987, 1988;Cantwell, 1989), and they underlie analyses of the extent to which, as a result of differing growth paths, economies with different initial income levels have been converging or diverging over time (e.g. Abramovitz, 1986; Baumol, 1986; De Long, g 1988; Dowrick and Gemmell, 1991). This paper contributes to these areas of debate. It draws heavily on the j understanding of technological accumulation in the industrialized world in I order to illuminate the situation in contemporary developing countries. N And, since the basic processes of technological accumulation and technical | change differ fundamentally between the agricultural and industrial sectors I in low income economies, it focuses on the industrial sector. This is the sector in which, at least relative to earlier expectations, disappointment at the realized extent of'catching up' over the last four or five decades is perhaps I greatest. o Even at the beginning of that period, it was widely recognized that there ' were difficulties in transferring agricultural technologies from developed to

International Measures of Schooling Years and Schooling Quality

Abstract: This study provides an update on measures of educational attainment for a broad cross section of countries. In our previous work (Barro and Lee, 1993), we constructed estimates of educational attainment by sex for persons aged 25 and over. The values applied to 129 countries over five-year intervals from 1960 to 1985. The schooling figures indicated the fractions of the adult population for whom the highest level of attainment fell into seven standard classifications: no formal education, incomplete primary, complete primary, first cycle of secondary, second cycle of secondary, incomplete higher, and complete higher. Information by country about the typical duration of each level of schooling then allowed us to compute the number of years of attainment achieved by the average person in each country at the various levels and in total schooling. The estimation procedure began with census information on school attainment for males and females aged 25 and over. These data came from individual governments, as compiled by UNESCO and other sources. The census values provided benchmark numbers for a subset of the dates (roughly 40 percent) that we were considering. Missing cells were filled in by using school-enrollment ratios by sex at various levels of schooling. The basic idea is that the enrolled population is the flow that adds over time to the prior stock of schooling to determine the subsequent stocks. In this manner, full estimates of educational attainment were obtained at five-year intervals for most countries from the benchmark figures for one or more years and from the reasonably complete data on school-enrollment ratios. The schooling figures that we constructed have clear advantages over the educational variables that have been used in many previous cross-country investigations of the effects of schooling. These studies have typically relied on school-enrollment ratios or adult literacy rates, concepts that do not correspond to the stock of human capital that influences current decisions about fertility, health, and so on. For these reasons, the new estimates have already been used in many empirical studies.' Despite these advantages, the data assembled in our previous study had a number of shortcomings. First, the available census information motivated an initial concentration on the adult population aged 25 and over; that is, the data were most plentiful for this age group. For many developing countries, however, a large portion of the labor force is younger than 25. For that reason, the present study provides estimates of school attainment for the population aged 15 and over. Our previous fill-in procedure used the UN's readily available figures on the gross schoolenrollment ratio, the ratio of all persons enrolled in a given level of schooling to the population of the age group that national regulation or custom dictates should be enrolled at that level. For example, the total registered students in primary school are typically compared with the population aged 6-11 years. A tendency for students to repeat grades or to return after previously dropping out means that the gross ratio will overstate the accumulation of human capital. One indication of

Distance still matters. The hard reality of global expansion.

Abstract: Companies routinely overestimate the attractiveness of foreign markets. Dazzled by the sheer size of untapped markets, they lose sight of the difficulties of pioneering new, often very different territories. The problem is rooted in the analytic tools (the most prominent being country portfolio analysis, or CPA) that managers use to judge international investments. By focusing on national wealth, consumer income, and people's propensity to consume, CPA emphasizes potential sales, ignoring the costs and risks of doing business in a new market. Most of these costs and risks result from the barriers created by distance. "Distance," however, does not refer only to geography; its other dimensions can make foreign markets considerably more or less attractive. The CAGE framework of distance presented here considers four attributes: cultural distance (religious beliefs, race, social norms, and language that are different for the target country and the country of the company considering expansion); administrative or political distance (colony-colonizer links, common currency, and trade arrangements); geographic distance (the physical distance between the two countries, the size of the target country, access to waterways and the ocean, internal topography, and transportation and communications infrastructures); and economic distance (disparities in the two countries' wealth or consumer income and variations in the cost and quality of financial and other resources). This framework can help to identify the ways in which potential markets may be distant from existing ones. The article explores how (and by how much) various types of distance can affect different types of industries and shows how dramatically an explicit consideration of distance can change a company's picture of its strategic options.