Purchasing power

About: Purchasing power is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2714 publications have been published within this topic receiving 36866 citations. The topic is also known as: adjusted for inflation.

Do microfinance institutions fulfil their promise? Evidence from cross-country data

Abstract: The concept of microfinance promises poverty reduction and economic growth. We empirically challenge this economic and social promise in an attempt to prove its fulfilment. Our multivariate regressions of economic development variables such as per capita gross national income based on PPP converted to international dollars (GNI per capita PPP), GDP growth, as well as gross capital formation and labour participation rate against specific microfinance institutions’ (MFI) variables show that the success and performance of MFIs significantly influence economic development. Microfinance directly influences economic growth through the value that MFI performance adds to purchasing power. An indirect impact comes from an improvement in capital accumulation and employment rates. These insights are valuable as the interdependencies between microfinance and economic development that this article verifies offer new and progressive insights into purposeful action that can be taken to stimulate economic develop...

Recent Arguments against the Gold Standard

Abstract: The presidential primary contests of 2011–12 brought renewed attention to the idea of reinstituting a gold standard. The 2012 Republican Party platform ultimately included a plank calling for the creation of a commission to study the issue.The favorable attention given to the idea of reinstituting a gold standard has attracted criticism of the idea from a variety of sources. Considered here are the most important arguments against the gold standard that have been made by economists and economic journalists in recent years.A few recent arguments are novel to some extent, but not all add weight to the case against a gold standard. Several authors identify genuine historical problems that they blame on the gold standard when they should instead blame central banks for having contravened the gold standard.Gold standards, being real-world human institutions, fall short of perfection. No doubt a well-trained academic economist can describe on the whiteboard an ideal monetary system that produces greater stability in the purchasing power of money than a gold standard does — or scores higher on whatever one criterion the economist favors — while sparing us a gold standard’s resource costs by employing fiat money. But other well-trained economists have proposed different criteria, and even a flawless central bank cannot pursue all criteria with one policy.More important, fiat standards in practice have been far from perfect monetary systems. We need to examine historical evidence if we want to come to an informed judgment about whether actual gold-based systems or actual fiat based systems display the smaller set of flaws. I find that the most automatic and least managed kind of gold-based system — a gold standard with free banking — can be expected to outperform a gold standard with central banking and to outperform the kind of fiat monetary systems that currently prevail.

The barracuda's tale: trawlers, the informal sector and a state of classificatory disorder off the Nigerian coast.

Abstract: the realisation that the unfaltering rate of urban expansion coupled with the dramatically enhanced purchasing power of the naira at the height of the oil boom had profound implications for the organisation of rural producers as they switched from cultivating export cash crops, such as cocoa, to provisioning urban markets with food produce. These studies were predicated on the realisation that the models of analysis used in the first phase of post-independence development efforts, which distinguished between moder and traditional sectors (Boeke, 1953; Rostow, 1960), were rapidly becoming inadequate for describing socio-economic processes in both urban and rural areas. Intervention in the market for the benefit of politically volatile urban consumers (Bates, 1981), the intrusion of transnational companies, imported technology and the consequences of changing consumer patterns (Beckman and Andrae, 1986), and the agility of some farmers in meeting new marketing opportunities (Guyer, 1987; Clough, 1981) demonstrated the complexity of Nigeria's food economy. Successive World Bank studies went to great lengths to substantiate the widely held assumption that Nigeria's agricultural sector was suffering a sharp decline throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, following a comprehensive reinterpretation of the data, it emerged that Nigeria's farmers had in fact expanded their production during that period (Forrest, 1993). This article deals with another area of food production which registered dramatic, yet entirely under-reported, increases throughout the 1970s and on into the Structural Adjustment-stricken 1980s: fisheries. It is a first attempt at sketching the conditions of artisanal fisheries along the Nigerian coastline and, on the basis of these insights from the fishing sector, a contribution to the debate on the character and quality of Nigeria's political economy. While the use of the term 'traditional sector' has been largely expunged from academic discourse, the persuasive power of contrastive dichotomies has resurfaced in different models, one of which was gaining wide circulation in the 1970s. It originated in two simultaneous studies, one by an anthropological researcher in Ghana, the other by the International Labour Office in Kenya, on employment patterns in African cities (Hart, 1973; ILO, 1972). Both concluded that, in spite of massive structural unemployment, the bulk of the working population in Accra and Nairobi were not idle, and indeed could hardly afford to be. Instead, people eked out