1,721,731 research outputs found
the middle class consensus and economic development
Get PDFModern political economy stresses"society's polarization"as a determinant of development outcomes. Among the most common dorms of social conflict are class polarization, and ethnic polarization. A middle class consensus is defined as a high share of income for the middle class and a low degree of ethnic polarization. A middle class consensus distinguishes development successes from failures. A theoretical model shows how groups - distinguished by class or ethnicity - will under-invest in human capital and infrastructure when there is"leakage"to another group. The author links the existence of a middle class consensus to exogenous country characteristics, such as resource endowments, along the lines of the provocative thesis of Engerman and Sokoloff (1997), that tropical commodity exporters are more unequal than other societies. The author confirms this hypothesis with cross-country data. This makes it possible to use resource endowments as instruments for inequality. A higher share of income for the middle class and lower ethnic polarization, are empirically associated with higher income, higher growth, more education, better health, better infrastructure, better economic policies, less political instability, less civil war (putting ethnic minorities at risk), more social"modernization,"and more democracy.Economic Theory&Research,Decentralization,Gender and Social Development,Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Achieving Shared Growth,Governance Indicators,Economic Development,Inequality,Economic Theory&Research
Los limites de la estabilizacion : infraestructura, deficit publicos y crecimiento en America Latina
No full textThis book is organized as follows:
Introduction; by William Easterly and Luis Serven Latin
America's Infrastructure in The Era of Macroeconomic
Crises; by Cesar Calderon, William Easterly, and Luis Serven
The Output Cost of Latin America's Infrastructure Gap;
by Cesar Calderon and Luis Serven Infrastructure
Compression and Public Sector Solvency in Latin America; by
Cesar Calderon, William Easterly, and Luis Serven
Macroeconomic Effects of Private Sector Participation in
Infrastructure; by Javier Campos, Antonio Estache, Noelia
Martin, and Lourdes Trujillo. Regulation and Private Sector
Participation in Infrastructure; by Sheoli Parga
Growth implosions, debt explosions, and my Aunt Marilyn : do growth slowdowns cause public debt crises?
Get PDFThe worldwide slowdown in growth after 1975 was a major negative fiscal shock. Slower growth lowers the present value of tax revenues and primary surpluses and thus makes a given level of debt more burdensome. Most countries failed to adjust to the negative fiscal consequences of the growth implosion, so public-debt-to-GDP ratios exploded. The growth slowdown therefore played an important role in the debt crisis of the middle-income countries in the 1980s, the crisis of the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPCs) in the 1980s and 1990s, and the increased public debt burden of the industrial countries in the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, the HIPCs'debt problems were worse than elsewhere because, as a result of poor policies, these countries grew more slowly after 1975 than other low-income countries. Econometric tests and fiscal solvency accounting confirm the important role of growth in debt crises.Economic Theory&Research,Strategic Debt Management,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Conditions and Volatility,Macroeconomic Management
How did highly indebted poor countries become highly indebted? : reviewing two decades of debt relief
Get PDFHow did highly indebted poor countries become highly indebted after two decades of debt relief efforts? A set of theoretical models predict that countries with unchanged long-run savings preferences will respond to debt relief with a mixture of asset decumulation and new borrowing. A model also predicts that a high-discount-rate government will choose poor policies and impose its inter-temporal preferences on the entire economy. Reviewing the experience of highly indebted poor countries, compared with that of other developing countries, the author finds direct and indirect evidence of asset decumulation and new borrowing associated with debt relief. The ratio of the net present value of debt to exports rose strongly over 1979-97 despite the debt relief efforts. Average policies in highly indebted poor countries were generally worse than those in other developing countries, nor were wars more likely in highly indebted poor countries. Over time there has been an important shift in financing for highly indebted poor countries, away from private and bilateral nonconcessional sources to the International Development Association and other sources of multilateral concessional financing. But this implicit form of debt relief also failed to reduce debt in net present value terms. Although debt relief is done in the name of the poor, the poor are worse off if debt relief creates incentives to delay reforms needed for growth.Environmental Economics&Policies,Strategic Debt Management,Economic Theory&Research,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Strategic Debt Management,Financial Intermediation,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform
The effect of International Monetary Fund and World Bank programs on poverty
Get PDFStructural adjustment - as measured by the number of adjustment loans from the IMF, and the World Bank - reduces the growth elasticity of poverty reduction. The author finds no evidence for structural adjustment having a direct effect on growth. The poor benefit less from output expansion in countries with many adjustment loans, than they do in countries with few such loans. By the same token, the poor suffer less from an output contraction in countries with many adjustment loans, than in countries with few. Why would this be? One hypothesis is that adjustment lending is counter-cyclical, in ways that smooth consumption for the poor. There is evidence that some policy variables under adjustment lending are counter-cyclical, but no evidence that the cyclical component of those policy variables affects poverty. The author speculates that the poor may be ill placed to take advantage of new opportunities, created by structural adjustment reforms, just as they may suffer less from the loss of old opportunities in sectors that were artificially protected before reform. Poverty's lower sensitivity to growth under adjustment lending, is bad news when an economy expands, and good news when it contracts. These results could be interpreted as giving support to either the critics, or the supporters of structural adjustment programs.Achieving Shared Growth,Country Strategy&Performance,Economic Conditions and Volatility,Services&Transfers to Poor,Safety Nets and Transfers
When is fiscal adjustment an illusion?
Get PDFFiscal adjustment is an illusion when it lowers the budget deficit or public debt but leaves the government's net worth unchanged, says the author. 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. The author 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 adjustmentprograms and case studies of Maastricht Euro countries. The results confirm the model predictions: Fiscal adjustment in these countries was at least partly an illusion.Environmental Economics&Policies,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Economic Theory&Research,National Governance,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Economic Stabilization,Environmental Economics&Policies
The Effect of IMF and World Bank Programmes on Poverty
Get PDFpoverty, structural adjustment, economic growth, income distribution
Can institutions resolve ethnic conflict ?
Get PDFHigh-quality institutions -- reflected in such factors as rule of law, bureaucratic quality, freedom from government expropriation, and freedom from government repudiation of contracts -- mitigate the adverse economic effects of ethnic fractionalization identified by Easterly and Levine (1997) and others. Ethnic diversity has a more adverse effect on economic policy and growth when a government's institutions are poor. But poor institutions have an even more adverse effect on growth and policy when ethnic diversity is high. In countries where the institutions are good enough, however, ethnic diversity does not lessen growth or worsen economic policies. Good institutions also reduce the risk of wars and genocides that might otherwise result from ethnic fractionalization. However, these forms of violence are not the channel through which ethnic fragmentation and its interaction with institutions affect economic growth. Ethnically diverse nations that want to endure in peace and prosperity must build good institutions.Governance Indicators,Economic Policy, Institutions and Governance,Inequality,Achieving Shared Growth,Poverty Assessment
Policy distortions, size of government, and growth
Get PDFThis paper analyzes the structural relationship between policies that distort resource allocation and long-term growth. It briefly reviews the Solow model in which steady-state growth depends only on exogenous technological change, but finds it unsatisfactory as a model of long-term growth. The author proposes an increasing-returns model in the spirit of the new literature on economic growth. With increasing returns, endogenous economic variables - and thus policy - will affect the steady-state rate of growth. This model gives output as a linear function of total capital, but a decreasing function of each of two types of capital. The distortion is defined as a policy intervention that increases the cost of using one of the types of capita. The results suggest that simple linear relationships between distortions and growth, or between size of government and growth, are untenable. Easterly's model shows that reducing the distortions does not have an equal effect on growth in all circumstances. The effect depends on how flexible the economy is, how large the share of the factor being penalized in production is, and how high the distortions are initially. Small changes in either very low or very high levels of initial distortions have a minimal effect on growth.Economic Theory&Research,Economic Growth,Economic Conditions and Volatility,Environmental Economics&Policies,Achieving Shared Growth
Explaining miracles : growth regressions meet the Gang of Four
Get PDFThe authorexamines a range of cross-sectional variation in performance and policies for evidence on what distinguishes successes from failures. At about 6 percent, the growth rate of the Four Tigers - Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China) - are among the largest outliners in any study of growth. This is not surprising, says the author. The Four Tigers are Tigers because their growth rate was high. The Four generally have large positive residuals in growth regressions, but the author argues that this is not surprising for observations that were known in advance to be at the top of the sample. But growth regressions and, more generally, quantitative measures of"policies"are not very successful at picking out the Gang of Four as"most likely to succeed."Most observers before the"miracle"were pessimistic about East Asia. The Four are not nearly as superlative in policies and other country characteristics as they are in per capita growth rates. Large positive residuals such as those associated with the Four's high performance have historically been transitory. The stratospheric trajectory of the Four should be heading back toward earth soon, says the author. What may be unusual about the Four's success is that they were all in one region. At least casually, the Asian successes look a lot like growth radiating from poles, with Japan followed by the Gang of Four, followed by China, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The great success of the Gang of Four does not imply a blanket endorsement of all their policies - they may have made mistakes that were more than offset by other good policies and, probably at least in part, by good luck. It is disturbing how large and transitory the unexplained element is in economic success. Perhaps the best way to think about good policies is that they make success likely sooner or later. When all is said and done, the story of the East Asian successes is consistent with the prosaic fundamentals: investment, education, financial depth, and low budget deficits. In these areas, the Four were above average.Economic Conditions and Volatility,Achieving Shared Growth,Governance Indicators,Economic Growth,Inequality
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