{"title":"Channels of Interprovincial Risk Sharing in China","authors":"Julan Du, Qing He, Oliver M. Rui","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1824142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1824142","url":null,"abstract":"This paper decomposes consumption risk sharing among provinces in China over the 1980-2007 period. We find that 9.4 percent of the shocks to gross provincial product are smoothed by the interprovincial fiscal transfer system. This system also cushions a relatively large fraction of the province-specific shocks in the coastal provinces of China. Using a variety of indicators, we explore non-fiscal channels of consumption risk sharing. We find that the migration of rural labor to urban areas and the remittance of migrant wages play important roles in promoting interprovincial consumption risk sharing in the inland provinces of China. In contrast, the extent of risk sharing through financial intermediaries and the capital markets is very limited. These factors have resulted in a low degree of risk sharing among Chinese provinces, especially over the last decade.","PeriodicalId":355227,"journal":{"name":"Development Economics eJournal","volume":"75 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121905268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Aid for Trade and the Liberalization of Trade","authors":"R. Hoekstra, G. Koopmann","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1695001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1695001","url":null,"abstract":"The Aid for Trade (AfT) initiative has gained much popularity since its launch at the World Trade Organization (WTO)'s Ministerial Conference in 2005, and there are ongoing discussions on its effectiveness and potential to improve the integration of developing countries (DCs) into the world economy. This article contributes to the debate by analysing AfT in a political economy context. We find that the delivery of AfT is a precondition for trade reform and trade-enhancing rule-making in DCs and may cushion adjustment problems to trade liberalization. Accordingly, AfT can be a catalyst of trade reforms domestically and internationally.","PeriodicalId":355227,"journal":{"name":"Development Economics eJournal","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115024024","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Impact of Worker Effort on Public Sentiment Towards Temporary Migrants","authors":"G. Epstein, A. Venturini","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1926843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1926843","url":null,"abstract":"Temporary and circular migration programs have been devised by many destination countries and supported by the European Commission as a policy to reduce welfare and social costs of immigration in destination countries. In this paper we present an additional reason for proposing temporary migration policies based on the characteristics of the foreign labor-effort supply. The level of effort exerted by migrants, which decreases over their duration in the host country, positively affects production, real wages and capital owners' profits. We show that the acceptance of job offers by migrants result in the displacement in employment of national workers. However it increases the workers' exertion, decreases prices and thus can counter anti-immigrant voter sentiment. Therefore, the favorable sentiment of the capital owners and the local population towards migrants may rise when temporary migration policies are adopted.","PeriodicalId":355227,"journal":{"name":"Development Economics eJournal","volume":"2015 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114525655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Sharia- and Jihad-Based Theory of Muslim Radicalism","authors":"M. Muthuswamy","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1952515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1952515","url":null,"abstract":"Predictors of religion-based terrorism are becoming clearer. By comparing the evolution of Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India - nations created from the same landmass just sixty-four years ago that share similarities in language, ethnicity, culture, and cuisine - this paper develops a theory to describe the radicalization process in Muslim communities. The proposed theory is that the popularization of certain prominent practices or features of Islam, namely, sharia and jihad, leads to backwardness and violent extremism. Accordingly, this paper suggests a paradigm shift in policy undertaking from “development first” or “democracy first” to that of “undercutting the influence of sharia and jihad first” as a way to break the cycle of radicalization and recruitment that sustains terrorism and, thereby, to address the socio-economic stagnation of Muslim communities.","PeriodicalId":355227,"journal":{"name":"Development Economics eJournal","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133543853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Alternative Indices of Political Freedoms, Property Rights, and Political Instability for Zambia","authors":"J. Fedderke, Farayi Gwenhamo, Ivo Lourenço","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1809869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1809869","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents new institutional measures for Zambia. Coverage is of political rights and freedoms, of property rights, and of political instability. The sample period is from 1947 to 2007. Comparison of the indices with directly comparable Zimbabwean and Malawian series, shows strong sources of divergence in institutional conditions. The paper also considers interaction amongst the institutional measures, and between the institutional measures and measures of economic development. We find that there is an association among the institutional variables, with the various rights dimensions moving together, and being negatively associated with political instability. The evidence further suggests that the institutional measures are associated benevolently with economic development. In this sense the indicators of the present paper therefore conform to the precepts of the new institutional economics","PeriodicalId":355227,"journal":{"name":"Development Economics eJournal","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122663930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nonlinearity Between Trade Openness and Economic Development","authors":"Donghyeon Kim, S. Lin, Y. Suen","doi":"10.1111/j.1467-9361.2011.00608.x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9361.2011.00608.x","url":null,"abstract":"This paper utilizes the instrumental variable threshold regressions approach to reassess the trade-development link. It finds evidence that trade openness contributes to uneven development. Greater trade openness tends to have beneficial effects on real development of high-income countries. For low-income ones, however, trade openness appears to influence real income in a significant and negative way. The data also reveal that greater trade openness has a positive effect on capital accumulation, productivity growth, and financial development in high-income countries, but a negative impact in low-income ones.","PeriodicalId":355227,"journal":{"name":"Development Economics eJournal","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121744054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Evolutionary Economic Geography of Regional Economic Development in Asia","authors":"H. Brunner","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1808652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1808652","url":null,"abstract":"The paper will review representations of regional development models in terms of their assumptions (peeled away like an onion) and in terms of their level of complexity, very much in the tradition of Peter Allen's classification system. Some applied models of regional economic development in Asia will be presented in more detail and compared to each other in terms of their ability to understand development and to gain knowledge about real world problem solutions. The paper shows with examples how complex systems of the kind using economic geography, can be used effectively in policy making in a very specific set of geographies. These new approaches capture economic restructuring across geographies in a way that they offer policy choice hitherto unseen and unrecognizable.Understanding reality and gaining knowledge about a problem require us to reduce the real complexity of any particular situation to a simpler, more understandable system by making specific simplifying assumptions. It is shown that there exist representations that, while being sufficiently simple to be understood, remain sufficiently representative of reality and yield significant power to make a big difference to regional economic development in Asia when compared to other, less useful representations. For instance, what is important to be explained in dynamic socio-economic systems is the structural change in terms of degree of heterogeneity of agent populations in space, the modularity and hierarchy of a system, and similar aspects of composite structural existence. Traditional mechanical models of regional economic development assume away structural change with the assumption of completeness of network connections among agents in the system, thereby imposing a simplifying homogeneity on economic agents that significantly reduces explanatory power.","PeriodicalId":355227,"journal":{"name":"Development Economics eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126029965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Anatoliy A. (Anatolii) Shiyan (Shyian), L. Nikiforova
{"title":"Why Do Inefficient Innovative Institutions Have Place in Russia and Ukraine?","authors":"Anatoliy A. (Anatolii) Shiyan (Shyian), L. Nikiforova","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1808131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1808131","url":null,"abstract":"Russia and Ukraine remain a high scientific potential in the comparison with a level of development of their economy. However, the innovative development of the economy is moving at a rate that significantly slowly in contrast to many transition economies (e.g. China). Why do inefficient innovative institutions have place in Russia and Ukraine? We have shown that the innovative institutions had been formed in the USSR in the late 1920's - early 1930's, when they solved the political tasks. Today these institutions have not changed and they are a cause of the failure of innovation. A model for estimating the losses from the inefficient institutions of innovation in Russia and Ukraine (in comparison with the institutions of innovation in the developed countries) are constructed. This model takes into account the presence of excessive licensing procedures as a result of the imperfect innovative institutions and corruption. It is shown that the losses due to the inefficiency of the innovative institutions are connected to the losses from corruption and shadow economy. For example, in Ukraine the imperfect institutions of innovation were lost to 20-30% of the funding. The comparison of the mechanisms of innovation in the developed countries and in Russia and Ukraine has been discussed in detail.)","PeriodicalId":355227,"journal":{"name":"Development Economics eJournal","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126361970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reconceiving Social Exclusion","authors":"A. Fischer","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1805685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1805685","url":null,"abstract":"Several ambiguities in the social exclusion literature – in both the fields of social policy and development studies – fuel the common criticism that the concept is redundant with respect to already existing poverty approaches, particularly more multidimensional and processual approaches, such as relative or capability poverty. In order to resolve these ambiguities and to derive value-added from the concept, social exclusion needs to be reconceptualised in a way that decisively opts for a processual definition, without reference to norms and/or poverty. Accordingly, a working definition of social exclusion is proposed as structural, institutional or agentive processes of repulsion or obstruction. This definition gives attention to processes occurring vertically throughout social hierarchies and opens up applications of the social exclusion approach to analyses of stratification, segregation and subordination in development studies, especially within contexts of high or rising inequality. Three strengths and applications include situations where exclusions lead to stratifying or impoverishing trajectories without any short-term poverty outcomes; where upward mobility of poor people is hindered by exclusions occurring among the nonpoor; and situations of inequality-induced conflict.","PeriodicalId":355227,"journal":{"name":"Development Economics eJournal","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117095885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Smart Growth in Dumb Places: Sustainability, Disaster, and the Future of the American City","authors":"Lisa Grow Sun","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1918386","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1918386","url":null,"abstract":"One of the many lessons of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan is that we cannot mitigate disaster risk through building codes and other structural solutions alone. Location is key to a community’s natural hazard vulnerability. Consequently, the most far-reaching and important question for disaster mitigation today is where we will channel the growth that will be needed to accommodate our expanding population. Yet, both environmental scholars and policymakers are promoting sustainability initiatives that will channel our country’s future growth into existing urban areas that are already extremely vulnerable to disaster. Indeed, many of these policies - and the legal tools used to implement them - are channeling growth, not only into particularly vulnerable cities, but into the riskiest areas of those cities. This Article is the first to identify and explore this critical tension between disaster mitigation and current sustainability policies.","PeriodicalId":355227,"journal":{"name":"Development Economics eJournal","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131715185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}