Political Economy: Government Expenditures & Related Policies eJournal最新文献

{"title":"Estimating the Macroeconomic Effects of Each Totalization Agreement","authors":"Ananth Seshadri, Junjie Guo","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3885758","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3885758","url":null,"abstract":"Totalization agreements coordinate the United States Social Security program with other countries’ comparable programs. We estimate each totalization agreement’s impact on a variety of bilateral trade outcomes. We find the impact is quite heterogeneous, both across agreements/countries and across sectors within a country. Moreover, we find agreements that entered into force more recently tend to increase total imports and decrease total exports by more than earlier agreements. We find no significant relationship between totalization agreements’ estimated impacts and economic indicators such as the trade complementarity index between the U.S. and the agreement countries. Finally, we find sectors where the U.S. has a larger revealed comparative advantage relative to the agreement country tend to experience a larger increase in exports following the totalization agreement. However, there is no significant relationship between revealed comparative advantage and the estimated impact on imports across sectors. In future work, we will investigate in more detail both the correlation between the heterogeneity across sectors within a country and the heterogeneity across countries, as well as the correlation between totalization agreements and the declining U.S. trade balance in the past few decades.","PeriodicalId":360236,"journal":{"name":"Political Economy: Government Expenditures & Related Policies eJournal","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128759355","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 Biased Firm in a Market with Complementary Products. A Note on the Welfare Effects","authors":"Clemens Buchen, Alberto Palermo","doi":"10.1111/sjpe.12236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/sjpe.12236","url":null,"abstract":"We analyse a duopoly setting with complementary products, in which a firm has a bias about its absolute advantage. We show that the bias can internalize parts of the negative externality that the complementarity of goods creates implying a higher producer's surplus. Moreover, we analyse additional conditions, which lead to an increase in the consumer's surplus. Counterintuitively, we show that the presence of a bias can lead to a positive welfare effect.","PeriodicalId":360236,"journal":{"name":"Political Economy: Government Expenditures & Related Policies eJournal","volume":"103 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115907816","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":"Poor Targeting? Targeting the Poor? Redistribution in the Hungarian Welfare System by Age and Socio-Economic Status","authors":"R. Gál, Márton Medgyesi","doi":"10.1111/SPOL.12653","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/SPOL.12653","url":null,"abstract":"In line with previous research, we confirm that welfare programs in Hungary are poorly targeted in terms of socio-economic status (SES). However, by adding age to our models, we demonstrate that even if the status is irrelevant in explaining access to social benefits and services, age is not. Applying simple regression techniques, we compare both the theoretical importance (based on regression coefficients) and the dispersion importance (using Shapley-value decomposition of the R2) of age and SES in explaining the receipt of and contributions to both in-kind and in-cash benefits at the level of the general government in Hungary. We conclude that what appears to be a dysfunctional instrument in alleviating poverty and inequality in a univariate model is actually a channel of resource reallocation that connects working-age people to children and to the elderly when the model includes two predictors.","PeriodicalId":360236,"journal":{"name":"Political Economy: Government Expenditures & Related Policies eJournal","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133823651","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 Decline in Public Investment: 'Social Dominance' or Too-Rigid Fiscal Rules?","authors":"M. Delgado-Téllez, Esther Gordo Mora, Iván Kataryniuk, Javier J. Pérez","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3666800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3666800","url":null,"abstract":"Public investment in advanced economies is at historical lows, and shows a declining trend since at least the 1980s. Two main hypotheses have been posed to rationalize this fact. On the one hand, the “social dominance hypothesis” claims that this is related to structural factors, given the upward social expenditure trends related to ageing populations and social preferences, and the operation of the government budget constraint (limits to further increase significantly tax revenues and public debt, in a context of secular stagnation). On the other hand, another branch of the literature indicates that too-rigid fiscal rule frameworks cause fiscal retrenchment episodes to hinge heavily on public capital expenditure, which does not recover enough in the subsequent expansion, creating a sort of downward hysteresis behaviour in this budgetary item. In this paper we look jointly at both sets of duelling explanatory factors, and show that both are key to understanding public investment dynamics in advanced economies over the past decades.","PeriodicalId":360236,"journal":{"name":"Political Economy: Government Expenditures & Related Policies eJournal","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125125988","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 Global State of Health Care System","authors":"Professor Kelly Kingsly","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3663356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3663356","url":null,"abstract":"Globally, health care has recently known indisputable challenges. Even the strongest nations have seen their supposedly strong health systems crush down. No health organisation has been left un-disrupted with the coming of Covid-19. If even the mighty have fallen what becomes of the weak?<br><br>African countries at independence were organized and financed by governments which provided facilities, personnel and other inputs. By the 1980s, however economic downturn and the embrace of international monetary fund loans with stringent conditionality meant that many governments had to cut public spending on infrastructure and services, including healthcare and education. Consequently, many African governments stopped subsidizing public services and began implementing various costs – recovery measures in public services. The cost recovery era witnessed the introduction of OOP (out-of-pocket) for healthcare services, public water supply and consumables in schools. Thus, since the 1980s and 1990s, OOP by individuals and households have accounted for a larger scale of healthcare expenditure in many African countries of sub-Saharan Africa (1). These payments popularly known as user-fees or the ‘cash and carry’ health system in Ghana are known for raising the cost of healthcare, thus making it un-affordable for a large number of the population. In many sub-Saharan countries, governments rank healthcare relatively low among development priorities (2). For this reason, insufficient resources are allocated to healthcare, including drugs; which is often financed OOP (3)<br><br>Healthcare statistics in sub-Sahara Africa are generally poor. For example, although the region makes up only 11 per cent, of the world’s population; it accounts for é’ per cent of the global disease burden and commands less than 1 per cent of global expenditure (4). Although the WHP suggests thresholds of OOP for health as a guarantee of adequate financial protection is in the region of 15-20 per cent, residents of many African countries spend more (5). For example, OOP spending on health was between 27 – 37 per cent in Ghana in 2012 about 52 per cent in Kenya, 6405-70 per cent in Nigeria in the 1998 – 2008 period: while in South Africa, the government contributes about 42 per cent of all expenditures on health. The remaining 58 per cent is paid by private sources insurance premiums and OOP.<br><br>The United Nations recommends minimum required budgetary allocation to health is 15 per cent, many African countries fall below this minimum in their budgetary allocations. In 2007 more than half of the 53 African countries spent less than $50 per person (as average) on health (6). Of the total expenditure, 30 per cent came from governments, 20 per cent from donors and 50 per cent from private sources of which 71 per cent was paid by patients themselves, the so-called out-of-pocket-payments.<br><br>The dire picture of the healthcare system in the world and particularly in sub-Saharan Africa de","PeriodicalId":360236,"journal":{"name":"Political Economy: Government Expenditures & Related Policies eJournal","volume":"133 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123353800","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":"Foreign Aid, Public Investment, and the Informal Economy","authors":"S. Chatterjee, Mark C. Kelly, S. Turnovsky","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3661581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3661581","url":null,"abstract":"This paper uses a two-sector open economy model to examine the dynamic absorption of foreign aid in the presence of both formal and informal production. Calibrating the model to yield a long-run equilibrium consistent with sample averages for 72 aid-recipient developing countries for the period 1990-2017, we show that an increase in foreign aid impacts the sectoral composition of the recipient economy, driving resources into the informal sector, and away from the formal sector. Further, if aid is untied (say, provided for general budget support), then the expansion of the informal sector can lead to a contraction of the aggregate economy through the Dutch Disease effect. If the recipient government’s objective is to drive an economic expansion by increasing the share of formal production, then re-allocating existing aid to public investment is more effective than an increase in the aggregate level of aid.","PeriodicalId":360236,"journal":{"name":"Political Economy: Government Expenditures & Related Policies eJournal","volume":"02 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129835898","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":"Transport Infrastructure and House Prices in the Long Run","authors":"Sefa Awaworyi Churchill, Kingsley Tetteh Baako, K. Mintah, Quanda Zhang","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3649487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3649487","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We examine the effects of transport infrastructure on house prices in the OECD countries over the period 1870 to 2016. We employ both parametric and non-parametric panel data techniques that account for the non-linear and time-varying relationship between transport infrastructure and house prices. Our parametric results, which are based on newly developed panel data models that incorporate interactive fixed effects, suggest that transport infrastructure is positively associated with house prices. The non-parametric estimates suggest a time-varying relationship and that the average positive effect of transport infrastructure has been the case for most of the period we study. We also examine three channels through which transport infrastructure could influence house prices – economic growth, employment, and crime – and find that economic growth is a mechanism through which transport infrastructure transmits to house prices.","PeriodicalId":360236,"journal":{"name":"Political Economy: Government Expenditures & Related Policies eJournal","volume":"655 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116485463","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":"Healthcare Transparency in the Age of COVID-19","authors":"J. O’Shea","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3698753","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3698753","url":null,"abstract":"In addition to causing widespread morbidity and mortality, the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed everyday life and has placed an enormous burden on a US healthcare system for which rising costs were already a major concern. Well before the current crisis, there was wide recognition of the need for greater healthcare price transparency in the United States as a way to promote competition, reduced spending, and a more efficient allocation of resources. The additional demands of the COVID-19 pandemic have accentuated the need for policymakers to take this opportunity to advance healthcare transparency as well as give consumers incentives to use the newly available information to make better healthcare choices. There are short-term measures that can be taken even as the medical impact of COVID-19 is being brought under control. More importantly, longer-term structural reform of the current insurance-based financing system is needed in order to alleviate the stress on the healthcare system and obviate the need for government intervention.","PeriodicalId":360236,"journal":{"name":"Political Economy: Government Expenditures & Related Policies eJournal","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125686112","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":"Distributional Effect of Pension Reform: Pension Benefit Reduction and Housing Market in China","authors":"Lu Xu","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3635101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3635101","url":null,"abstract":"This paper studies the impact of pension reduction on the housing price and wealth distribution in China. We first set up a simple model, conceptually predicting that a pension reduction will boost the housing price and reduce housing wealth inequality. To get a full picture of the impact of pension reduction, we set up a stochastic OLG model with the housing market to quantitatively examine the long term effect of pension benefit reduction on the housing market and welfare redistribution in China. The policy experiment shows that a reduction of replacement ratio from 0.7 to 0.45 will produce a rise in housing price by 14%. Quantitatively the housing price rise is contributed by four main channels: direct channels, the non-housing asset price channel, the tax rate channel, the bequest channel. We also checked the response of the cohort-wise housing wealth distribution and finds out that housing wealth distribution is more equal after the pension reduction. We finally examined the effect of a pension benefit reduction on welfare redistribution and finds out the policy change generated interesting implications on welfare and wealth redistribution across households with different income, asset levels, and age.<br>","PeriodicalId":360236,"journal":{"name":"Political Economy: Government Expenditures & Related Policies eJournal","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116922945","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":"Do Public Program Benefits Crowd Out Private Transfers in Developing Countries? A Critical Review of Recent Evidence","authors":"P. Nikolov, Matthew Bonci","doi":"10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.1049679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.1049679","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":360236,"journal":{"name":"Political Economy: Government Expenditures & Related Policies eJournal","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127264808","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}