Rajabrata Banerjee, Admasu Asfaw Maruta, Ronald Donato
{"title":"Does higher financial inclusion lead to better health outcomes? Evidence from developing and transitional economies","authors":"Rajabrata Banerjee, Admasu Asfaw Maruta, Ronald Donato","doi":"10.1111/ecot.12341","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ecot.12341","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study critically examines the effect of financial inclusion on life expectancy and infant mortality rates, and whether the effect is conditioned by possible threshold effects determined by the degree of income inequality and poverty levels. We draw our conclusions based on 61 developing and transitional economies in the period 2011–2017. Using an aggregate hybrid financial inclusion index, we show that financial inclusion exerts a direct positive effect on health outcomes. Furthermore, the effectiveness of financial inclusion as a policy tool to achieve better health outcomes is higher in societies where poverty and income inequality are more prevalent. These are significant findings from a policy perspective as greater financial inclusion offers the scope to invest in health capital and enhances the capacity for risk management among the most vulnerable populations in the face of health shocks.</p>","PeriodicalId":40265,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Transition and Institutional Change","volume":"31 2","pages":"363-401"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ecot.12341","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43793770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Impact of research and development (R&D) and information, and communication technology (ICT) on innovation and productivity evidence from Tunisian manufacturing firms","authors":"Adel Ben Khalifa","doi":"10.1111/ecot.12340","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ecot.12340","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study aims to examine the ability of Tunisian manufacturing firms to invest in innovation activities and to transform these investments on innovation outputs and if these outputs have contributed to productivity improvements. It explores the relationship between research and development (R&D), information, and communication technology (ICT) use, product and process innovations and productivity. The study presents an application of the augmented Crépon-Duguet-Mairesse (CDM) model for 238 manufacturing firms in Tunisia. Results show that R&D is an important predictor for product innovation, but not for process innovation. The use of ICT has a positive impact on both innovation types, but this impact is more important for the case of process innovation. Furthermore, the study shows the possible existence of a complementary relationship between R&D and ICT. The firms that combine R&D with ICT use increase their probability to introduce product and process innovation. R&D and ICT are also an important indirect driver of firm productivity through innovation activities. Thus, the results show a positive impact of product innovation on firm-level productivity. However, process innovation has a significant impact only if it is combined with product innovation. The study also identifies guidelines for development actors to better transform ICT and R&D into innovation and productivity in Tunisian economy.</p>","PeriodicalId":40265,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Transition and Institutional Change","volume":"31 2","pages":"341-361"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43436856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Duong Hoang Vu, Bruce Dehning, Drahomíra Pavelková
{"title":"Firm life cycle and foreign direct investment spillover effect: The case of the Czech Republic","authors":"Duong Hoang Vu, Bruce Dehning, Drahomíra Pavelková","doi":"10.1111/ecot.12342","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ecot.12342","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and the resulting spillover effects can be important for a country's development and economic growth. Using panel data from 2004 to 2019 in the Czech Republic's manufacturing industry, this paper finds the following. First, FDI firms generate positive horizontal labour effects and backward labour linkage on domestic firms. However, other hypothesized effects of FDI firms, such as horizontal and backward competition and the forward linkage of FDI, were not significant. Second, FDI firms at the mature and shakeout stage generate more spillover than those at the introduction and growth stage. There is no spillover impact on domestic firms by FDI firms at the decline stage. This is the first paper to examine the role of firm life cycle on the spillover effects of FDI.</p>","PeriodicalId":40265,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Transition and Institutional Change","volume":"31 2","pages":"319-340"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45937194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The effect of corruption on microfinance loan portfolio: A semiparametric analysis","authors":"Jeleta Kebede, Vincent Tawiah, Ernest Gyapong","doi":"10.1111/ecot.12332","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ecot.12332","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this paper, we examine the extent to which corruption affects the loan portfolio of microfinance institutions (MFIs). We employ robust econometric estimation on a sample of 507 MFIs across 63 countries from 2005 to 2018. Our results show that corruption is negatively associated with the loan portfolio. However, in semiparametric analysis, we find that lower-level corruption is beneficial to increase the loan portfolio while higher-level corruption is detrimental. The results imply that it is not just corruption that matters as far as its effect on MFIs' loan portfolio is concerned; what matters is the degree of corruption. In further analyses, we find that corruption reduces both the number of active borrowers and average loan per borrower indicating that corruption reduces both coverage and amount of credit extension. The results suggest that the effect of corruption on the loan portfolio is gender-sensitive. Corruption facilitates an increase in loans to female borrowers. Our results are robust to alternative variable measurements and different identification strategies, including two-stage least square.</p>","PeriodicalId":40265,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Transition and Institutional Change","volume":"31 1","pages":"241-268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41960950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The impact of tax policy on firm debt maturity: Evidence from China's VAT reform","authors":"Jingxian Zou, Guangjun Shen","doi":"10.1111/ecot.12334","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ecot.12334","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper mainly discusses how tax reduction policies may affect a firm's debt maturity structure by altering firm performance. When an indirect financing system is dominated by banks, such as is the situation in China, tax reduction policies impose two opposite effects on the firm debt maturity structure. The improved profitability will encourage banks to lengthen debt maturity to retain firm customers, which can be called the ‘customer competing effect’. Meanwhile, the increased free cash flow will exaggerate the principle-agent problem between banks and firms, leading to a shortened debt maturity, which is designated the ‘agency cost effect’. In this paper, based on China's Industrial Enterprise Database, we use China's VAT (value-added tax) reform as a natural experiment to empirically test the two effects. After the tax reduction, firm debt maturity was found to generally lengthen. Meanwhile, such an extension is found to be larger when the firm's profit gain is greater or the increased free cash flow is less, which confirms our hypothesis.</p>","PeriodicalId":40265,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Transition and Institutional Change","volume":"31 2","pages":"295-317"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46710789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reform complementarities and growth: Evidence and mechanisms","authors":"Danko Tarabar, Louis J. Pantuosco","doi":"10.1111/ecot.12333","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ecot.12333","url":null,"abstract":"<p>When reforms of different policy areas are said to be complementary, the presence of one reformed area bolsters the effectiveness of reform of the other. We use the five areas of the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index over 2000–2017 to test for the impact of reform complementarities on real per capita income growth in up to 131 countries. Using a novel index for complementarity (Braga De Macedo & Oliveira-Martins, 2008, Econ. Transit.), we find robust evidence that pursuing broader reform packages is associated with an increase in annual growth by about 1.2%. Further analysis shows that the effect of complementarities operates largely through its positive impact on domestic investment.</p>","PeriodicalId":40265,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Transition and Institutional Change","volume":"31 2","pages":"271-294"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48906451","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Corruption and privatization: Evidence from a natural experiment in China","authors":"Ling Zhu, Dongmin Kong","doi":"10.1111/ecot.12331","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ecot.12331","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper investigates how government corruption shapes state-owned enterprises' (SOEs) privatization. To establish causality, we exploit a natural experiment (i.e., the investigations of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection) to document that SOEs significantly deepen privatization after the crackdown on corruption. Further evidence demonstrates two plausible mechanisms driving our findings. Specifically, anti-corruption campaign: 1) accelerates privatization process by curbing the underpricing transfers to state entities and encouraging the normal transfers to private entities or individuals; and 2) by reducing managers' incentives to maintain the dominance of state ownership for expropriation through the discretion of perk consumption. Moreover, our findings are particularly pronounced for SOEs located in areas with high levels of social trust, government intervention, and less information asymmetry.</p>","PeriodicalId":40265,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Transition and Institutional Change","volume":"31 1","pages":"217-239"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ecot.12331","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42105339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Technical change and wage premiums amongst skilled labour: Evidence from the economic transition","authors":"Sergey Alexeev","doi":"10.1111/ecot.12330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ecot.12330","url":null,"abstract":"<p>I present reduced-form and structural evidence that the reorganization of the Russian economy in the post-transitional period increased the demand on law and business graduates. This demand shock provides a novel unified explanation of the Russian wage structure for 1985–2015. I then show that this shock is a common feature of all transitional economies, and it contributed to the transformational recession. The demand behaviour is identified with a new skill-biased technical change model of demand for skills with three production inputs (high school graduates and bachelor-level educations with two majors), showing that a technology shift that favours a particular skill might emerge within the skilled group rather than between skilled and unskilled. This is relevant because similar shifts (e.g., data scientists vs. liberal arts) emerge today in the frontier economies that adopt new general-purpose technologies (e.g., machine learning). Thus, this paper informs policymakers today on tools to counteract a potential drop in economic equality and performance that result from this adoption. Lastly, because of similarities between the mechanics of the transition and the 2022 sanctions to discourage Russia's war effort, my results highlight the importance of additional sanctions against the education system to prevent the regime's structural adaptation and preservation.</p>","PeriodicalId":40265,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Transition and Institutional Change","volume":"31 1","pages":"189-216"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ecot.12330","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50143162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abidemi Adisa, Michael Farmer, Jamie Bologna Pavlik
{"title":"The effect of the Mahathir regime on the Malaysian economy","authors":"Abidemi Adisa, Michael Farmer, Jamie Bologna Pavlik","doi":"10.1111/ecot.12327","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ecot.12327","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad is often credited with Malaysia's dramatic economic success post-1980. It is well known that the Mahathir regime installed centralized power in the Office of the Prime Minister (PM) and greatly extended state capacity through a far-reaching clientelist system. <i>Prima Facie</i>, the Malaysian experience appears to validate power centralization and state capacity as complementary to economic development. Though these changes did make Malaysia more susceptible to corruption, dramatically exhibited in 2015 with the 1MDB 5 billion dollar scandal, it has been argued that the clientelist political structure installed in Malaysia generally manages corruption at tolerable levels in order to provide the state the capacity needed to implement controls for economic development that began in the 1980s. While Malaysia experienced impressive economic growth during the Mahathir administration, our test using the Synthetic Control Method finds that GDP per capita fell well below what would have been expected under the governing structures in place in the 1970s, before Mahathir took office—a loss of approximately $4000 per capita below its potential. This study provides evidence of powerful negative economic consequences attributable to greater power centralization and enhanced state capacity inaugurated under Mahathir.</p>","PeriodicalId":40265,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Transition and Institutional Change","volume":"31 1","pages":"97-114"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41413573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Public support for economic transition","authors":"Lucie Coufalová, Lenka Kolajtová, Libor Žídek","doi":"10.1111/ecot.12329","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ecot.12329","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper focuses on the Czech economic transition and aims to identify the determinants of unusually high and long-lasting public support for market reforms. The study is based on a unique combination of statistical analysis of survey data and oral history (interviews with reformers, managers etc.), which has enabled us to depict the views of the general public as well as of many people involved in decision-making processes on both macro and micro levels. These findings allow us to propose recommendations on how to gain and maintain public support for economic reforms. Above all, reformers must utilize the period of euphoria and communicate the individual steps of reform with the public.</p>","PeriodicalId":40265,"journal":{"name":"Economics of Transition and Institutional Change","volume":"31 1","pages":"161-187"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46050053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}