Food consumption and economic development in Turkey and European Union countries

This study investigates the relationship between food consumption and economic development in Turkey and European Union countries. Differences in food diets are analysed by using data on per capita consumption in caloric terms based on the period from 1970 to 2000. The cluster analysis is employed to derive country grouping on the basis of similarities in dietary structure in the 1970 and 2000. Existence of a trend towards a common European diet is explored with Beta convergence. The empirical results show that per capita food consumption is becoming less responsive to changes in income and appears to be reaching a ceiling in the majority of EU countries and Turkey. However, the share of animal products in food consumption diet is low and income expenditure elasticity of animal products is higher with 0.84 values in Turkey than that in European countries in 2000. There are great differences in dietary structure between Turkey and the European Union. Differences also exist between European Union countries; however, despite these differences there is a general tendency for dietary structure to become increasingly similar across the majority of European Union countries. The result also supports the absence of a convergence towards a common diet if Turkey joins the European Union.     

Price and quantity in international comparisons of health care expenditure

An important omission from earlier cross-national comparisons of health care expenditure has been the failure to distinguish between price and quantity. Using recent data on purchasing power parities, the purpose of this article is to report some preliminary results regarding health care expenditure and quantity across 22 OECD countries. The article concludes that, contrary to what has been suggested in some recent articles, the relative price of health care is not correlated to the aggregate per capita income. The fraction of the national income that is devoted to health care provision increases with the per capita income regardless of whether health care is measured in terms of expenditure or quantity. The relative price of health care has a rationing effect on the quantity of health care that is offered, with a price alasticity close to minus one. The latter finding means that the health care expenditure is not greater in countries with higherprices. Furthermore, the differences in health care expenditure or quantity between countries persist after correction for the relative price and the income level. Part of these differences can be explained by differences in the definition of health care in the various countries.     

A comparison of unemployment, income and mortality interaction for five European countries

The relationship between unemployment and health status is examined in a comparative study of five European countries using a time series model. "The hypothesis considered in this paper is that the secular decline in mortality rates can be attributed to the secular rise in real per capita income and that the remaining fluctuations in mortality rates can be explained by cyclical movements in income and variations in unemployment." The data concern the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, and Ireland.     

Health spending in Italy: The impact of immigrants

The welfare impact of immigration is a highly debated issue especially for countries on the external borders of the European Union. This paper studies how immigrants affect public health expenditure across Italian regions during the period 2003–2016 using NUTS II level data. Identification strategy is based on shift–share instruments, which are made robust to pull factors that might attract immigrants in Italy and to internal migration of natives. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in immigrants over total resident population leads to a decrease in public health expenditure per capita by about 3.8% (i.e. around 69 euro per capita). Among possible channels, we find no support for any crowding out effect from public to private health services by natives due to increasing immigration or for any role played by different levels of efficiency across regional health systems. Our results are driven by immigrants' demographic structure: they are mostly males and younger workers that call for less health spending, according to a positive selection mechanism. Moreover, linguistic barriers contribute to limiting the immigrants' reliance on public healthcare, which is confirmed also by the use of the European Health Interview Survey microdata.     

The second Engel law: Is it a paradox?

The second Engel law says that the Engel curve for food moves out as family size increases, thus showing a decrease in welfare. What is puzzling, though, is that this regularity does not hold for equivalent income functions expressed in per capita terms. Deaton and Paxon [1998. Economies of scale, household size, and the demand for food. Journal of Political Economy 106 (5), 897-930] show that holding per capita total household expenditure constant, per capita expenditure on food falls with the number of heads. Deaton and Paxson's empirical evidence from developed and less developed countries seems to invalidate the claim of the second Engel's law. The main objective of this paper is to understand such paradoxical relationship between food consumption and household size. Our nonparametric empirical evidence, drawn from the Colombian 1985 urban survey, shows that the food share is negatively related to total household per capita expenditure in line with Deaton and Paxson's claim, but equivalent incomes shift to the right as theory predicts. The regularity of our nonparametric results is an indication of a problem in the parametric specification of the Engel curve modified by family size. In fact, using also the surveys of Italy, Nepal, Djibouti, and Bangladesh we show that a theoretically plausible modified Engel curve is coherent with the claim of the second Engel law and explains Deaton and Paxson's paradox.     

Does environmental quality influence health expenditures? Empirical evidence from a panel of selected OECD countries

In this paper we examine the role of environmental quality in determining per capita health expenditures. We take a panel cointegration approach in order to explore the possibility of estimating both short-run and long-run impacts of environmental quality. Our empirical analysis is based on eight OECD countries, namely Austria, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK for the period 1980-1999. We find that per capita health expenditure, per capita income, carbon monoxide emissions, sulphur oxide emissions and nitrogen oxide emissions are panel cointegrated. While short-run elasticities reveal that income and carbon monoxide emissions exert a statistically significant positive effect on health expenditures, in the long-run in addition to income and carbon monoxide, we find that sulphur oxide emissions have a statistically significant positive impact on health expenditures.     

Financial sector development and domestic savings in South Asia

Given the limited capital flows to developing countries in South Asia, domestic savings is the primary source of investment and growth. Financial sector development and access to financial institutions are important determinants of savings ratios in developing countries. In this context, we empirically examine the role of financial development on savings ratios of five South Asian countries after controlling for other relevant variables for the period 1975–2010 and also for two sub-periods—the pre-reforms period (1975–1991) and the post-reforms period (1992–2010). We find that financial sector development positively affects total and private savings in South Asia along with per capita income, share of agriculture and foreign savings. Results also support the humped-shaped relationship between financial development and savings. The causality results support that financial development leads to higher savings mobilisation in South Asia.     

Manufacturing consumption,relative prices,and productivity

I study the patterns of manufacturing consumption expenditures across a broad set of countries that differ in their level of development using disaggregated expenditure and price data. The relative price of manufacturing tends to decline with income and the real share rises with income, particularly for countries in the top half of the income distribution. I find that the nominal expenditure share of manufacturing displays a hump-shape pattern with respect to the level of income per capita. I document that the income elasticities of the relative price of individual manufacturing categories lie in a wide range. However, since most categories have a negative elasticity, the average elasticity for manufacturing is negative. In addition, most aggregations of individual categories, regardless of the criteria used, yield manufacturing sub-sectors that feature a negative income elasticity of its relative price and the variation across income in nominal expenditure shares tends to mask a larger variation across income in real shares. Using a standard development accounting framework, I report large differences in productivity across countries for manufacturing categories. I also find some differences in productivity across countries for manufacturing sub-sectors, but these differences are smaller than the differences between manufacturing and services and considerably smaller than the differences across individual manufacturing categories.     

Regional mobility in the European Union

Regional mobility in the spatial distribution of per capita income in the European Union is examined over the period 1977 to 1999. The methodology used to investigate this issue combines a series of measures taken from the literature devoted to the dynamic study of personal income distribution with a non-parametric analysis. The results show limited mobility in the distribution considered, and a decline in mobility over time. The empirical evidence presented indicates, moreover, that mobility patterns vary as a function of regional development levels. Additionally, the analysis carried out investigates the role played in explaining intra-distribution mobility by variables such as per capita income, population density, per capita expenditure in investment, market potential, and the share in total employment of agriculture, advanced services and non-market services.     

Long- and short-run elasticities of residential electricity consumption in China: a partial adjustment model with panel data

While it has stabilized in developed world, the per capita residential electricity consumption (REC) in developing countries such as China is growing very rapidly and this trend is very likely to continue. Built upon a provincial level panel data, we employ a partial adjustment model to investigate the future trend of REC in China and factors that affect it. We estimate the income and price short-term and long-term elasticities for urban and rural China, respectively and compare the results with REC studies in other countries or regions. The findings provide useful information to understand how the REC would grow in China as household income increases and how effective that price could be as an intervention tool.     

中国居民消费需求不足原因研究——基于中国城乡分省数据

This paper uses Chinese urban and rural panel data for 30 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities (except Tibet and Taiwan) on the consumption of Chinese urban and rural households in 1995–2005, by constructiong a random effect model, to analyze the impact of sources of household’s consumption demand on the Chinese economy. The quantitative analysis reveals that the per capita disposable income of households is highly relevant in explaining households’ per capita consumption expenditure, in these eleven years, and that China’s consumption function was fairly stable. On the basis of flow of funds accounts (barter transaction) data in 1992–2004, the paper further reveals that, since 1997–1998, China’s consumer demand remains in the doldrums because of the following distribution and redistribution process of the national income: The Government’s share of total income and disposable income is becoming ever larger, while the share of households is declining. Aside from the result that a rise in the burden of personal tuition has a negative impact on per capita consumption demand for urban households, we have not found that housing reform or medical expenses significantly reduce consumer demand in China. We believe that low household consumption demand is caused mainly by the income redistribution between households, government, and corporations rather than the inequality in income distribution across households.     

Is health care a luxury? The debate revisited with new evidence from emerging economies

This paper studies the long-run relationship between health care expenditure and income using a panel data set of emerging economies over the period 1995–2012. The results show that expenditure on health care and income are non-stationary and cointegrated. After controlling for cross-sectional dependence and unobserved heterogeneity among different countries, we find that the income elasticity of health care is less than 1, indicating that health care is a necessity and not a luxury. Government expenditure and out-of-pocket expenditure turn out to be important determinants of health care expenditure. Among non-monetary factors, results show that old age dependency and female education seem to have significant bearings on health care expenditures. Policy recommendations suggest that government should increase spending on health care in emerging economies since higher incomes may not automatically translate into higher health care spending by the people of these countries.     

The impact of the credit crisis on poor developing countries: Growth,worker remittances,accumulation and migration

We show that the credit crisis of OECD countries has a negative impact on the growth of the world economy according to an error-correction model including China and Australia. This causes negative growth effects in poor developing countries. The reduced growth has a direct or indirect impact on the convergence issue, aid, remittances, labour force growth, investment and savings, net foreign debt, migration, tax revenues, public expenditure on education and literacy. We estimate dynamic equations of all these variables using dynamic panel data methods for a panel of countries with per capita income below $1200 (2000). The estimated equations are then integrated to a dynamic system of thirteen equations for thirteen variables that allows for highly non-linear baseline simulations for these open economies. Then we analyze the effects of transitional shocks as predicted by the international organizations for the OECD and world growth for 2008 and 2009. Whereas growth rates return to the baseline scenario until 2013 with overshooting for China and Australia, the level of the GDP per capita shows permanent effects, which are positive only for China. In the poor countries, investment, remittances, savings, tax revenues, public expenditure on education, all as a share of GDP as well as literacy and the GDP per capita, are reduced compared to the baseline until 2087 where our analysis ends. Investment, emigration and labour force growth start returning to baseline values between 2013 and 2017. GDP per capita and tax revenues start returning to baseline around 2040. Education variables do not return to baseline without additional effort.     

Firm turnover,restructuring and labour productivity in transition: the case of Poland

Many studies have found strong and positive relationship between per capita income and health care expenditure. These studies usually adopt the assumptions that (1) the relationships among the variables are constant; and/or (2) the supply-side market for health care could be treated by using standard demand functions models. To take into account of the supply side of health care, we use the demand and supply approach with the cointegration model to re-examine this issue. By using Taiwan health care expenditure data, our results show that the real income elasticity is smaller than unity and the health care expenditures are primarily for ‘curing’ rather than ‘caring’.     

Health spending and public pension: evidence from panel data

This article empirically investigates the determinants of aggregate health expenditure in a panel of OECD countries from 1980 to 2005. We differ from most existing studies by testing some new determinants motivated by recent theoretical advances in the literature. We find that a one percentage increase in public pension payments per elderly person leads to approximately a one third percentage increase in aggregate health spending, and this effect is significant and robust across a variety of model specifications. A back of the envelope calculation based on this estimate suggests that the expansion of the public pension programme on average accounts for approximately over one fifth of the rise in aggregate health expenditure as a share of GDP in the set of OECD countries during 1980–2005. In addition, we find that the estimated effect of GDP per capita in our model ranges from 0.66 to 0.80, which is consistent with the results from some recent studies, and thus further reinforces the finding in the literature that health care is not a luxury good.     

明代GDP及结构试探

本文尝试利用现代国民经济核算方法研究明代GDP及其构成.利用历史文献提供的数据,并借鉴前人定量研究的成果,我们整理和估算了1402-1626年的明代主要经济变量,进而对明代经济进行总体描述,并和工业革命前的英国经济相比较.主要结论如下:明代整体经济增长不快,年均GDP增长率为0.29%;总经济规模有所增长,人均年收入没有明显变化,维持在平均6公石(391公斤)小麦上下;以1990年美元计值的人均收入平均为230美元,最高的年份也不到280美元;农业占GDP比重平均为88%,手工业和商业最高时也没有突破20%;政府税收与GDP之比为3%到9%,平均为5%,明中叶后军费开支占中央政府支出的60%到90%;年均积累率低估值为5.3%,高估值为9%.     

Social capital, innovation and growth: Evidence from Europe

This paper investigates the interplay between social capital, innovation and per capita income growth in the European Union. We model and identify innovation as an important mechanism that transforms social capital into higher income levels. In an empirical investigation of 102 European regions in the period 1990-2002, we show that higher innovation performance is conducive to per capita income growth and that social capital affects this growth indirectly by fostering innovation. Our estimates suggest that there is no direct role for social capital to foster per capita income growth in our sample of European Union countries.     

Social norms and economic growth in a model with labor and capital income tax evasion

Empirical evidence suggests that low-income countries are characterized by high levels of labor and capital income tax evasion while the opposite is true for high-income countries. This paper proposes a model to study the relationship between economic growth and both types of income tax evasion. We show that the existence of a social norm towards tax compliance generates a complementarity between capital and labor income tax evasion which explains the decline of both the share of evaders in the population and the amount of tax evasion when countries accumulate capital. The model predicts that the level of tax morale is positively correlated with both types of income tax evasion and the level of income per capita, consistent with recent empirical evidence. Finally, a higher tax rate increases the share of evaders in the population and aggregate tax evasion.     

Income, income inequality, and health: Evidence from China

This paper tests using survey data from China whether individual health is associated with income and community-level income inequality. Although poor health and high inequality are key features of many developing countries, most of the earlier literature has drawn on data from developed countries in studying the association between the two. We find that self-reported health status increases with per capita income, but at a decreasing rate. Controlling for per capita income, we find an inverted-U association between self-reported health status and income inequality, which suggests that high inequality in a community poses threats to health. We also find that high inequality increases the probability of health-compromising behavior such as smoking and alcohol consumption. Most of our findings are robust to different measures of health status and income inequality. Journal of Comparative Economics 34 (4) (2006) 668–693.     

Capital income taxation in a growing world economy

This paper deals with dynamic adjustment in large economies to changes in the rate of capital income taxation or in the rate of investment tax credit in one country. The framework applied in the paper is a continuous-time, overlapping generations model with two countries. It features population growth and debt non-neutrality. We address impact and steady state effects of capital income tax and investment subsidy changes in the home country on consumption per capita, the capital intensity, and the per capita net foreign asset position in both countries. We also briefly consider individual welfare consequences of these policies.