The Structure and Composition of India’s Exports and Industrial Transformation (1980–2000)

Abstract

This paper analyses structural change in Indian manufactured exports empirically for 143 (mainly manufacturing) industrial groupings. Trade indices such as Balassa’s revealed comparative advantage (RCA) index and variants are used. Detailed econometric analysis is employed to examine structural change. The stability and the process of the intertemporal evolution of the RCA indices is considered. Three technology categories (high technology, medium technology and low technology) are analysed individually. Our results point towards substantial industrial restructuring in manufactured exports. We find evidence of despecialisation within India’s manufactured exports for the time period studied, which is consistent with increasing specialisation in a subset of manufactured exports.     

Measurement of fiscal rules: Introducing the application of partially ordered set (POSET) theory

Data on (economic) institutions are often available only as observations on ordinal, inherently incomparable properties, which are then typically aggregated to a composite index in the empirical social science literature. From a methodological perspective, the present paper advocates the application of partially ordered set (POSET) theory as an alternative approach. Its main virtue is that it takes the ordinal nature of the data seriously and dispenses with the unavoidably subjective assignment of weights to incomparable properties, maintains a high standard of objectivity, and can be applied in various fields of economics. As an application, the POSET approach is then used to calculate new indices on the stringency of fiscal rules for 81 countries over the period 1985–2012 based on recent data by IMF (2012). The derived measures of fiscal rules are used to test their significance for public finances in a fiscal reaction function and compare the POSET with the composite index approach.     

Productivity Dynamics in a Large Sample of Countries: A Panel Study

Recent research shows that productivity differences are more important than differences in accumulation rates in explaining per capita income differences across countries. So far static differences in productivity have been mainly computed and analyzed in large samples of countries. This paper extends the research by focusing on productivity dynamics . It uses the panel approach to compute productivity indices for a large sample of countries for two time periods, namely an initial period of 1960–75 and a subsequent period of 1975–90. This allows computation of ordinal and cardinal changes in productivity between the two periods. The results show considerable variation in productivity dynamics across countries. The task ahead is to find out what accounts for the observed dynamics.     

Dimensions and Determinants of Financialisation: Comparing OECD Countries since 1997

ABSTRACT

The financialisation literature has grown over the past decades. Despite a generally accepted definition, financialisation has been used to describe different phenomena. We distinguish between financialisation of non-financial companies, households and the financial sector and use activity and vulnerability measures. We identify seven financialisation hypotheses in the literature and empirically investigate them in a cross-country analysis for 17 OECD countries and two time periods, 1997–2007 as well as 2008–17. We find different financialisation measures are only weakly correlated, suggesting the existence of distinct financialisation processes. There is strong evidence that financialisation is linked to asset price inflation and correlated with a debt-driven demand regime. Financial deregulation encourages financialisation. There is limited evidence that market-based financial systems are more financialised. Foreign financial inflows do not seem a main driver. We do not find indication that an investment slowdown precedes financialisation. Our findings suggest financialisation should be understood as a variegated process, playing out differently across economic sectors and countries.     

Ethically robust comparisons of bidimensional distributions with an ordinal attribute

We provide foundations for robust normative evaluation of distributions of two attributes, one of which is cardinally measurable and transferable between individuals and the other is ordinal and non-transferable. The result that we establish takes the form of an analogue to the standard Hardy–Littlewood–Pólya theorem for distributions of one cardinal attribute. More specifically, we identify the transformations of the distributions which guarantee that social welfare increases according to utilitarian unanimity provided that the utility function is concave in the cardinal attribute and that its marginal utility with respect to the same attribute is non-increasing in the ordinal attribute. We establish that this unanimity ranking of the distributions is equivalent to the ordered poverty gap quasi-ordering introduced by Bourguignon [12]. Finally, we show that, if one distribution dominates another according to the ordered poverty gap criterion, then the former can be derived from the latter by means of an appropriate and finite sequence of such transformations.     

Introduction: Is the European Union Capable of Integrating Diverse Models of Capitalism?

ABSTRACT

The causes and consequences of the Euro crisis have led comparative political economy scholars to question whether European integration can accommodate diverse models of capitalism. This special issue addresses two important questions about the compatibility of diverse growth models within the European Union (EU): Are some growth regimes better suited to European integration than others? and does the EU favour a particular constellation of domestic institutions? Contributions within this special issue provide a qualified yes to these questions, concluding that the EU favours export-led growth models whilst it penalises and discourages domestic consumption-oriented growth paths, particularly those that are financed by debt accumulation. While recent comparative capitalism literature highlights that European monetary integration has favoured export-led growth regimes, contributions in this special issue outline that the EU’s prioritisation of export-led growth over domestic demand-led growth is present in other facets of integration, including EU accession, financial integration, the free movement of people, fiscal governance and the Europe 2020 growth strategy. Findings here provide important insights for both the European integration and comparative capitalism literature, highlighting that the unique economic ties being forged within the European project may be problematic for those countries outside northwestern Europe and for workers in low-wage domestic sectors.     

Linkage Measures: a Revisit and a Suggested Alternative

This paper examines major linkage measures in the literature from different perspectives and attempts to clarify some of the controversies over them. The examination and clarification suggest more refined backward and forward linkage measures for linkage indices construction. The measures are then applied to analyse the linkages of Hawaii’s agriculture sectors.     

Inequality of Happiness in the U.S.: 1972–2010

It is well accepted that a country's GDP may not fully reflect its level of well‐being. In recent years, happiness has emerged as an alternative indicator of well‐being, and research has mainly focused on determining the level of happiness. While it is important to look at the level, the distribution of happiness is also a salient aspect in any evaluation of inequality. There has been a growing interest in the distribution of happiness, although the ordinal nature of the data makes the use of standard inequality measures problematic. Our paper contributes to the literature by exploring the distributions for the U.S. from 1972 to 2010. Based on new methods developed for ordinal data, we are able to overcome the problems associated with ordinality and obtain unambiguous rankings of happiness distributions. We also compute the level of happiness inequality using existing measures based on median centred approaches. Further, we decompose the median based inequality measures of happiness by gender, race, and region.     

On Inequality-Sensitive and Additive Achievement Measures Based on Ordinal Data

This paper, following earlier work on the measurement of inequality when only ordinal information is available, proposes an axiomatic derivation of a new class of inequality-sensitive and additive achievement measures. Use is then made of these indices to study health achievement in Europe, using information on self-assessed health in 30 countries, based on the European Health Interview Survey (wave 2).     

Measurement of export prices and changes in product quality

In this paper, the economic theory of index numbers is applied to the construction of industry-level export price indices and export quality indices. These indices are used to make consistent comparisons of export prices and qualities at the same or different points in time. Evidence of quality change over time was found to be an important phenomenon in explaining the variation of unit value indices over time and across countries for some European Union trade flows. About half of the unit value differences among destination countries can be explained by quality differentials. The quality-corrected price indices are potentially useful in any empirical application in which accurate measures of export prices are needed.The authors wish to thank Bienvenido S. Cortés for valuable discussion at the Forty-Eighth International Atlantic Economic Conference, October 7–10, 1999, Montreal, Canada.     

Measuring Social Polarization with Ordinal and Categorical Data

We examine the measurement of social polarization with categorical and ordinal data. We partition the society into groups on the basis of salient social characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, and we take into account the extent to which these groups are clustered in certain regions of an attribute's distribution. This is particularly useful in many contexts where cardinal data are not available. The new measures we propose are characterized axiomatically.     

Conventional and Islamic Banks’ Performance in the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries; Efficiency and Determinants

This paper investigates the cost efficiency levels of the banking sectors of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries for the period from 2001 to 2015 and provides a comparison of conventional and Islamic banks. We obtain measures of efficiency using a stochastic frontier model and the meta-frontier approach. The evidence demonstrates that Islamic banks are less efficient and have a weaker level of production technology than conventional banks. The cost efficiency of banks varies significantly across the six Gulf countries and over time. We adopt the results drawn from the meta-frontier model that allow to take into account the differences between the studied countries, and empirically examine the bank-specific, financial, macroeconomic, and political determinants of banking efficiency. The results provide evidence of the differential effects of the selected variables on the efficiency of conventional and Islamic banks. These variables affect the performance of the two types of banks in different ways and with different magnitudes.

     

Financial openness and financial development: an analysis using indices

This paper examines the link between financial openness and financial development through panel data analysis on advanced and emerging market countries. Using indices, financial openness together with institutional and educational variables explains a large part of the variation in financial development across countries and over time. Our analysis demonstrates that different indexing strategies serve to find better measures for financial openness and financial development in comparison with the individual indicators used in the literature. Our principal-component-type financial openness index conveys a positive effect on financial development independent from the lag structure or specifications used.     

Power laws and comparative advantage

Using a comprehensive international trade data set we document empirical Power Laws (PLs) for the distribution of the interaction between countries as measured by revealed comparative advantage. Using the recently developed estimator by Gabaix and Ibragimov (2011), we find strong evidence in favour of PLs along the time, country and sector dimension for three different levels of data aggregation. This finding is not predicted by any of the existing trade theories. The estimated PL exponents characterizing the distribution of revealed comparative advantage are stable over time but differ between countries and sectors. These differences are related empirically to country and sector characteristics, including population size, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and factor intensities.     

电子信息产业国内价值链省域比较优势测度及空间差异研究

为应对后疫情时代全球电子信息产业加剧的“比较优势陷阱”,中国亟需通过国内价值链省域比较优势的互补协同提升整体国际竞争力。在价值链产品内,基于垂直专业化分工框架,兼顾增值能力与劳动生产率两个维度,使用非竞争型投入占用产出模型,设计一个评测国家内部区域电子信息产业真实比较优势的新指标。结果表明,东部沿海省域比较优势强度与广度最为显著,内陆省域比较优势集中于上游能源型部门;制造业部门比较优势凸显,服务业部门比较优势相对薄弱;比较优势高省域集中度与低省域集中度的产业部门中,均存在整体比较优势强弱差异,其中,高省域集中度产业部门比较优势强度更高。     

Trade liberalisation and exchange rate pass-through: the case of textiles and wearing apparels

Studies on the relationship between exchange rates and traded goods prices typically find evidence of incomplete pass-through, usually explained by pricing-to-market behaviour. Although economic theory predicts that incomplete pass-through may also be linked to the presence of non-tariff barriers to trade, variables reflecting such a link is rarely included in empirical models. In this paper, we estimate a pricing-to-market model for Norwegian import prices on textiles and wearing apparels, controlling for non-tariff barriers to trade and shift in imports from high- to low-cost countries. We apply the cointegrated VAR approach and develop measures of foreign prices based on superlative price indices (including the Törnqvist and Fischer price indices) and a data calibration method necessary to approximate relative price levels across countries. Our measures of foreign prices thereby account for inflationary differences and varying import shares and price level differences (known as the China effect) among trading partners. We show that these measures of foreign prices, unlike standard measures used in the pricing-to-market literature, are likely to produce unbiased estimates of pass-through. Once the China effect is controlled for, we find little evidence that pass-through has changed alongside trade liberalisation.     

Schumpeterian and semi‐endogenous productivity growth explanations

This paper examines the nature and sources of productivity growth in South African manufacturing sectors, from an international comparative perspective. On panel data estimations, we find that the evidence tends to support Schumpeterian explanations of productivity growth for a panel of countries including both developed and developing countries, and a panel of South African manufacturing sectors. By contrast, semi‐endogenous productivity growth is supported for a panel of OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) manufacturing sectors. However, we also report evidence that suggests that sectors are not homogeneous. For this reason, time series evidence may be more reliable than panel data. Time series evidence for South Africa suggests that prospects for the sustained productivity growth associated with Schumpeterian innovation processes, is restricted to a narrow set of sectors. For the OECD manufacturing sectors, both semi‐endogenous and Schumpeterian growth finds support. Schumpeterian growth is present for a larger number of sectors than for South Africa, and is most prevalent in the North American economies.     

Ordinal vs cardinal status: Two examples

We demonstrate that in models where agents have concerns for status the model predictions can drastically change depending on whether status is modelled as an ordinal or cardinal magnitude. As a proof, we show that two well known theoretical findings are not robust to the substitution of ordinal status with cardinal status [Frank, R.H., The Demand for Unobservable and Other Positional Goods. American Economic Review, (75):101–116, 1985.] and viceversa [Clark, A. and Oswald, R.J., Comparison-Concave Utility and Following Behavior in Social and Economic Settings. Journal of Public Economics, (70):133–155, 1998.].     

Scale And Scope In Technology: Large Firms 1930/1990

We examine historical empirical patterns of change in corporate. technological scale and scope. Much literature on scale and scope by business and economic historians has conflated product markets and technology together. However, given the technologically complex environment of the late twentieth century, the relationship between scale and scope in production and products is not simple, and conflated discussions may be naive. Consequently we have two aims. Firstly, we wish to see if technological scale and scope follow the historical pattern of broader notions of scale and scope. Secondly, given increasing technological complexity, we consider whether the nature of corporate technological scope has changed over time.

Using data drawn from the University of Reading's patents database, we examine the technological activities in 32 of the world's historically largest patenting firms over the period 1930 to 1990. Shin-sham analyses based on panel-data regressions examine the different influences on technologicascope over time. A technological trend closely resembling that of broader notions of scale to scope is observable in most of the sectors. although it does not proceed uniformly. We also find, that whilst increases in corporate technological scope through diversification are not particularly linked to technological relatedness in recent times, they are periodically influenced by the rise of pervasive, fast-growing new technologies.