Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country*

For their empirical evaluation, several active research programs in economics and political science require data on ethnic groups across countries. Ethnic group, however, is a slippery concept. After addressing conceptual and practical obstacles, I present a list of 822 ethnic groups in 160 countries that made up at least 1 percent of the country population in the early 1990s. I compare a measure of ethnic fractionalization based on this list with the most commonly used measure. I also construct an index of cultural fractionalization that uses the structural distance between languages as a proxy for the cultural distance between groups in a country.     

Distance and trade: Disentangling unfamiliarity effects and transport cost effects

This paper provides evidence supporting Grossman's (Comments on Alan V. Deardorff, Determinants of bilateral trade: Does gravity work in a neoclassical world?. In: Jeffrey A. Frankel (Ed.), The regionalization of the world economy. Chicago: University of Chicago for NBER; 1996) claim that not only transport costs but also unfamiliarity can explain the negative correlation between geographic distances and bilateral trade volumes. A gravity model that controls for as many natural causes of trade as possible reveals that countries high in uncertainty-aversion (based on Hofstede's survey) export disproportionately less to distant countries (with which they are presumably less familiar). More important, this result is mainly driven by differentiated products, not by products with international organized exchanges or with reference prices. For transport costs alone to explain such a trade pattern, one would have to assume that distance-related ad valorem transport costs are higher when a trade route originates from a high uncertainty-aversion country, which is unlikely. This trade pattern is easy to explain, however, if one accepts that geographic distance is a proxy for unfamiliarity and that exporters in high uncertainty-aversion countries are more sensitive to informational ambiguity. A further result is that high uncertainty-aversion countries trade less and thus grow poorer in the long run, which suggests that cultural factors are as important as geographic ones in determining trade openness and prosperity.     

Borders and Growth

This paper presents a framework to understand and measure the effects of political borders on economic growth and per capita income levels. In our model, political integration between two countries results in a positive country size effect and a negative effect through reduced openness vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Additional effects stem from possible changes in other growth determinants, besides country size and openness, when countries are merged. We estimate the growth effects that would have resulted from the hypothetical removal of national borders between pairs of adjacent countries under various scenarios. We identify country pairs where political integration would have been mutually beneficial. We find that full political integration would have slightly reduced an average country's growth rate, while most countries would benefit from a more limited form of merger, involving higher economic integration with their neighbors.     

我国文化产业对经济增长影响的实证研究

本文首先使用灰色关联度方法分析了文化产业对经济增长的影响;然后,以同样的方法分析文化产业对三大产业的影响并作比较;在此基础上,进一步从文化产业的核心层、外围层、相关层对经济增长的影响进行了比较分析;最后,利用新古典经济增长模型对文化产业中投资、劳动和创新对经济增长的影响进行了测度分析。结果发现,文化产业对经济增长有较大的影响力;文化产业对第三产业的带动作用尤为明显;文化产业中的相关层对经济增长的影响最大;文化产业创新对经济增长具有巨大的拉动作用。研究结果表明,重视文化产业中文化制造业的发展,推动文化创新,对拉动经济增长具有重要的意义。     

Impact of social media on economic growth – evidence from social media

This article attempts to investigate the impact of social media (SM) on economic growth. Using information obtained from memberships to social networks, we find that SM has a negative and significant impact on economic growth. This provides evidence in favour of our hypothesis that SM increases the search costs for information and also increases the substitution effect from labour to leisure thereby producing a negative impact on growth.     

Where Did All the Growth Go? External Shocks, Social Conflict, and Growth Collapses

This article argues that domestic social conflicts are a key to understanding why growth rates lack persistence and why so many countries have experienced a growth collapse since the mid-1970s. It emphasizes, in particular, the manner in which social conflicts interact with external shock on the one hand, and the domestic institutions of conflict-management on the other. Econometric evidence provides support for this hypothesis. Countries that experienced the sharpest drops in growth after 1975 were those with divided societies (as measured by indicators of inequality, ethnic fragmentation, and the like) and with weak institutions of conflict management (proxied by indicators of the quality of governmental institutions, rule of law, democratic rights, and social safety nets).     

Relative consumption, economic growth, and taxation

This paper studies the influence of consumption externalities in the Ramsey model. In contrast to the recent literature, a quite general specification of preferences is used and the concept of the effective intertemporal elasticity of substitution is introduced. We give conditions for the observational equivalence between economies with consumption externalities and externality-free economies. An additional key result is that there exist several types of instantaneous utility functions in which the decentralized solution coincides with the socially planned one in spite of the presence of consumption externalities. The conditions for optimal taxation are also derived.     

社会资本、金融发展与经济增长--基于中国东中西部省际数据的实证检验比较

社会资本对理解转轨情境下的当代中国金融发展与经济增长问题十分重要。采用中国东、中和西部的省际面板数据研究中国转轨时期不同制度水平下社会资本、金融发展及其联合效应对经济增长的影响。实证研究表明,正规金融的发展促进了经济增长,而社会资本对中国经济增长则具有显著的负影响。社会资本与正规金融发展的联合效应在东部和西部地区有利于经济增长,但非正规金融与社会资本的联合效应则不利于经济增长,并且制度越完善,这种负面效应越明显。因此,在深化制度改革和金融发展的同时,应注重社会资本结构优化和平衡,规范非正规金融发展。     

社会资本视角下的中国金融发展与经济增长关系——基于1997-2008年省际面板数据研究

本文分析了社会资本与金融发展对经济增长的资本积累和技术创新效应,并利用我国31个省（市）1997-2008的面板数据,对社会资本、金融发展与经济增长的关系进行了实证研究。结论表明：社会资本对我国经济增长具有明显的促进作用,而金融发展却阻碍了经济的发展,社会资本与金融发展的互动效应对经济增长起着推动作用。最后本文从政府应注重投资社会资本的角度提出了相关的政策建议。     

Conspicuous consumption, economic growth, and taxation

Commodities do not only serve the purpose of satisfying direct needs in the production and consumption process. Some of them are also used to display social status and to affect the position of an individual in society. The paper looks at status-seeking activities in an economic-growth context. Two questions are asked. Does status-seeking behavior accelerate economic growth? And: should capital accumulation be subsidized to correct for the status externality? The answers to both questions are ambiguous.     

广西库区移民土地淹没长期补偿政策研究

1986年以来,我国水库移民安置普遍实行“前期补偿、后期扶持”的政策,随着社会经济的发展,其弊端日益凸现,需要研究出新的更适应实际情况的方法和政策。近年来,广西在水库移民安置方面,坚持从实际出发,总结经验,开动脑筋,集思广益,创造性地实施淹没土地的长期补偿政策,走出了水库移民安置经济补偿的新路子。     

论经济增长与社会发展的失衡

本文研究了快速增长的中国经济中经济增长与社会发展的失衡问题,认为失衡会严重影响中国经济社会的健康发展。失衡的表现是多方面的,失衡的原因在于单纯的经济增长主义、经济政策与社会政策的混淆和政府与市场功能的错位。本文的结论是应按照转变经济发展方式的要求校正失衡。     

社会资本在经济增长中的贡献——以黑河流域张掖市为例

从社会资本概念出发,将社会资本分为结构型和认知型。利用调查问卷形式定量测度了黑河流域10县区的社会资本,构建了包含社会资本要素在内的经济增长模型,考察了黑河流域2004年10县区经济增长和社会资本之间的关系,以及2002～2004年张掖市5县区社会资本对经济增长贡献率的变化,定量测算了社会资本在经济增长中的贡献。这对定量验证社会资本在经济增长过程中的作用具有重要意义。     

经济转型期我国社会保险与经济增长关系的实证分析

随着社会保障制度在世界范围内的建立和实施,对社会保险与经济增长之间关系的研究也成为颇具争议的焦点问题。本文基于新的经济环境视角,采用经典回归模型进行分析的结果表明,社会保险基金支出和经济增长之间长期存在双向正向的关系,通过不断完善社会保险制度有利于提高社会保险制度对经济增长的正向激励效应。