Migration and regional convergence in the European Union

We offer an empirical, econometric analysis of the impact of migration on the EU27’s NUTS2 regions in the period 2000–2007. We find that migration had no significant impact on regional unemployment in the EU, but affected both GDP per capita and productivity. A 1 percentage point increase in immigration to immigration regions increased GDP per capita by about 0.02?% and productivity by about 0.03?% on impact and by 0.44?% for GDP per capita and 0.20?% for productivity in the long run. For emigration regions an increase in the emigration rate leads to similar reductions of GDP per capita and productivity both on impact and in the long run. Since immigration regions are often regions with above average GDP, while emigration regions in Europe practically all have below average GDP, migration does not seem to promote convergence.     

Technological innovations and economic prosperity: A time series analysis

Using a univariate decomposition of per capita real GDP into its permanent trend and irregular components, the objective of this paper is to measure, rank, and compare the relative importance of the major technological innovations of the past two centuries as measured by their contribution to the growth rate of real per capita GDP. The paper uses the growth model and Beveridge and Nelson’s (1981) univariate decomposition method to measure and to compare the economic impact of random technological shocks, as measured by the average increase in real per capita GDP during sub-periods of major technological advancements.     

关于我国碳排放量及影响因素的实证分析

采用加权最小二乘法与向量自回归方法构建了在低碳经济环境下我国碳排放量及其影响因素之间关系的对比性实证分析模型,并进一步利用脉冲响应函数和方差分解探索影响系数大小和时期变化规律。研究表明,一方面,我国碳排放量与其影响因素之间存在一种长期均衡稳定的关系,其中最重要的因素是人均GDP、能源效率和产业结构,其次是人口数量和人均收入;另一方面,通过脉冲响应函数和方差分解得出我国碳排放量对人均GDP、能源效率和产业结构的冲击反应比较敏感,而对人口数量和人均收入水平随时期变化的响应则比较稳定,各变量影响系数在短期和长期存在明显差异。     

中国区域碳排放的因素分解模型及实证分析

本文测度了1995—2008年中国29个省市的碳排放量,分析了中国碳排放的区域差异,通过构建“LMDl分解模型”,将各地区人均碳排放分解为人均GDP、能源结构、能源强度等影响因素,同时将能源强度进一步分解为各产业能源强度和产业结构两类因素。研究结果表明：几类因素对各省市自治区碳排放增长的影响方向和影响程度存在差异,但从全国及东中西三大区域看,人均GDP是促进碳排放量增长的决定因素,能源强度下降是抑制碳排放增长的主要因素,而能源强度变化主要由工业部门能源强度的变化决定,产业结构变化通过促进能源强度的增加,间接推动了碳排放量的增长。能源结构推动了碳排放的增长,但影响程度较小。现阶段应根据各地区碳排放的区域差异及碳排放增长的影响因素,制定差异化的区域碳减排政策,包括：优化区域能源结构、降低区域能源强度、调整区域产业结构、积极推进区域低碳经济增长方式转变。     

Explaining Differences in Economic Growth among OECD Countries

This paper re-examines the determinants of growth of GDP per capita using panel data for OECD countries for the period 1970–1999 with data averaged over five-year periods from new perspectives. First, we introduce indicators of innovation input and technological specialization simultaneously into the empirical growth equation. Second, we employ the system-GMM (Generalized-Method-of-Moments) panel estimator that controls for (a) the possible specification bias when variables are highly persistent over time and (b) the possible simultaneity bias. We find a large and statistically significant impact of business enterprise R&D (BERD) intensity on GDP per capita with an elasticity of 0.22. The share of high-technology exports is also significantly positively related to GDP per capita, but the magnitude suggests that BERD is more important than technological specialization in explaining the level of GDP per capita. Furthermore, we find that the budget deficit and government consumption (both measured as percentages of GDP) and the volatility of growth are significantly negatively related to GDP per capita.The authors would like to thank Gunther Tichy for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. We also thank the participants of the Austrian economic association conference (NOEG) and the Empirical Industrial Organization workshop at the WU WIEN for helpful comments. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the OeNB Jubiläumsfonds Project and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Economy and Labor (BMWA).JEL codes: E62, H20, H50, O23, O40     

Questioning the empirical basis of the environmental Kuznets curve for CO2: New evidence from a panel stationarity test robust to multiple breaks and cross-dependence

This paper investigates the time series properties of per capita CO₂ emissions and per capita GDP levels for a sample of 86 countries over the period 1960-2000. For that purpose, we employ a state-of-the-art panel stationarity test which incorporates multiple shifts in level and slope, thereby controlling for cross-sectional dependence through bootstrap methods. Our analysis renders clear-cut evidence that per capita GDP levels are nonstationary for the world as a whole while per capita CO₂ is found to be regime-wise trend stationary. The analysis of country-groups shows that for Africa and Asia, per capita CO₂ is best described as nonstationary, while per capita GDP appears stationary around a broken trend. In addition, we find evidence of regime-wise trend stationarity in both variables for the country-groups consisting of America, Europe and Oceania. The results of our analysis carry important implications for the statistical modelling of the Environmental Kuznets curve for CO₂, since the differing order of integration in both variables for the world as a whole and for Africa and Asia calls into question the validity of panel cointegration techniques which assume that both variables are nonstationary and cointegrated with one another. Cointegration techniques would not be appropriate either for the case of America, Europe and Oceania which are characterised by per capita GDP and CO₂ emissions being stationary around a broken trend. Similar conclusions are reached when we analyse country-groups based on levels of development. Failure to properly characterise the time series properties of the data by not controlling for an unknown number of structural breaks and for cross-sectional dependence could be responsible for the fragility and lack of robustness surrounding the estimation of environmental Kuznets curves.     

Convergence in per capita health expenditures and health outcomes in the OECD countries

Our analysis of 19 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries over the period 1972 to 2006 provides evidence of convergence in per capita health care expenditures for 17 countries, while the US and (to a lesser degree) Norway follow a different path. A simple decomposition of per capita health expenditures reveals that the divergence of the US comes from the divergence of the ‘ratio of health care expenditures to Gross Domestic Product (GDP)’ component, while Norway's divergence is mainly caused by the ‘labour productivity’ component. Interestingly, our results suggest that convergence in per capita health expenditures among the 17 OECD countries does not lead to convergence in health outcomes. Finally, we extend our analysis to examine convergence in various determinants of health expenditures.     

Productivity and per capita GDP growth: The role of the forgotten factors

Average hourly productivity has often been used to draw conclusions on long run per capita GDP growth, based on the assumption of full utilization of labor resources. In this paper, we argue that a failure to recognize the potential significant wedges among the two variables - even in the long run - can be misleading. By applying both time series and panel cointegration techniques on data on 19 OECD countries, we fail to reject the hypothesis of the absence of a long run common stochastic trend among the two variables in the period 1980-2005. Furthermore, we apply a simple decomposition of GDP growth into five variables, including some related to the supply-side and demographics, so to verify the single contributions to income growth and variance over our period of interest. We conclude that variables that have been so far absent in the growth literature indeed have a non-negligible role in explaining the dynamics of long run per capita GDP growth. In particular, these “forgotten factors” (that we identify with the employment and the activity rates and a demographic ratio) matter more in better performing economies, where we also highlight that productivity has been less important in determining GDP growth than in relatively bad performers.     

Ecological footprint inequality across countries: The role of environment intensity,income and interaction effects

Recently, White (2007) analysed the international inequalities in ecological footprints per capita (EF hereafter) based on a two-factor decomposition of an index from the Atkinson family (Atkinson, 1970). Specifically, this paper evaluated the separate role of environment intensity (EF/GDP) and average income as explanatory factors for these global inequalities. However, in addition to other comments on their appeal, this decomposition suffers from the serious limitation of the omission of the role exerted by probable factorial correlation (York et al., 2005). This paper proposes, by way of an alternative, a decomposition of a conceptually similar index like Theil's (1967) which, in effect, permits clear decomposition in terms of the role of both factors plus an inter-factor correlation, in line with Duro and Padilla (2006). This decomposition might, in turn, be extended to group inequality components (Shorrocks, 1980), an analysis that cannot be conducted in the case of the Atkinson indices. The proposed methodology is implemented empirically with the aim of analysing the international inequalities in EF per capita for the 1980–2007 period and, amongst other results, we find that, indeed, the interactive component explains, to a significant extent, the apparent pattern of stability observed in overall international inequalities.     

Beyond GDP: an analysis of the socio-economic diversity of European regions

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to analyze the socioeconomic diversity of the European Union (EU-28) regions from a dynamic perspective. For that purpose, we combine a series of exploratory space-time analysis approaches to multiple Factor Analysis (MFA) applied to a large range of indicators collected at the NUTS-2 level for the period 2000–2015 for the EU-28. First, we find that the first factor of MFA, interpreted as economic development (ECO-DEV), is spatially clustered and that a moderate convergence process is at work between European regions from 2000 to 2015. Second, when comparing these results with those obtained for Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, we show that the convergence pattern detected with GDP per capita is more pronounced: ECO-DEV adjusts slower over time compared to GDP per capita. Third, pictures provided by the remaining interesting factors, capturing educational attainment, population dynamics and employment, are very different.     

Nonlinearity and the Unit Root Hypothesis for African Per Capita Real GDP

Once described as an epic center of growth tragedy, African nations have lately achieved relatively rapid growth rates, which have raised hopes that the continent is finally on the path to economic convergence with other emerging economies. However, there is a need to establish whether stabilization policies for the purpose of enhancing the GDP are effective in African countries. One of the means of examining the effectiveness of these policies is through the investigation of the unit root properties of per capita GDP in the continent. This study aims to add to the existing papers on GDP in African countries by investigating the non-stationarity of per capita GDP in 52 African countries, while using a newly proposed nonlinear unit root test. The results suggest that per capita GDP follows the non-stationarity process in half of the entire sample.     

洱海流域城乡经济发展与洱海湖泊水环境保护的实证分析

以云南大理市洱海及其流域为例,通过建立湖泊水质指标演变与流域人均GDP增长的计量模型,对环境库兹涅茨曲线(EKC)进行新的检验发现:基于时间序列数据的洱海水质指标与流域人均GDP的拟合曲线,与环境库兹涅茨曲线相比较呈现了不同特征和形状:既有经典的倒U型的曲线,也有U型、N型和同步型的曲线。倒U型的曲线表明洱海治理措施的有效性;U型、N型和同步型的曲线表明湖泊面源污染和富营养化控制的复杂性,湖泊面源污染和富营养化控制需要寻求的新解决思路和多种措施的配合。在借鉴国外经验和国内有价值的研究成果的基础上,本研究将有利于通过结构调整对面源污染从源头实施总量控制,推进"工程治污"与"结构控源"措施的优化与配合,辅助湖泊水环境的规划与管理及决策。     

Global value chain and growth convergence: Applied especially to China

We propose a new convergence potential indicator for standard growth convergence regressions: the global value chain (GVC) position index, measured by the contribution of high-skilled labour in total domestic value added. Our convergence indicator can avoid the lagged dependent variable problem discussed in Barro (2015 and 2016) and deliver more accurate forecasts for China’s GDP growth than GDP per capita does. Using the GVC position index, we predict that China’s growth potential remains at 7–8% between 2010 and 2015, while the predictions using GDP per capita as the convergence potential indicator are much lower.     

Ageing, Optimal National Saving and Future Living Standards in Australia

Making allowance for the ageing structure of the population, this paper calculates the levels of optimal national saving and future living standards for Australia for the period 1999–2050. For this period, the optimal saving response to the ageing of the Australian population is for national saving to increase from its current level by 2.7 per cent of GDP by the year 2017 and then to decline to the year 2050. The implied growth of living standards is 1.20 per cent per year. Reduced immigration would reduce the rate of growth of living standards but reduced fertility would not.     

Population Ageing and Projections of Government Social Outlays in Australia

This paper makes new projections of government social outlays for Australia. The calculations suggest that government social outlays will increase considerably as a percentage of GDP over the next 50 years, by 7.3 per cent of GDP in the base case. This is a greater increase than that found by previous investigators. Over 60 per cent of this increase will occur between 2011 and 2031, the years when the baby boom generation retires. The major contribution to this increase will have come from increased government outlays on social security. Lower rates of net immigration are shown to yield an even larger increase in the percentage of government social outlays in GDP. The paper also considers the disincentive effect of taxation and the effect of in-creasing the age of retirement. However, notwithstanding the trends suggested by the projections, the paper argues that there are a number of reasons to be sanguine about the implications of ageing on the share of government outlays in GDP.     

中美两国工业化进程中铜消费指标分析

工业化进程与资源消耗密切相关,GDP或人均GDP可用来衡量一个国家的工业化进程。本文以5年为一个时间段分析了中美两国历史上单位GDP铜消费量(T)的变化,发现中国1960～2005年间单位GDP的铜消费量并未出现明显的上升或下降趋势;美国1929～2005年间单位GDP的铜消费量基本上呈较明显的下降趋势,在20世纪20～40年代T值在高位持续了一定年份,不过自1941年以后T值逐步下降,单位GDP的铜消费量降低了81%。GDP的年增长率(g)和单位GDP铜消费量的年下降率(t)是影响铜消费量变化的两个重要参数,对应不同的单位GDP铜消费量年下降率的假设,文章估算出未来中国经济增长与铜消费指标间的关系以及单位GDP铜消费量降低的百分数,提出了一些实现铜消费减量的措施。最后,给出了中美两国工业化进程中的铜消费量与GDP、人均铜消费量与人均GDP间的关系曲线,总结出铜消费的一些规律。     

An empirical analysis of the relationship between economic development and population growth in China

China has experienced a dramatic demographic transition since the latter half of the twentieth century, and thus, assessing the global economic implications is an important issue. This article uses time-series data on China to estimate the determinants of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. According to the results of the presented co-integration analysis, population has a significantly negative impact on GDP per capita, while savings rate, total factor productivity and degree of industrialization have significantly positive impacts on GDP per capita. These results suggest that the share of the working-age population relative to the total population does not have a strong influence on GDP per capita. Therefore, the contribution of the working-age population to economic growth might not be as large as previously assumed. It is also possible that an increase in savings, remarkable industrialization and rapid technological progress have all stimulated economic growth in China greatly.     

Is Asian per capita GDP panel stationary?

The goal of this paper is to examine whether per capita GDP for 15 Asian countries is panel stationary. We apply a panel test for stationarity that allows for multiple structural breaks developed by Carrion-i-Silvestre et al. (Econ J 8: 159–179, 2005). Our main findings are: (1) when we apply conventional tests, such as the ADF and KPSS univariate tests without structural breaks, we find little evidence for stationarity; (2) when we apply the KPSS univariate test with multiple structural breaks, we find evidence of stationarity for 10 out of 15 countries; and (3) when we apply the KPSS panel test with multiple structural breaks, we find overwhelming evidence of panel stationarity of per capita real GDP for different panels of Asian countries.      

Peaks vs Components

We analyze the cross‐national distribution of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and its evolution from 1970 to 2009. We argue that peaks are not a suitable measure for distinct convergence clubs/equilibria in the cross‐country distribution of GDP per capita, because the number of peaks is not invariant under non‐linear strictly monotonic transformations of the data such as the logarithmic transformation. Instead, we model the distribution as a finite mixture, and determine its number of components via statistical testing. We find that the number of components in the cross‐country distribution changes from three to two in the mid 1990s.     

Trade and regional growth in Spain: panel cointegration in a small sample

In this article, we test for the existence of a relationship between per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and trade, for 15 Spanish Autonomous Communities between 1988 and 2004, using a panel cointegration methodology. In particular, we implement several panel unit root tests (Maddala and Wu, 1999; Levin et al., 2002; Im et al., 2003) and panel cointegration tests (Pedroni, 1999, 2004), with a special attention to their behaviour in a small sample. We also develop a Seemingly Unrelated Regression Estimation (SURE) residual based test, in order to explicitly take into account the cross regional correlation pattern. Appropriate confidence intervals are estimated with a sieve bootstrap designed for our small time sample, preserving the dependence structure among cross sectional units. Our cointegration tests reject the existence of a significant relationship between GDP per capita and exports. However, we do find some evidence of a significant relationship between GDP per capita and imports or with total trade.