Budgetary-Neutral Fiscal Policy Rules and External Adjustment

Large external imbalances and fragile fiscal positions have emerged as major policy challenges for the euro area in the financial crisis. The paper analyses whether shifting government purchases between tradable and non-tradable goods could help reduce external fluctuations without large swings in the overall fiscal stance. The policy rules considered are budgetary-neutral in the sense that the overall level of government expenditure is kept constant. We compare the policy rules to fiscal devaluation as a strategy to reduce external imbalances and find that state-dependent changes in the composition of government purchases between tradables and non-tradables can stabilise excessive fluctuations in the event of economy-wide supply and demand shocks. Contrary to fiscal devaluation, the expenditure-shifting rule faces a trade-off between stabilising domestic activity and enhancing household welfare, on the one hand, and reducing excessive fluctuations in external positions, on the other hand. The excess volatility of domestic variables associated less volatility in the external position implies welfare losses for standard specifications of household utility. The adverse welfare effect is absent in the case of fiscal devaluation.     

Weltgetreidemarkt: Anhaltender Boom oder kurzfristige Spekulationsblase?

Zusammenfassung   Die Weltagrarm?rkte waren im letzten Jahr von stark steigenden Preisen gepr?gt. Wird diese Entwicklung durch fundamentale Faktoren gestützt oder handelt es sich um eine kurzfristige Erscheinung? Welche Rolle spielen dabei das Bev?lkerungswachstum und die Steigerung der Pro-Kopf-Einkommen? Was geht auf die Nachfrage nach biogenen Kraftstoffen zurück? Diese Fragen werden beispielhaft anhand des Weizenmarktes behandelt. Prof. Dr. Bernhard Brümmer, 39, ist Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Landwirtschaftliche Marktlehre am Department für Agrar?konomie und Rurale Entwicklung der Universit?t G?ttingen; Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ulrich Koester, 70, ist Emeritus des Lehrstuhls für Landwirtschaftliche Marktlehre an der Universit?t Kiel; Prof. Dr. Jens-Peter Loy, 44, lehrt in der Abteilung Marktlehre des Instituts für Agrar?konomie an der Universit?t Kiel und ist Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Marktlehre an der CAU Kiel.     

Single Market effects on productivity in the German insurance industry

The Single Market project of the European Commission was supposed to foster productivity growth in the financial service industry. We assess its consequences on productivity development in the German insurance industry, one of the largest insurance markets within the European Union, by applying Data Envelopment Analysis to a panel of German insurance companies. We estimate standard and bootstrapped efficiency scores for the years 1991 through 2006 and apply a test on scale efficiency based on bootstrapped statistics. Furthermore, we compute a Malmquist index and test for different types of productivity convergence across firms.     

Smallholder participation in vegetable exports and age‐disaggregated labor allocation in Northern Tanzania

Modern agricultural supply chains have been playing an increasingly important role in developing countries and have had significant effects on rural labor markets. This article analyses the effects of smallholder farmer participation in export vegetable supply chains in Northern Tanzania on both household hired labor demand and off‐farm labor supply, using an age‐disaggregated approach. In our sample, neither separability nor exogeneity of smallholder farmer participation in export supply chains can be rejected. Hence, we apply lognormal double‐hurdle models and find that participation in export supply chains positively affects households’ decision to hire labor from all age groups. We also find that it increases the unconditional overall level of hired labor demand, while the age‐disaggregated analysis shows that these effects mostly benefit rural youth. However, our sample does not allow us to establish statistically significant evidence of an effect on household off‐farm labor supply although the point estimates point to nonnegligible positive effect sizes.     

Heterogeneity of Long‐run Technical Efficiency of German Dairy Farms: A Bayesian Approach*

In parametric efficiency studies, two alternative approaches exist to provide an estimate of the long‐run efficiency of firms: the dynamic stochastic frontier model and the generalised true random‐effects model. We extend the former in order to allow for heterogeneity in the long‐run technical efficiency of firms. This model is based on potential differences in firm‐specific characteristics and in firms’ inefficiency persistence. The model is applied to an unbalanced micro‐panel of German dairy farms over the period 1999 to 2009. Estimation of long‐run technical efficiency and inefficiency persistence is based on an output distance function representation of the production technology and estimated in a Bayesian framework. The results suggest that heterogeneity in long‐run technical efficiency of farms is mostly attributed to discrepancies in farm‐specific factors rather than differences in farms’ inefficiency persistence. Farm size is positively related to long‐run technical efficiency while subsidies exert a negative effect on the long‐run technical efficiency of farms. Inefficiency persistence is found to be very high, but heterogeneity in this persistence is low.     

Scandinavia's monetary convergence with the European Community

In the twelve months preceding the conclusion by the EFTA countries and the EC of the agreement on the establishment of a common European Economic Area in October 1991, the three Skandinavian EFTA members-Norway, Finland and Sweden-decided to tie their currencies to the ECU. What objectives do these countries hope to achieve by this move? What effects is it likely to have?     

Alternative evolutionary theories: A historical survey

Our overview has the objective of making our study relevant to bioeconomists. The need for the ‘alternatives’ to the Synthetic Theory of Evolution in social-economic studies was substantiated, for example, by Colombatto (Journal of Bioeconomics, 5, 1–25, 2003), who maintains that the natural-selection theory is ‘ill suited’ to describing evolutionary processes in economics. He proposed an alternative ‘non-Darwinian’ approach by equating the ‘non-Darwinian’ approach with a definite version of neo-Lamarckism. Yet, as we will show, there is a palette of alternative approaches within and beyond the neo-Lamarckism. We hope to give bioeconomists more choice in their theoretical modeling and constructing of analogies between biology and economics. It will also be shown that in the light of suggested definitions the concept of ‘universal Darwinism’ recently discussed in bioeconomics makes little sense as a generalizing category. In addition, in the concluding part of the paper we demonstrate that the majority of alternative approaches are far from being pigeonholed as archaic and once and for all wiped off the theoretical landscape. On the contrary, in recent years one can observe some revival of interest in the theoretical ‘heresies’.      

Convergence,the “tax-state” and economic dynamics

Convergence, the “Tax State” and Economic Dynamics. — The paper analyses the welfare/efficiency relationship of taxation and empirically tests the relationship between taxes and economic dynamics for OECD countries. Since taxes are only one of the determinants of economic growth, in a first step the influence of other sources of or impediments to economic growth is analysed. This general model - which contains hypotheses about catching-up, the technological gap, human capital and inflation - is tested against a specific model in which the specific interest is in the role of taxes. For the group of the most important OECD countries taxation turns out to be growth-retarding.