Is social expenditure responsible for recent rise in public debt in OECD countries?

In developed economies, social expenditure is alleged to cause the rise in public debt over the last three decades. With dynamic panel data of 34 OECD countries from 1980 to 2014, we find robust evidence that the rise in public debt is not attributable to social expenditure.     

Culture,financial crisis and the demand for property,accident and health insurance in the OECD countries

Culture has been known to play an important role in explaining differences in consumption behaviour across countries. Yet, we know very little how it affects spending on non-life insurance products. This paper attempts to shed some light on how cultural characteristics impact the demand for property, accident and health insurance, focusing on the OECD countries in the period 2000–2017. We find, via the system generalized method of moment estimations, that cultural characteristics such as individualism, long-term orientation, masculinity and uncertainty avoidance were the drivers of the expenditure on property insurance, whereas long-term orientation, uncertainty avoidance and hypometropia explained accident and health insurance spending across the OECD countries. In the presence of the global financial crisis, cultural effects on property insurance spending turned out to be relatively minor, with the exception of individualism. These findings provide valuable information for non-life insurance companies, consumers and policy makers in the OECD countries.     

Road safety determinants in low and middle income countries

The objective of this article is to summarize and review the literature on the determinants of road traffic injuries and fatalities, to identify the relevant research gaps in particular for low and middle income countries. We also present a cross-country analysis of the determinants of road traffic injuries and fatalities that take into account a wide range of potential environmental, economic and social factors. The present study focused on differences based on the level of development. The goal was to identify relevant commonalities that may assist in the creation of road safety policies common to countries at a similar level of development. The countries were divided according to the level of gross national income per capita, and these income-level groups were the primary units of interest. The results presented here focus on the differences by income level.     

Testing the asymmetric effects of exchange rate pass‐through in BRICS countries: Does the state of the economy matter?

This paper investigates not only the question of whether there is exchange rate pass‐through (ERPT) but also the extent to which the pass‐through is asymmetric or state‐dependent in the BRICS countries. Using monthly data from 1999:M1 to 2019:M12 and non‐linear smooth transition vector autoregressive (STVAR) model, our results provide evidence of period‐specific ERPT between the upper and lower regime periods, governed by the selected transition variables. The results further suggest that the pass‐through of exchange rate is higher when the economy is experiencing large appreciations and expansions as well as large depreciations and recessions. Theimplication for these findings is that ERPT is strongly affected by the state of the economy.     

The development trinity: How regional integration impacts growth,inequality and poverty

Developing countries today have become more active participants in regional trade agreements. This raises questions about how the benefits of integration are distributed, and the extent to which lower‐income countries are able to capture development gains. Historically, such impacts have been difficult to identify with precision. This paper seeks to address this gap by empirically analysing the impact of regional integration on development, particularly the effects on growth and welfare. Using both bilateral and regional integration measures, we show that the ability to capture gains from integration varies across developing country regional groups, with developing Asia benefiting on par with developed countries. The findings in the paper indicate that trade and trade policy play an important role in reducing inequality and poverty in developing countries. It also shows that regionalism can function as a channel to make multilateralism a more adept way of addressing national challenges.     

The effects of oil price shocks on inflation in the G7 countries

This study examines the effects of three types of oil price shocks on inflation in the G7 countries with a new method of isolating oil price shocks. Based on monthly data from January 1997 to January 2019, we find that each oil price shock has the largest effect on U.S. inflation among the G7 countries and each country’s response to oil price shocks is different. Moreover, a rolling-window analysis shows that supply shocks, demand shocks and risk shocks have dynamic effects on inflation. The effect of supply shocks on inflation is strong before the financial crisis, but weakens during the crisis. However, the effect of demand shocks increases sharply in this time. The effect of risk shocks mainly occurs during the financial crisis and the European debt crisis. In addition, this study uses two ways to verify the robustness of the results. Our empirical results have important implications for policymakers and manufacturers, since the results provide a good explanation for the response of inflation in the G7 countries to the oil price shocks from different sources.     

International sanctions’ impact on energy efficiency in target states

This paper investigates the impact of international sanctions on energy efficiency by employing the panel fixed effect as well as average marginal effect from the Tobit model via data on 30 sanctioned states over the period 1996–2015 with international sanctions including unilateral, plurilateral, U.S., EU, UN, economic, and non-economic cases. Overall, we find that the imposition of unilateral sanctions leads to a 0.067% decrease in energy efficiency, but that of plurilateral sanctions positively contribute to energy efficiency in the case of the full sample of countries. Moreover, the imposition of UN sanctions has a greater decrease on energy efficiency in the target states than the 0.042% reduction of energy efficiency when the sanctionist is the U.S. For robustness, empirical results indicate that the imposition of plurilateral sanctions results in a drop of energy efficiency in Islamic countries, but an increase in non-Islamic countries, while there are also negative shocks induced by the imposition of EU sanctions on energy efficiency in Asian countries, but not for non-Asian countries. We also consider endogenous problems and dynamic specification by using indicator variables and System GMM. In summary, our empirical findings provide policy suggestions for those sanctioned countries about how to maintain energy efficiency when facing international sanctions.     

Smooth breaks and nonlinear mean reversion in real interest parity: Evidence from East Asian countries

This study aims to explore the empirical validity of the real interest rate parity (RIP) hypothesis for East Asian countries using Japan as the base country. To this end, we employ the recently proposed unit root tests of Christopoulos and Leon-Ledesma that account for both multiple smooth structural breaks of unknown form and nonlinear mean reversion in the series. Our empirical results uncover overwhelming evidences in favor of the RIP hypothesis for the whole countries in our sample. More specifically, through a Fourier approximation, it is observed that all real interest rate differentials display a mean-reverting behavior around an infrequently smooth-breaking mean, with the breaks being in accordance with the financial reforms and economic crises witnessed by the countries. Moreover, the degree of mean reversion appears to vary nonlinearly with the size of real interest rate appreciations and depreciations.     

Firm financing and growth in the Arab region

This paper documents how firms in Arab countries use equity, corporate bond and syndicated loan markets to obtain financing and grow. Working with a new dataset on issuance activity in domestic and international markets and firm performance, the paper finds that capital raising through these markets has grown rapidly since the early 1990s and involved an increasing number of firms. Whereas the amounts raised in equity and loan markets (relative to gross domestic product) stand well relative to international standards, bond issuance activity lags behind. However, bond financing has gained importance over time. Equity issuances take place primarily in domestic markets, whereas bonds and loans are mostly issued internationally, display long maturities and entail low levels of credit risk. Issuing firms from the Arab region are very large compared to international standards. They also tend to be larger, faster growing and more leveraged than non-issuing firms in Arab countries.     

Foreign direct investment in OECD countries: a special focus in the case of Greece

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is considered as an important instrument for economic development all over the world. The aim of this paper is to examine the FDI inflows determinants for 24 OECD countries. To this end we employ annual data from 1980 to 2012 for a series of potential FDI determinants that have been identified as the most important by the relevant literature. Our empirical strategy employs both the standard fixed effects panel as well as a dynamic panel approach. The empirical findings highlight the importance of market size, trade openness, unit labor cost, schooling, taxation, gross capital formation, institutional variables, and ROA/ROE as significant FDI determinants. In the case of the dynamic panel model those FDI inflows determinants are not uniform for all country groups. Additionally, the results indicate that corporate tax rates clearly affect FDI attractiveness. This finding is robust when testing different countries subgroups. The present study has important policy implications indicating the factors that host economies should place emphasis on in order to attract FDI inflows. Policy makers should not only pay attention to the corporate tax rate level but they should also design a simple, stable and transparent taxation system that minimizes the relevant business risk.