Policy uncertainty and aggregate fluctuations

This paper estimates the impact on the US economy of four types of uncertainty about (i) government spending, (ii) tax changes, (iii) public debt, and (iv) monetary policy. Uncertainty about government debt has a large and persistent effect on output, consumption, investment, consumer confidence, and business confidence. Uncertainty about tax changes also has detrimental consequences for real activity but the effect of spending and monetary policy uncertainty appears to be small. About 25% of output fluctuations are accounted for by policy uncertainty, with government debt making the largest contribution at longer horizons.     

The relationship between leader–member exchange and employee outcomes: review of past themes and future potential

Management Review Quarterly - Research on leader–member exchange (LMX) has gained momentum with a large number of studies investigating its impact on multiple levels. This article...     

Taking agricultural technologies to scale: experiences from a vegetable technology dissemination initiative in Tanzania

One of the widely suggested approaches to meet the increasing food demand of a substantially growing world population is sustainable intensification. We present a unique agricultural research and scaling programme in Tanzania, focusing on the key elements necessary for results related to: gender analysis; private sector engagement; social capital; improvement and adaptation; and programme performance monitoring and evaluation. Since 2014, more than 6000 farmers have benefited from either the adaptive research or the scaling component of the programme. Preliminary impact analysis results from six pilot locations indicate that programme participants realized significantly higher yields compared to non-participants. In addition to productivity improvements, introducing resistant and drought-tolerant elite vegetable varieties improved the resilience of the existing farming systems. Finally, considering the needs of both male and female participants had a positive impact on technology adoption rates and reach.     

Labor Market Dynamics: A Time‐Varying Analysis

This paper studies how key labour market stylized facts and the responses of labour market variables to technology shocks vary over the US postwar period. It uses a benchmark dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model enriched with labour market frictions and investment‐specific technological progress that enables a novel identification scheme based on sign restrictions on a SVAR with time‐varying coefficients and stochastic volatility. Key findings are: (i) the volatility in job finding and separation rates has declined over time, while their correlation varies across time; (ii) the job finding rate plays an important role for unemployment, and the two series are strongly negatively correlated over the sample period; (iii) the magnitude of the response of labour market variables to technology shocks varies across the sample period.     

Time‐varying yield curve dynamics and monetary policy

Monetary policy, the yield curve and the private sector behaviour of the US economy are modelled as a time‐varying structural vector autoregression. The monetary policy shocks of the early 1980s explain a large portion of the persistence of inflation and the level of the term structure. Changes in inflation expectations implied by the yield curve account for the persistence of the federal funds rate. Failures of the expectations hypothesis are rare, and coincided with the credibility building of Paul Volcker's Fed tenure at the beginning of the 1980s and the sequence of consecutive policy rate cuts around the time of the early 1990s recession. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The challenge of growth,employment and poverty in the South African economy since democracy: an exploratory review of selected issues

The welfare challenges in post‐apartheid South Africa are best represented by the triumvirate of poverty, income inequality and unemployment. In turn, the one generally accepted mechanism for overcoming these challenges is for an economy to realise sustained levels of high economic growth. Herein lie the essential coordinates of this article. We attempt first to describe the post‐apartheid experience with economic growth and its determinants. Secondly, we describe the nature of the welfare challenges that the society faces in terms of poverty, income inequality and unemployment. Finally, and perhaps most critically, we explore the various constraints on economic growth that may be hindering the realisation of higher standards of living amongst the population.     

The Political Economy of US Aid to Pakistan

Variations of bilateral aid flows are difficult to explain on the basis of official development objectives or recipient need. Based on the example of US aid to Pakistan, this paper suggests alternative political economic explanations, notably the relevance of ethnic lobbying and the relevance of US business interests. Time series regressions for the period from 1980 to 2002 and logistic regressions based on votes for the Pressler and the Brown Amendment confirm the significance of these political economic determinants. While in case of the Pressler Amendment, the direct influence of population groups of Indian and Pakistani origins seems to have played a predominant role, the role of ethnic business lobbies appears to have dominated in the context of the Brown Amendment. Time series analysis also provides some evidence for the impact of US business interests based on FDI and exports, but these effects appear to be comparatively small.     

Gender discrimination in education,health, and labour market: a voice for equality

The objective of the study is to examine the impact of gender discrimination in education, health, and labour market on economic growth in a panel of 20 high-income OECD countries for the period of 1980–2015. In addition, the study proposed an index of pro-equality growth, which is flared with education, health, and labour market initiatives to promote economic growth. The results show that gender parity index for educational attainment significantly promotes economic growth while health and labour market required substantial policy reforms to reduce health and labour market inequalities to sustain long-term economic growth. The results classified three countries as highly equitable growth, one country for equitable growth, two countries are moderate growth, four countries are less equitable growth while remaining 10 countries fall in the category of inequitable growth, where greater inequality promotes economic growth on the cost of education, health, and labour market inequalities.     

"All Decisions Are Top-Down:" Engendering Public Expenditure in Vietnam

Between October 1999 and June 2000 a joint government-donor working group undertook a public expenditure review in Vietnam that was supposed to use "gender issues" as a cross-cutting theme. The article discusses ways in which a gender analysis could have been incorporated into a review of public expenditure, and examines why this did not happen in the end. Flaws in the process reduced the scope of gender analysis. Institutional constraints on the part of both the government and the World Bank weakened the commitment to a gender analysis. More fundamentally, however, it is argued that the methodological approach of the World Bank rendered it incapable of investigating possibly unquantifiable macrostructural and mesoinstitutional determinants of individual behavior. It is further argued that the conceptualization of social institutions offered by the World Bank with regard to gender relations fails to adequately express the extent to which social institutions are gendered.     

Social Assistance Amidst the COVID-19 Epidemic in South Africa: A Policy Assessment

In an attempt to minimise the negative economic impacts of COVID-19 on vulnerable households the South African government allocated R50 billion in additional social assistance spending. The cash transfer package included a temporary increase in existing grants and introduced a new “Covid grant.” We assess the chosen package and compare it with an initial proposal to increase the Child Support Grant (CSG). Coverage, cost and welfare effects are calculated to measure the relative impacts in each case. We find that while a significant increase in the CSG delivers resources most progressively, the addition of the COVID-19 grant may potentially reach a much larger group of otherwise uncovered, vulnerable individuals. Critically, this extended coverage comes at a cost to the poorest households, via additional transfers to the upper income deciles. However, we identify several categories of vulnerable household groups which suggests that the workers most negatively affected by the pandemic are not necessarily those in the poorest households. The paper emphasises that social assistance to mitigate the consequences of COVID-19 should not be viewed necessarily as a standard poverty reduction exercise, but rather as an attempt to mitigate COVID-19-related income shocks for the vulnerable who were most negatively affected by the pandemic.