Poverty, Income Distribution and Policy Making

This paper deals with the key distributional issues arising from the regulation of the environment and the management of natural resources. The paper is divided into a section dealing with poverty and a section dealing with broader income distribution effects. Although there is much discussion of the linkages of poverty to environmental degradation, empirical studies establishing these linkages are few. The relationship is critically dependent on the institutional structures in the countries concerned and how they respond to changing environmental pressures. On the broader distributional impacts, the papers focusses on the analysis of ganiers and losers from environmental regulations. The analysis is complex because the direct incidence is not the same as the final incidence. Much of the work has looked only at the former. In addition, the political economy of regulation needs to pay greater attention to impacts on key and vulnerable groups; more so than can be done by looking at broad income bands.     

Geography and Poverty Traps

We test the view that the large differences in income levels we see across the world are due to differences in the intrinsic geography of each country against the alternative view that there are poverty traps. We reject simple geographic determinism in favor of a poverty trap model with high- and low-level equilibria. The high-level equilibrium state is found to be the same for all countries while income in the low-level equilibrium, and the probability of being in the high-level equilibrium, are greater in cool, coastal countries with high, year-round, rainfall.     

Policy for Poverty Alleviation and Income Redistribution with Quasi-Public Goods

This paper proposes a theoretical framework for a poverty‐alleviation program with quasi‐public goods and presents four main effects. First, this policy succeeds in self‐selection, which identifies low‐productive persons under imperfect information and allows them to receive at least the minimum income. Second, we can observe income redistribution by this scheme without any taxes. Third, the program contributes cost‐effectiveness in many cases. Finally, it makes clear that this policy is suitable, especially in areas where low‐income people are concentrated.     

Economic Growth and Income Support Policy in Australia*

This paper examines the growth in welfare spending in Australia over the 20 years from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. Particularly for pensioners and beneficiaries with children, the levels of benefit and high tax rates implicit in the tax and social security systems are shown to create disincentives over wide ranges of private income. A careful examination of the evidence indicates that more generous levels of benefits had a modest but significant part in the growth of unemployment since 1970. The paper concludes by suggesting that the efficiency costs of meeting society's distributional objectives can be minimized by targeting assistance to the most needy and by the careful use of income testing.     

Expectation Traps and Monetary Policy

Why is inflation persistently high in some periods and low in others? The reason may be the absence of commitment in monetary policy. In a standard model, absence of commitment leads to multiple equilibria, or expectation traps , even without trigger strategies. In these traps, expectations of high or low inflation lead the public to take defensive actions, which then make accommodating those expectations the optimal monetary policy. Under commitment, the equilibrium is unique and the inflation rate is low on average. This analysis suggests that institutions which promote commitment can prevent high inflation episodes from recurring.     

Poverty Traps, Indeterminacy, and the Wealth Distribution

We consider a one-sector growth model in continuous time with a production externality and endogenous labor supply. There is a continuum of households who have identical preferences but differ with respect to their initial wealth. We show that there exist economies such that an indeterminate steady state exists for some wealth distribution but not for others. A second result is that a redistribution of wealth may drive the economy from a steady state with strictly positive output to a poverty trap in which output converges asymptotically to zero. These results indicate that differences in the wealth distribution may be responsible for drastic differences in the long-run standard of living. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D31, D50, O41.     

Management Ability, Long-run Growth, and Poverty Traps

This study establishes an R&D-based growth model that includes the functional difference between labor and human capital in the production of goods. In our analysis, human capital is used by the managers in the manufacturing process. Such an allocation of human capital yields three possible steady states: endogenous growth, poverty traps, and multiple equilibria. Economies are sorted into these steady states according to the endowments of labor, human capital, and knowledge. Thus, the obtained steady states explain some economic growth patterns, such as polarization and leapfrogging of economies.     

Economic Convergence,Capital Accumulation,and Income Traps: Empirical Evidence

This paper examines the factors that increase the likelihood of economic transition to higher income status, thereby attempting to answer the question of why some economies move to a higher income country group while others do not. Using a quintile income distribution approach, we identify 62 economies that moved to a higher quintile income group in each decade from 1960s to the 2010s out of a sample of 182 economies. Our findings show that higher physical and human capital growth and oil revenues are significantly associated with a greater probability of transitioning to higher quintile income group, although their effects vary not only across income groups within a sample period but also across different periods. Our results indicate that economies that have attained substantial capital accumulation (either physical or human, or combination thereof) and/or are blessed with natural resources have avoided income traps and demonstrated a successful and often steady transition to higher income groups.     

Income Mobility, Temporary and Permanent Poverty

This paper incorporates poverty persistence in a measure of aggreg ate poverty over two-periods by decomposing the Foster et al . (1984) class of poverty measures into those temporarily in poverty and those in poverty in both periods. An additional weight is added to the permanent component in forming an aggregate poverty measure over both periods; this weight reflects the degree of poverty-persistence aversion. The effect on aggregate poverty of mobility between permanent and temporary poverty is found to be unambiguous only in the case of the headcount poverty measure. Simulations are used to investigate the relationship between poverty and mobility. The effects of two different types of mobility (random proportio nal income changes and a systematic regression towards or away from the median) are isolated     

Reconstructing the Balkans: Alternative Policy Approaches

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

宏观审慎政策与收入不平等

借助世代交替模型,得到宏观审慎政策影响收入不平等的理论机制,接着基于2000—2018年59国的非平衡面板数据,分析宏观审慎政策对收入不平等的影响。实证结果表明:(1)住房贷款价值比(LTV)上限与基尼系数呈负相关关系,说明实行降低LTV上限的宏观审慎政策对居民收入分配差距具有扩大作用,且扩大作用在新兴市场国家更为显著。(2)当LTV上限值较低时,降低LTV上限进一步扩大了收入不平等程度;相反,当LTV值较高时,降低LTV上限却减小了收入不平等程度,宏观审慎工具的政策效果呈现异质性特征。(3)将降低LTV上限的宏观审慎政策替换为提高存款准备金率等政策后,实证结论基本不变。实证结果在不同收入不平等变量、不同虚拟变量和不同面板模型下均表现出高度稳健性。对于我国而言,中国人民银行在制定宏观审慎政策时,应考虑政策的收入再分配效应,从而在确保政策有效性的同时,兼顾政策公平性。     

Mismatch between Material Deprivation and Income Poverty: The Case of Turkey

By employing cross-sectional data obtained from Survey of Income and Living Conditions for the years from 2007 to 2011, we analyze the identification problem of the poor by using both monetary and non-monetary measures. We classify the poor into the following categories: (i) poor in monetary and nonmonetary measures, (ii) poor in monetary measure only, (iii) poor in non-monetary measure only, and (iv) non-poor in both categories. We examine the determinants of each category by utilizing the probit model and find that the share of workers in adults — or the share of informal or agricultural workers — creates some disparities between poverty at a country and regional level.     

21世纪养老保险改革展望

世界银行为各国养老保险改革提供了大力支持,充当着这场运动的领导者角色。本文系统介绍了世界银行对养老保险改革的策略框架,主要包括最初的养老保险改革理念和世界银行已经提供的贷款情况,探讨了有关养老保险改革的方案设计与实施中出现的若干重要问题。目前世界银行继续鼓励各国构建多层次养老保险体系,同时主张各国的决策者应探索多样化的养老保险改革路径。任何国家要想成功推行多层次养老保险体系,相关的经济、政治及制度等方面的初始条件非常重要。