South Africa: Macroeconomic challenges after a decade of success1

More than halfway through the decade, the South African economy has done very well. This report asks whether such achievements provide grounds for complacency. In particular it discusses the current account challenge in light of the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGI‐SA) program. Our assessment is that a cautionary note on the need to reduce external imbalances is needed. We provide policy recommendations to minimize the negative impact of a possible sudden stop of capital inflows. On the consistency of ASGI‐SA program, we note that, given South Africa's recent employment and productivity performance a large investment program would be required to deliver the desired growth rates. In our view this imposes a large burden on public investment and on the current account itself.     

Inflation targeting in emerging market and transition economies: Lessons after a decade

Starting in the early 1990s, several emerging market and transition economies adopted inflation targeting (IT). In this paper we discuss a number of issues that arise in this context: (a) the definition of IT, (b) the role of preconditions for IT, (c) the use of intermediate exchange rate targets, and (d) the specification of inflation targets. Our overall conclusion is that, suitably modified, IT is a useful policy strategy for EMEs.     

Sri Lankan households a decade after the Indian Ocean tsunami

This study estimates the causal effect of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on household consumption and income in Sri Lanka 8 years after the event, using a difference‐in‐differences methodology and extensive household survey data. The analysis finds a strong association between the area‐wide tsunami disaster shock and increases in household income and consumption in the long term. The increase in consumption is much smaller than the observed increase in income; while the increase in income is mostly observed in nonagricultural wage income (and a decline in agricultural income). We also find that households in high‐income regions and lower‐damage districts experienced a much better recovery, in terms of income, than those in poorer regions or those districts that experienced more destruction. Deviating from the common observation on short‐term adverse impacts of catastrophic disasters in low‐ and middle‐income countries, these results are suggestive of a potential for long‐lasting and more successful recovery scenarios. Still, Sri Lanka received a very large amount of external assistance post‐tsunami—an amount that may not be replicable elsewhere. It is likely that this massive inflow of assistance, further helped by the end of the armed conflict in 2009, has contributed significantly to this relatively successful recovery.     

转轨与发展：俄罗斯的10年

2001年结束了俄罗斯后共产主义转型，实现宏观经济稳定增长，制定、通过一系列法令，在现代俄罗斯历史上国家第一次有了议会多数的政府。这些进展是俄罗斯在后工业时代形成与市场民主相应制度中重要步骤，也是未来几年发挥社会经济战略优势对当前经济政治形势挑战的必要前提。     

Agriculture: The next decade

So long as a very large section of rural producers continues to operate miniscule holdings, crop raising activity by itself is not going to resolve the poverty problem. It is maintained that in a country like India where the production base of the large majority of the cultivators is very narrow, even a 4% per annum growth in crop production will leave at least 30% of the rural households below the poverty line in year 2000. The basic problem is to bring this section of the producers in the mainstream of economic growth. Several alternative strategies are examined in this paper. The development of high-value, labor intensive, supplementary occupations emerges as the only feasible alternative. The success of this strategy depends on creating infrastructure facilities in the countryside and organizing homogeneous groups of small producers. The latter is necessary to impart the requisite strength to the disadvantaged sections to enable them to interact with the delivery system on equal footing.     

Shadow pricing market access: A trade benefit function approach

Appropriate assessment of the social value of market access is at the core of a broad range of inquiries in trade research. We propose a new approach based on a trade benefit function to obtain the shadow value of net imports. Our approach is in keeping with well-established trade welfare measurement techniques, for the trade benefit function is dual to the standard trade expenditure function. This dual relation further allows for a direct retrieval of the shadow values of net imports from the trade benefit function. The operationality of our approach is demonstrated in a series of applications and simulations.     

Welfare from a benefit viewpoint

Summary Individual welfare is most naturally measured in terms of individual utility but this has the well-known disadvantage that utility levels of different consumers cannot be meaningfully compared. This difficulty is traditionally avoided by using various willingness-to-pay measures, such as compensating and equivalent variation. These measures are based on price changes. This paper develops alternative welfare measures using willingness-to-trade concepts as originally proposed by Dupuit (1844). These measures are based directly on commodity bundle changes. These welfare measures can be represented as integrals under certain inverse demand functions.An important property of the proposed welfare measures studied here is that they can be meaningfully aggregated to form overall welfare measures. These measures in turn directly quantify a compensation criterion. It is shown that competitive prices provide a first-order approximation to the welfare measures. Furthermore a second-order approximation can be found by forming a suitable aggregation of the individual second-order effects.Finally, it is shown that the representations for consumer welfare as integrals under inverse demand curves can be extended to the aggregate measures as well. This then provides a complete complement to traditional measures based on price changes.This research was supported by Grant SES-9022881 from the National Science Foundation. The author wishes to thank Andrew Yates for valuable suggestions on this paper.     

Optimal auditing of social benefit fraud: a case study

Empirical Economics - The aim of this paper is to study the effect of different audit strategies on fraud in one particular social benefit system in Sweden. The efficiency of different audit...     

Knowledge management systems in support of disasters management: A two decade review

Humans are increasingly being challenged with numerous forms of man-made and natural emergency situations. Emergencies cannot be prevented, but they can be better managed. The successful management of emergency situations requires proper planning, guided response, and well-coordinated efforts across the emergency management life cycle. Literature suggests that emergency management efforts benefit from well-integrated knowledge-based emergency management information systems (EMIS). This study presents a systematic review of papers pertaining to the application of knowledge-driven systems in support of emergency management that have been published in the last two decades. Our review presents two major findings. First, only limited work has been done in three EMIS-knowledge management system (KMS) subdomains: (i) definition, (ii) use, and (iii) methods. Second, only limited research has been done in embedding roles in KM systems. We highlight role alignment to the 12 fundamental roles, as called for by Turoff et al. (2004), in the context of creating dynamic systems in aid of emergency management efforts. We believe that these two findings warrant the attention of the research community.     

A model of benefit and tax share discrimination by a monopoly bureau

This paper integrates the theory of demand for publicly provided goods in a democracy with the theory of bureaucratic supply in order to develop a model of benefit share and tax share discrimination by a monopoly bureau. The demand side of the political market is based on a utility maximizing model of voter behavior with voters' demands aggregated through a majority voting process. The supply side of the political market is based on a budget maximizing model of bureaucratic behavior. The bureau is assumed to possess monopoly power as a result of either its control over benefit shares or tax shares and, hence, implicit tax prices or its control over budget proposals placed on the agenda. Different degrees of discrimination are examined and in each case the equilibrium of the model yields a total budget for the bureau as well as distributions of benefit shares or tax shares across voters.     

Long-term care insurance matures as a benefit

Forty-eight percent of U.S. businesses now offer long-term care insurance (LTCI) coverage, an increase of 15% since 1998. As more organizations realize the added value of LTCI in the employee benefit package, they have also found that motivation to buy varies with employee financial standing, gender and age, and that targeted employee education as part of retirement planning is essential.     

Introduction to “Economic and Financial Governance in the European Union after a decade of Economic and Political Crises.”

ABSTRACT

This paper offers the Introduction to the Special Issue “Economic and Financial Governance in the European Union after a decade of Economic and Political Crises.” We introduce the five papers. We distill three important lessons they offer for EU integration.     

Mildly ill/backup child care: a benefit for employees and employers

As the number of working parents continues to grow, many companies are shifting toward an environment that supports family needs. Mildly ill and backup child care are key tools that companies can use to recruit and retain employees as well as a way to curb unscheduled absences.     

The societal benefit of a financial transaction tax

We provide a novel justification for a financial transaction tax for economies where agents face stochastic consumption opportunities. A financial transaction tax makes it more costly for agents to readjust their portfolios of liquid and illiquid assets in response to liquidity shocks, which increase both the demand for and the price of liquid assets. The higher price improves liquidity insurance and welfare for other market participants. We calibrate the model to U.S. data and find that the optimal financial transaction tax is 1.6% and that it reduces the volume of financial trading by 17%.     

Patent disclosure requirements and benefit sharing: A counterfactual case of Morocco's argan oil

This article uses the seemingly promising case of Morocco's argan oil to assess the value of patent disclosure requirements (PDRs) as a policy instrument aimed at improving the sharing of biodiversity benefits. After introducing the disclosure requirements debate and discussing relevant features of the argan oil case, I construct a simple counterfactual by asking: “How would PDRs have changed benefit sharing in the argan oil case?” From this case, three practical considerations emerge that shed a realistic, if cautious, light on the marginal value of PDRs as a benefit sharing mechanism: (1) PDRs require an accompanying national biodiversity regime but their relative value is inversely proportional to regime strength (2) PDRs should be assessed based on the additional compliance incentives they provide and median, not blockbuster, patent values and (3) the alternative to no PDRs and no regime is not zero benefits. While these considerations are inherently country-specific, PDRs should generally be assessed at the margin rather than in vague conceptual and aggregate ways.     

Long-term care insurance: an essential employee benefit

Growing numbers of employers are embracing long-term care insurance (LTCI) as an important new addition to their employee benefits package due to aging baby boomers, tax favorable legislation, the need for employee retention and rising costs of care. Even the best retirement plans can be gutted by the high costs of long-term care. The authors identify key components of LTCI and offer guidelines for selecting an LTCI company.     

Tightening a welfare system: the effects of benefit denial on future welfare receipt

We derive Local Average Treatment Effect estimates of the impact of welfare benefit denial on future receipt using a unique experiment involving reassessment of some applicants who were originally slated to receive benefits. We find evidence of considerable heterogeneity among applicants. Our results support a model with a peripheral group who exhibit scarring effects from being granted benefits and a core group who do not. The core group moves quickly back onto welfare when they are denied benefits. Even for the peripheral group, benefit denial has intermediate term, but not permanent, impacts.     

MNT: an innovative employee-friendly benefit that saves

In an effort to address the rising cost of health care within employee and retiree populations, many large employers are turning to an innovative health care solution: the registered dietitian and medical nutrition therapy and prevention. Research and case histories show the effectiveness of this approach.