The Effects of Remittances on Output per Worker in Sub‐Saharan Africa: A Production Function Approach

This paper uses a production function to examine the channels through which remittances affect output per worker in 31 Sub‐Saharan African countries from 1980 to 2010. Lagged remittances increase physical capital per worker, average years of schooling and total factor productivity, but the effectiveness of remittances varies with the income level of the recipient nation. Although remittances have increased both physical capital and total factor productivity among the upper middle income nations, among the lower middle income, they have increased only the physical capital. Meanwhile a reduction in institutional risk has encouraged investment and efficiency, but its relationship to the effectiveness of remittances has been inconclusive.     

Productivity Gains from Offshore Outsourcing: Evidence from the Chinese Manufacturing Industry

Using the Cobb–Douglas production function and vertical specialization share, the present paper measures the productivity spillover effects of offshore outsourcing in the Chinese manufacturing industry. We examine different production factors and the degree of openness by dividing the Chinese manufacturing industry into five major categories: capital‐intensive business, technological‐intensive business, labor‐intensive business, open business and non‐open business. The results show that offshore outsourcing is positively associated with productivity in the Chinese manufacturing industry as a whole, but less so in labor‐intensive industries and more in capital‐intensive industries. Moreover, the positive impact of outsourcing on productivity is slightly higher in open industries than in non‐open industries. These results shed light on the differential spillover effects of offshore outsourcing on productivity. Our findings suggest that outsourcing structure is important to China's long‐run competitive advantage. China's policy‐makers should encourage further offshore capital‐intensive and technology‐intensive activities and focus more on outward‐oriented offshore businesses.     

An Overview of the Proximate Determinants of Economic Growth in Indonesia Since 1960*

In this paper, we address two questions. First, what determined the growth of GDP per worker in Indonesia from 1960 to 2014? We examine Indonesia’s economic performance, using a growth accounting framework. We show that economic growth during the Soeharto era after 1975 was mainly determined by an increase in capital accumulation. Negative growth in total factor productivity (TFP) during the Asian financial crisis was more noticeable in Indonesia than in comparable ASEAN countries. In Indonesia, the contribution of TFP growth turned persistently positive after 1999. Second, what are the key determinants of the GDP per worker differences between Indonesia and the United States? Using data from the recently updated Penn World Table database and employing a levels accounting method, we find that the gap in physical capital deepening between the two countries is of declining importance in explaining the gap in labour productivity between Indonesia and the United States. We then compare our findings with data from the World Bank’s Changing Wealth of Nations 2018.     

Technology and the great divergence: Global economic development since 1820

The paper measures productivity growth in seventeen countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. GDP per worker and capital per worker in 1985 US dollars were estimated for 1820, 1850, 1880, 1913, and 1939 by using historical national accounts to back cast Penn World Table data for 1965 and 1990. Frontier and econometric production functions are used to measure neutral technical change and local technical change. The latter includes concurrent increases in capital per worker and output per worker beyond the highest values achieved. These increases were pioneered by the rich countries of the day. An increase in the capital-labor ratio was usually followed by a half century in which rich countries raised output per worker at that higher ratio. Then the rich countries moved on to a higher capital-ratio, and technical progress ceased at the lower ratio they abandoned. Most of the benefits of technical progress accrued to the rich countries that pioneered it. It is remarkable that countries in 1990 with low capital labor ratios achieved an output per worker that was no higher than countries with the same capital labor ratio in 1820. In the course of the last two hundred years, the rich countries created the production function of the world that defines the growth possibilities of poor countries today.     

On Persistent Poverty in a Rich Country

We examine differences in income within the United States, and the regions of persistent poverty that have arisen, using a newly assembled county‐level data set linking 19th century Census data with contemporary data. We identify the roles of current differences in aggregate production technologies and factor endowments, together with contributions of historical institutions, culture, geography, and human capital. We allow for possible cross‐county factor mobility via a correlated random effects GMM estimator and find evidence of significant regional differences in production technologies. Our decompositions of the poor/nonpoor income gap suggest that at least three‐fourths of the gap is explained by differences in productive factors. Persistently poor counties are different (and poorer) primarily because they have lower levels of factors of production, not because they use the factors they have less efficiently. Together, historical and contemporary human capital explain over half of the overall income gap between persistently poor and nonpoor counties.     

Free trade and income redistribution in some developing and newly industrialized countries

A competitive general equilibrium model of production is specified and the long-run comparative static elasticities of changing prices on factor prices are examined in eight developing and newly industrialized countries. Unskilled labor in these developing countries stands to gain from a program of global free trade characterized by increased manufacturing exports and falling prices of imported business services, while capital owners and skilled labor lose. Results are contrasted with developed countries, the United States in particular, where unskilled labor will lose while capital and skilled labor enjoy gains with global free trade.     

Government spending and the distribution of economic growth

In the United States, total government spending, and especially government social spending, has increased greatly over the last 50 years. What effect this has had on economic growth is a subject of intense debate among politicians, policymakers, and economists. However, there has been less attention paid to the distributional effects of government spending even though economic inequality has grown greatly over the last generation and much social spending is at least indirectly intended to reduce inequality. The effects of government social spending in the United States on growth in family income at deciles of the income distribution were estimated. The results suggested that social spending but not non‐social spending was likely to increase growth in family income per capita measured over 10‐year intervals. The largest effects of social spending were for deciles below the median income. At no point in the distribution does social spending have a negative effect.     

On the unimportance of machinery

Economists and economic historians tend to use the terms capital and machinery interchangeably, even though machinery rarely consitutes one-fifth and sometimes is as little as one-tenth of a nation's reproducible tangible assets. This habit can distort the way economists think and talk about important issues. In economic history, disproportionate attention to machinery helps explain why the “Habakkuk” debate, which has now spanned several decades, has been premised on the need to rationalize empirical regularities the opposite of those in need of explanation. In manufacturing and, indeed, in the economy in the aggregate, the United States was less, not more capital intensive than Britain in 1860.     

Economic Convergence in the African Continent: Closing the Gap

The paper attempts to analyse the conditional β‐convergence and its sources for 32 African countries over the period 1960‐2008. The augmented Solow model with both gross domestic product (GDP) per worker and per capita income is estimated using the dynamic system generalized methods of moments (GMM) technique with the panel data. This is the first study on the sources of conditional β‐convergence for African countries. According to the results of the augmented Solow model, income convergence rates are lower than those of GDP per worker. Moreover, total factor productivity convergence, human capital convergence and capital labour convergence are contributing towards the convergence of GDP per worker in Africa. This means that growth in the poorest African countries is being augmented by “catch‐up factor,” which is good news for them. However, convergence in terms of GDP per worker is not being fully translated into income per capita convergence. The demographic structure in the African continent with its record of persistent population growth has played an important role in lowering the income convergence of its countries.     

A test of prohibition's effect on alcohol production and consumption using crop yields

The effect of alcohol prohibition in the United States has been the subject of continuing debate. Due to a lack of data, one question that remains unanswered is the effect prohibition had on the actual production of alcohol. This article attempts to answer this question by estimating prohibition's impact on the yields of grains that constitute the principal inputs in alcohol production. Using a variety of data sources and exploiting the variation in timing of state prohibition law adoption, we estimate the effect of prohibition on several measures of crop production. Our preferred identification strategy compares contiguous counties in states with differing prohibition laws. Our findings suggest that state prohibition laws decreased the production of barley and may have increased the production of corn. Using these estimates, we calculate that prohibition decreased alcohol production, and by extension consumption, by at least 18 gallons per adult per year.     

FDI对我国制造业升级的影响研究——基于省级面板数据的实证

当前FDI流入我国增速已经放缓;然而,FDI流入高技术制造业的比重却正在提高。FDI流向正在发生的深刻变化将对我国制造业升级产生深远影响。在FDI流入总量及流向正发生深刻变化的新条件下,探讨如何更加合理有效地利用FDI,促推我国制造业升级,正成为急需探讨的新课题。本文运用1996~2014年中国省级面板数据,通过构建FGLS模型,对FDI影响制造业升级的效应进行了实证检验,结果表明：从全国层面来看,FDI对劳动密集型与技术密集型制造业发展都有明显的促推作用;而对资本密集型制造业的发展则存在较为明显的负向影响。从分地区层面来看,FDI促进了劳动密集型制造业从东部向中部地区转移,资本密集型制造业由东部向中、西部地区转移;此外,FDI还促进了东部地区技术密集型制造业占比提高。但是,FDI在西部对制造业的投资方向过于单一,主要集中于资本密集型制造业,这对我国西部地区制造业的长期发展不利。因而,要顺应FDI新变化,发挥政府宏观调控作用,更加合理、有效地利用好FDI。     

制造业部门技术水平比较研究——基于浙江地区与国内外制造业的分析比较

加快提升制造业技术水平,是实施国家创新驱动战略、建设创新型国家或地区的重要支撑。对反映制造业技术水平的三类指标研究综合评价表明,浙江等国内制造业各部门的技术水平,仅为美国等发达国家制造业的五分之一左右。未来需要加速物质资本、人力资本、社会资本三类资本积累,尤其要加快提升技术装备和技术引进水平,实现从粗放外延增长到集约内涵增长转变,重振区域制造乃至中国制造业。     

China,Like the US,Faces Challenges in Achieving Inclusive Growth through Manufacturing

For more than three decades the goal of becoming “the factory of the world” has been at the core of China's development strategy. This strategy, in combination with high rates of domestic investment and low rates of consumption, has made Chinese production the most manufacturing intensive in the world. But as its wages have risen, China's competitiveness in the most labor‐intensive manufacturing industries has eroded. Its ability to assemble products remains a major source of its exports, but it has also tried to shift toward more sophisticated value‐added production domestically. Chinese domestic spending has shifted away from investment toward consumption as citizens' income has grown. Like Americans, Chinese are also spending more on services than on manufactured goods. All of these changes are fundamentally altering the structure of China's production, reducing the role of manufacturing and increasing the skill levels of workers in manufacturing. This paper reviews the challenges posed by these developments for China's long‐term goal of achieving more inclusive growth. It presents evidence that the commonly held perceptions that Chinese manufacturing employment growth is robust are wrong. In fact, such growth has peaked and China is now following a pattern of structural change that is typical of a more mature emerging economy, in which the share of employment in manufacturing declines as workers are increasingly employed in services.     

The Relative Importance of Employer and Employee Effects on Compensation: A Comparison of France and the United States

Using individual data on compensation, matched with establishment and firm data on performance and inputs, we compare the French and American pay systems. The compensation measures are decomposed into components related to measured individual characteristics, establishment–enterprise effects, and a residual. In France, the compensation outcomes are more compressed than in the United States. For France, individual characteristics and establishment effects explain more of the variability in compensation outcomes than in the United States. The observable and unobservable components of compensation are identically correlated in the two countries. The relations among compensation components (individual and establishment) and firm performance outcomes (value-added per worker, sales per worker, and profit per unit of capital) exhibit some important similarities and differences between the countries. Higher paid workers, either because of individual characteristics or establishment effects, are employed in firms that are more productive. Higher pay due to enterprise heterogeneity is associated with higher profitability in France but lower profitability in the United States. J. Japan Int. Econ. December 2001, 15(4), pp. 419–436. Department of Labor Economics, Cornell University, 259 Ives Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853–3901, CREST and NBER; CREST-INSEE, 15, bd Gabriel Péri, 92245 Malakoff Cedex, France, CEPR and IZA; LAMIA-TEAM, Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 106–112, bd de l'Hôpital, 75647 Paris Cedex 13, France, and Crest; and Department of Economics, University of Missouri–Columbia, 118 Professional Bldg., Columbia, Missouri 65211. © 2001 Elsevier Science (USA).Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: J31, D21.     

“外转内”背景下浙江商贸流通业态结构优化与升级

自2008年以来,面对全球经济危机,欧美等发达国家经济下滑,依靠外单生产加工为主的浙江外销制造业企业面临利润缩水与发展转型,即许多外贸制造业企业已经试着将市场关注重点由外销转为内销,简称"外转内"。基于"外转内"背景,文章对浙江商贸流通业态结构构建了优化、整合与升级的模型和路径,并提出优化与升级的对策,这在一定程度上对解除浙江外销制造业企业产品的营销困境有转嫁与促进作用,对浙江整体商贸流通业结构的优化与升级有重要的现实意义。     

Do private capital markets insure regional risk? Evidence from the United States and Europe

A striking feature of international economic relations is the limited extent of intertemporal trade and risk-sharing among nations. This paper uses data on consumption, income, and production from regions of the United States to address the question of whether the limited participation of national economies in international capital markets is a fundamental aspect of economic relations among large geographic regions, or whether it is specifically an artifact of international economic relations. We conclude that capital flows among the regions of the United States are significantly larger than those across countries. However, such private markets still provide a relatively limited degree of insurance against regional fluctuations.     

Job security and work force adjustment: How different are U.S. and Japanese practices?

The paper compares employment and hours adjustment in Japanese and U.S. manufacturing. In contrast to some previous work, we find that adjustment of total labor input to demand changes is significantly greater in the United States than in Japan; adjustment of employment is significantly greater in the United States, while that of average hours is about the same in the two countries. Although workers in Japan enjoy greater employment stability than do U.S. workers, we find considerable variability in the adjustment patterns across groups within each country. In the United States, most of the adjustment is borne by production workers. In Japan, female workers, in particular, bear a disproportionate share of adjustment.     

全球价值链分工视角下的中美贸易摩擦透析

本轮中美贸易摩擦正呈现出愈演愈烈态势，基于全球价值链分工视角的分析，可以发现中美贸易摩擦不断升级的诱因主要包括：近年来中国制造在全球价值链体系中的竞争力明显提升，与美国的差距正逐渐缩小；中国经济社会发展对全球生产网络的依赖日益加深，在全球价值链体系中边缘化中国成为美国遏制中国发展的主要手段；为有效应对中美贸易摩擦，中国积极推动"一带一路"建设以拓宽发展空间。对于全球价值链分工及各国福利改进而言，中国的参与不可或缺，美国在全球价值链分工中边缘化中国的企图将难以实现。着眼于推动形成全面开放新格局，中国应以中美贸易摩擦为契机倒逼国内改革，积极应对中美贸易摩擦对国内供应链产生的冲击，加快完善外资管理体制，加快外贸领域结构调整。     

Equal Convergence? Convergence Patterns Among Immigrants by Occupation

This study examines the immigrant-native wage gap in the United States using 2019 Annual Social and Economic Supplement data from the Current Population Survey. Ordinary least squares regression analyses were used to estimate the wages of immigrants while controlling for human capital characteristics, sociodemographic factors, and time since arrival in the United States. The results demonstrate that the wage gap converges with more time spent in the United States, likely due to increased work experience and language proficiency, but does not completely diminish. Separate regressions are conducted for different occupational groups. Occupations are shown to be a large contributor to the differential, as wages differ significantly more in unskilled occupations such as manual labor or transportation. The possibility of labor market discrimination is explored as a reason for the wage gap, with the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition showing that only 68% of the wage gap can be explained by the included explanatory variables.