Export Promotion Policies and the Crowding‐out Effect in Developing Countries*

Critics of export promotion policies have pointed out a fallacy of composition, where what is viable for a small country acting in isolation might not be viable when pursued by a group of countries simultaneously. This paper investigates the crowding‐out effect of the fallacy of composition; that is, whether developing countries that specialize in exports of manufactured products compete and crowd out one another's exports. The results of fixed‐effects panel estimation suggest that developing countries are not crowding out one another's exports. Instead, they are crowding out Western European countries’ exports of manufactured products.     

Determinants of Female Fertility in Taiwan, 1966–2001: Empirical Evidence from Cointegration and Variance Decomposition Analysis*

This study investigates the determinants of the fertility rate in Taiwan over the period 1966–2001. Consistent with theory, the key explanatory variables in Taiwan's fertility model are real income, infant mortality rate, female education and female labor force participation rate. The test for cointegration is based on the recently developed bounds testing procedure while the long‐run and short‐run elasticities are based on the autoregressive distributed lag model. Among our key results, female education and female labor force participation rate are found to be the key determinants of fertility in Taiwan in the long run. The variance decom‐position analysis indicates that in the long run approximately 45percent of the variation in fertility is explained by the combined impact of female labor force participation, mortality and income, implying that socioeconomic development played an important role in the fertility transition in Taiwan. This result is consistent with the traditional structural hypothesis.     

Sources of Growth and Structural Change in the Vietnamese Economy, 1996–2003: A Computable General Equilibrium Analysis*

We use the MONASH‐VN model, a dynamic computable general equilibrium model of the Vietnamese economy, to investigate Vietnam's rapid growth and structural change over the period 1996 to 2003. We do this in two steps. First, we estimate changes in variables representing production technologies, consumer preferences, government policy and other structural features of the economy. Movements in these structural and policy variables are then used to explain the recent history of Vietnam's rapid growth and structural change. We find the most important sources of growth and change to be technical improvements, favorable shifts in foreign demand for Vietnamese goods and employment growth. Other important factors include movement in household preferences away from primary products and towards manufactures and services, expansion in agricultural land supply, and tax reform.     

Trade,the Staple Theory of Growth,and Fluctuations in Colonial Singapore, 1900–39

Our paper enquires into the nexus between trade, growth, and fluctuations in the British colony of Singapore during the early twentieth century. Hitherto, little quantitative economic history has been written on this great entrepôt of Southeast Asia due to a lack of data. We overcome this limitation by utilising the gross domestic product series recently constructed for the pre‐war period by Sugimoto. This comprehensive data set enables us to explore the relevance and applicability of the staple theory of export‐led growth to colonial Singapore through cliometric analyses. The results suggest that foreign trade had acted both as an engine of growth and a source of economic instability.