世界银行帮助内蒙古改善交通促进边贸

世界银行执行董事会批准向中国内蒙古交通和贸易走廊项目提供1亿美元贷款。该项目将通过帮助内蒙古自治区改善交通基础设施和物流,促进中俄、中蒙边境贸易发展,降低交通运输成本,增加外贸创收,提高内蒙古的收入水平。该项目的目标是充分利用交通基础设施促进发展通过内蒙古特别     

The relative impacts of banking,infrastructure and labour on industrial growth: evidence from Indian states

This article analyses the impacts of outreach of banking services, infrastructure penetration, and labour market rigidity on the growth of manufacturing industries across 14 major states in India in the post-liberalization period (from 1991–92 to 2002–3). It documents that the outreach of the banking sector as well as infrastructure penetration has a significant positive impact on the growth of industries. Interestingly, the counteracting effect of labour market rigidity does not appear to be significant, if the effects of infrastructure and banking services are controlled for. This article also assesses the relative magnitudes of the impacts of these three institutional factors on industrial growth.     

Globalization, telecommunications and trade

This article describes some characteristics of globalization, one of the most dramatic impacts of the information revolution. There is a need for a broad international agreement on trade in services, yet the changes in thinking that this demands are being hampered by old perceptions, particularly in telecommunications. Issues arising in the Geneva negotiations on trade in services are examined. Particular importance is attached to factoring the implications of the globalization process and the new telecommunications realities into national decision making, if governments wish to retain control over those decisions and their impacts.     

Aid econometrics: Lessons from a stochastic growth model

This paper evaluates the standard empirical methods employed in the study of foreign aid, when the data generating process is a calibrated stochastic growth model in which aid recipients make optimal investment and consumption decisions. When recipients receive a stochastic flow of aid and wish to smooth consumption, standard methods fail to distinguish between the response to transient and permanent aid shocks, and hence yield misleading results concerning the object of interest to policy makers: the long-run impact of aid.     

Information, trade, and derivative securities

Hellwig's (1980) model is used to analyze the value of improvingtrading opportunities by more frequent trading in the underlyingasset, or by trading in a derivative asset. With multiple tradingsessions, uninformed investors behave as rational trend followers,while more informed investors follow a contrarian strategy.As trading becomes continuous, Pareto efficiency is achieved.With trading in an appropriate derivative security, Pareto efficiencymay be achieved in only a single round of trading. All derivativeclaims are then priced on Black and Scholes (1973) principlesand, in the absence of further supply shocks, no trading willtake place in subsequent trading rounds.     

Culture, infrastructure and international health benefits delivery

When selecting a health insurance carrier for international employees, it is advantageous to recognize that valid assumptions made when selecting domestic benefits simply do not apply in the international realm and can lead to costly errors. This article examines some scenarios and cultural anomalies that invalidate commonly accepted domestic health insurance practices. It explores strategies for simplifying benefit design, providing access to quality care abroad, assessing costs, minimizing overseas risks and understanding the cultural impact on health care delivery.     

Unobserved investment,endogenous quality,and trade

A seller can make investments that affect a tradable asset’s future returns. The potential buyer of the asset cannot observe the seller’s investment prior to trade, nor does he receive any signal of it, nor can he verify it in any way after trade. Despite this severe moral‐hazard problem, this article shows the seller will invest with positive probability in equilibrium and that trade will occur with positive probability. The outcome of the game is sensitive to the distribution of bargaining power between the parties, with a holdup problem existing if the buyer has the bargaining power. A consequence of the holdup problem is surplus‐reducing distortions in investment level. Perhaps counterintuitively, in many situations, this distortion involves an increase in the expected amount invested vis‐à‐vis the situation without holdup.     

Microeconomic uncertainty,international trade,and aggregate fluctuations

The extent and direction of causation between micro volatility and business cycles are debated. We examine, empirically and theoretically, the source and effects of fluctuations in the dispersion of producer-level sales and production over the business cycle. On the theoretical side, we study the effect of exogenous first- and second-moment shocks to producer-level productivity in a two-country DSGE model with heterogeneous producers and an endogenous dynamic export participation decision. First-moment shocks cause endogenous fluctuations in producer-level dispersion by reallocating production internationally, while second-moment shocks lead to increases in trade relative to GDP in recessions. Empirically, using detailed product-level data in the motor vehicle industry and industry-level data of U.S. manufacturers, we find evidence that international reallocation is indeed important for understanding cross-industry variation in cyclical patterns of measured dispersion.     

Currency momentum,carry trade,and market illiquidity

This study empirically examines the effect of equity market illiquidity on the excess returns of currency momentum and carry trade strategies. Results show that equity market illiquidity explains the evolution of currency momentum strategy payoffs, but not carry trade. Returns on currency momentum are low following months of high equity market illiquidity. However, in the recent decade, illiquidity positively predicts the associated payoffs. The findings withstand various robustness checks and are economically significant, approximating in value to one-third of average monthly profits.     

Costly trade,managerial myopia,and long-term investment

The costly trade theory predicts that it is much more difficult to exploit long-term private information than short-term. Thus, there is less long-term information impounded in prices. The managerial myopia theory predicts that a variety of short-term pressures, including inadequate information on long-term projects, cause asymmetrically-informed corporate managers to underinvest in long-term projects. The introduction of long-term options called LEAPS provides a natural experiment to jointly test both theories, which are otherwise difficult to test. We conduct an event study around the introduction of LEAPS for a given stock and test whether corporate investment in long-term R&D/sales increases in the years following the introduction. We find that over a two year period of time LEAPS firms increase their R&D/sales between 23% and 28% ($125–$152 million annually) compared to matching non-LEAPS firms. The difference depends on the matching technique used. Two other proxies for long-term investment find similar increases. We find that the increase is positively related to LEAPS volume. We also find that the increase is larger in firms where R&D plays a larger and more strategic role. We test if a firm becomes less likely to beat analyst's quarterly earnings forecasts after LEAPS are introduced and find support for the hypothesis. These results provide both statistically and economically significant support for the costly trade and managerial myopia theories.     

Innovation,diffusion, and trade: Theory and measurement

What are the sources of economic growth? This paper presents a multicountry growth model of innovation and the adoption of foreign technologies through trade. The costs of both domestic innovation and adopting foreign innovations are estimated using data on innovation, output and trade. A decomposition of the sources of growth shows that technology adoption accounts for about 65% of “embodied” growth in developing countries. Developed countries grow mainly through domestic innovation, which explains 75% of their “embodied” growth. Counterfactuals show how growth rates and levels of income would change if countries faced the same barriers to adoption and research productivity.     

Government spending,the balance of trade and the terms of trade in British history

This paper investigates the relationship between government spending, the balance of trade and the terms of trade using early British data. A large open-economy intertemporal framework, in which Ricardian equivalence holds, predicts a larger effect of temporary government spending changes on the trade deficit than permanent ones. Further, a pure switch between debt and taxes should have no effect on trade flows. The results provide some support for these hypotheses, although they are sensitive to sample period and the method of decomposition of government spending. A negative relationship between government spending and the terms of trade is also found.     

The causal,linear and nonlinear nexus between sectoral FDI and infrastructure in Pakistan: Using a new global infrastructure index

This study explores the causal, linear, and nonlinear relationship between sectoral level foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows and infrastructure (transport, telecommunication, financial, and energy sectors) of Pakistan. Granger causality and autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration; suggest the presence of long-run bidirectional causality between infrastructure and FDI, while the nonlinear ARDL affirms the asymmetries in this connection. Results suggest that sectoral FDI inflows are important to enhance infrastructure in various sectors, both in the short and long-run. As improving infrastructure is vital to attracting FDI, results will be particularly useful to policymakers concerned about emerging markets.     

Monetary policy,accounting conservatism and trade credit

Using a sample of A-share listed firms in China during the 2003–2012 period,this paper investigates the effect of accounting conservatism on trade credit,taking...     

World trade patterns,economic disturbances,and exchange-rate management

This paper construct and analyzes a three-country stochastic model of world trade. the objectives of this paper are to investigate the propagation of economic disturbances worldwide and to analyze the nature of optimal exchange-rate management on the part of a single country faced with monetary and real disturbances accurring in all its trade patterns. The paper analyzes the roles of bilateral trade patterns, the type of underlying stochastic disturbances i.e. monetary vs real and transsitory vs permanent and of the optimality criterion, in determining the optimal exchange-rate regime.     

Stickiness, synchronization, and passthrough in intrafirm trade prices

About 40 percent of all U.S. international trades occurs between related parties, or intrafirm, such as trades between a parent and subsidiary of the same multinational corporation. This paper uses a transaction-level dataset that distinguishes arm's length from intrafirm trades to demonstrate that for differentiated products, intrafirm prices are characterized by (1) less stickiness, (2) less synchronization, and (3) greater exchange rate passthrough.     

Exchange risk, exposure, and the option to trade

Rather than impeding trade, increased exchange rate uncertainty may on average create trade as it implies a higher probability that ex post deviations from Commodity Price Parity will exceed tariffs and transportation costs. We demonstrate such an effect in a small-country, short-term model, under the alternative assumptions of perfect competition and of a monopolist trader-producer. The proofs rely on the fact that such firms' exposures can be replicated (and hedged) by standard options. Under partial monopoly scenarios, the effect of volatility is ex ante unclear, though. (JEL F31)