Production, trade, prices, exchange rates and equilibration in large experimental economies

We study market equilibration in laboratory economies that are larger and more complex than any that have been studied experimentally to date. Complexity is derived from the fact that the economies are “international” in economic structure with multiple input, output, and foreign exchange markets in operation. The economies have twenty-one markets and due to the fact that they have roughly fifty agents, the economies are characterized by several hundred equations. In spite of the complexity and interdependence of the economy, the results demonstrate the substantial power of the general equilibrium model of perfect competition to predict the direction of movement of market-level variables. Empirical patterns in the convergence process are explored and described.     

Economic complexity,human capital and economic growth: empirical research based on cross-country panel data

Economic complexity reflects a country’s production capabilities and plays an important role in economic growth. This article measures the economic complexity of 210 countries using the method of reflections, and investigates the impact of economic complexity and human capital on economic growth. The measurement results show that there are significant differences regarding the level of complexity among countries. High-income economies have higher complexity than low- and middle-income economies. The empirical findings demonstrate that economic complexity and different levels of human capital have positive effects on long- and short-term growth. A positive interaction effect on economic growth exists between economic complexity and human capital. In addition, secondary education as a proxy for human capital has a relatively greater positive direct effect and a much stronger interactive effect with complexity on economic growth. In addition, the magnitude of the interaction effect between economic complexity and human capital on long- and short-term growth increases as the revealed comparative advantage threshold grows.     

Does connectedness improve SMEs’ access to formal finance? Evidence from post-communist economies

Evidence suggests that a disproportionately greater share of formal finance is channelled to large enterprises in emerging economies, limiting the flow of appropriately-financed small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Market and information imperfections are conventionally seen as major causes of this misallocation. However, the role of political factors in affecting the distribution of formal finance has become more widely acknowledged in recent times. Our analyses of SMEs in post-communist economies also show that measures of political connectedness improve the chances of receiving bank credit and that the benefits of these links are stronger for well-established and larger SMEs.     

Volatility transmission between stock and foreign exchange markets: a connectedness analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper empirically investigates volatility transmission among stock and foreign exchange markets in seven major world economies during the period July 1988 to May 2018. To this end, we first perform a static and dynamic analysis to measure the total volatility connectedness in the entire period (the system-wide approach). Second, we make use of a dynamic analysis to evaluate the net directional connectedness for each market. To gain further insights, we examine the time-varying behaviour of net pair-wise directional connectedness during the financial turmoil periods experienced in the sample period Our results suggest that slightly more than half of the total variance of the forecast errors is explained by shocks across markets rather than by idiosyncratic shocks. Furthermore, we find that volatility connectedness varies over time, with a surge during periods of increasing economic and financial instability.     

The myth of decoupling

The decoupling hypothesis is the idea that business cycles in emerging market economies have become more independent from business cycles in advanced economies in recent years. Decoupling essentially amounts to a structural break in the degree of business cycle interdependence between the two groups of economies, and it can be tested as such. We develop an innovative measure of business cycle interdependence based on the Euclidean distance, available at the annual frequency, which allows for a proper test for a structural break in a graphical setup. We also make use of a standard econometric test. Both approaches point to the same conclusion: there has been no decoupling in recent years. If anything, the degree of business cycle interdependence has become stronger.     

Technological versus Pecuniary External Economies: The Former Should Rule the Roost

The paper endeavors to illustrate that though the existing literature emphasizes the dynamic role of Scitovskian pecuniary external economies to account for the growth of innovations, highlighting particular types of market interdependence, such interdependencies can just highlight quasi-rent-led static adjustments that do not ensure an endogenous growth of innovations; the possibility of the growth of innovations remains exogenous. In this context, the present paper highlights the importance of division of labor-led dynamic technological external economies that ensures the endogenous growth of innovations, underlining the need of reinterpretation of Allyn Young in a broader Kaldorian-Keynesian perspective. In this perspective, finance-led investment in more productive opportunities not only supports increases in market size but also begets further investment in (still) more productive opportunities. This understanding provides a more dynamic conceptualization of Keynesian pecuniary external economies that are driven by Youngian technological external economies.     

Democracy and Economic Growth in an Interdependent World

We model dynamic interdependence in cross‐country economic growth processes by allowing it to vary according to democratic distance among economies. Stochastic distributional dynamics and temporal effects of democracy on economic growth are studied, and spatial variation in economic growth is explored. Among important results, democratic poverty trap is found to exist indicating the possibility of persistence of (un)stable democratic equilibria at different levels of democracy. Our cross‐sectional regression evinces that democracy has exerted significant growth‐enhancing effect and that the democratic distribution has steadily shifted locus from low‐level to high‐level equilibrium. Our spatial analysis of democracy‐economic growth nexus provide evidence of significant dynamic spatial autocorrelation and complementarity among countries' growth processes. Finally, it is demonstrated that the relevance of geographical proximity in facilitating interdependence in economic growth is overshadowed by relational proximity.     

Emerging patterns of multinational enterprise operations in developed market economies: evidence and policy

In their attempt to adapt to the extreme flexibility requirements of the current international competitive environment multinational enterprises have enriched their menu of means for international expansion with many forms of minority equity investments and nonequity interfirm alliances. The rapid proliferation of these new means of international operation has opened a Pandora's box for governments; the increased internationalization of business in a large number of manufacturing industries has certainly decreased the possibilities for the successful implementation of strictly internally focused economic policies. The fact that this internationalization is a bottom-up procedure (firms reacting to market conditions) and that its causes seem only to be intensifying in the foreseeable future has conviced governments of developed market economies to accept the resulting global interdependence as a rather permanent feature of international competition and try to accomodate national priorities accordingly. Economic interdependence among nations can be a real solution for healthy development should it be strengthened through tailoring that maintains independence.     

Economic reforms and human development: evidence from transition economies

Do market-oriented economic reforms result in higher levels of human well-being? This article studies the impact of macro-level institutional and infrastructure reforms on the economic, educational and health dimensions of human well-being among 25 transition economies. We use panel data econometrics based on the LSDVC technique to analyse the effects of market-oriented reforms on the human development index (HDI), as a measure of human well-being, from 1992 to 2007. The results show the complexity of reform impacts in transition countries. They show that institutional and economic reforms led to positive economic effect and significant impacts on other dimensions of human development. We find some positive economic impacts from infrastructure sectors reforms. However, not every reform measure appears to generate positive impacts. Large-scale privatizations show negative effects in health and economic outcomes. The overall results show the importance of the interaction among different reform measures and the combined effect of these on human development.     

Money as Social Exergy

Synopsis It has been proposed that open thermodynamic systems will act to dissipate available energy gradients by self-organizing into coherent structures that, with time, evolve and develop into nested hierarchies – panarchies – that adapt to internal and external changes according to a characteristic adaptive cycle. This paper seeks to apply these ideas in the purely societal realm by investigating the role of money in economic systems. Money represents the value embodied in goods; a value that is separate from the exact nature of those goods. We suggest that money thereby liberates the ‘free value’ of economic desire and that this free value has properties analogous to energy. The result is the self-organization of structures and systems (‘econosystems’) that dissipate this ‘free value’. Econosystems act at different scales, and nested levels of econosystems form a panarchy, having effects that can be observed. In particular, it appears that money facilitates the creation of relationships between econosystem actors, increasing the connectedness of the econosystems that envelop those actors. We have identified a phenomenon whereby freed social value (i.e. money) can aggregate, or pool, at a larger econosystem scale in structures such as banks. These pools act as gradients that actors at the neighborhood scale can exploit for self-organization in the econosystem. Thus, econosystem actors appear to be freed from thermodynamic constraints by using money as a means of self-organization. However, because of these pools of aggregated social exergy, connectedness is increased at the larger scale of the econosystem. The potential consequence of this dynamic is that money may act to push larger scale econosystems toward a state of heightened vulnerability to collapse, while freeing smaller scale actors from apparent constraints. In this way, we propose that money acts to skew information feedback loops between econosystem actors and larger scale structures such as economies and ecosystems.      

STRATEGIC EQUILIBRIA IN A MODEL OF ECONOMIC GROWTH WITH INPUT INTERDEPENDENCE

Two countries face a strategic interdependence in producing intermediate goods. Producing these intermediate goods requires both domestic capital and another imported intermediate good. Individually, both economies determine a balanced growth path by taking into account this interdependence in different grades of awareness. By allowing for strategic interactions in the analysis, we adapted a two‐agent dynamic setting and find an interior Markov perfect equilibrium as well as an open‐loop equilibrium reflecting these different degrees of reaction. We find that main results resemble each other but growth rates will be higher when strategies are dynamically updated.     

A New Approach to Identifying Structural Development in Economic Systems: The Case of the Queensland Economy

Recently, some economists have come to view economic development as a process of ongoing structural change which has self-organisational features. What is required is evidence concerning the self-organisational character of economic development. In other words, is economic growth associated with growth in the complexity of its structure and with a parallel rise in organisational interdependence? An extended version of qualitative input-output analysis, termed Minimal Flow Analysis (MFA), is used in this paper to analyse the structural linkages and changes that have occurred in the Queensland economy over the last two decades. The MFA evidence confirms that there has been a steady increase in the complexity of the Queensland economy. Economic coordination has occurred, to an increasing extent, through market intermediation. From a self-organisational perspective, it is clear that the Queensland economy has followed a rapid and coherent developmental path, marked by the emergence of bonded structures in its core and increasing complexity on its periphery.     

Fancy Bitcoin and conventional financial assets: Measuring market integration based on connectedness networks

We investigate the relationship between Bitcoin and conventional financial assets from a perspective on the connectedness of asset networks. We adopt the method of measuring connectedness proposed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2009, 2012, and 2014) in a VAR system to study the dynamic interdependence between returns in Bitcoin, stocks, oil, and gold. We find that the connectedness between bitcoin and conventional assets is weak. The separation of positive and negative returns in the Bitcoin market shows the existence of an asymmetric pattern of the spillover effects between Bitcoin and conventional assets. A rolling window analysis finds that although Bitcoin prices experience a rising link to other financial assets, the magnitude is proven to be moderate. However, connectedness via negative returns is much stronger than via positive ones and exhibits a clearly increasing trend in recent periods. Our results in application are generally robust to other popular cryptocurrencies, such as ETH and Ripple. The findings presented in this paper have important implications for financial market participants, policymakers, and researchers in light of projected increases in the adoption of Bitcoin, as well as the rapid development of cryptocurrency.     

The quality and quantity of bank intermediation and economic growth: evidence from Asia Pacific

We investigate the impact of the quantity and quality of bank intermediation on economic growth across 14 Asia-Pacific economies over 2003–2015. Measures of bank shareholder value efficiency as well as profit and cost efficiency are used as indicators of intermediation quality. We also employ measures of liquidity creation (fat and nonfat) as a proxy for the quantity of bank intermediation. Our main finding is that the quality of bank intermediation (enhanced credit allocation) is a driver of economic growth in developed Asia-Pacific economies, whereas it is the quantity of bank intermediation (capital accumulation) that positively influences growth in developing nations. From a policy perspective, our findings suggest that policymakers in developed nations should concentrate their efforts on reforms that enhance bank efficiency. Second, reforms that stimulate capital accumulation should be encouraged in developing economies because this is the main channel that spurs economic growth.     

An analysis on economic opportunity

Although economic opportunity is considered as a latent variable, it can serve as another factor in promoting growth and development. Through the construction of an economic opportunity index, this article identifies the extensity and intensity channels through which economic opportunity is created. Data on 24 variables for 184 world economies for the period 2000 to 2010 are collected for the empirical analysis. The methodology involves the use of principal component analysis in constructing three indices for the parametric and nonparametric regression analyses. The country sample is divided into OECD and non-OECD economies so as to examine their different performances. Extensity seems to be the more important channel to all economies, but for non-OECD economies, a higher performance in intensity can enrich the effect of extensity on economic opportunity.     

Can trust effects on development be generalized? A response by quantile

While the beneficial effects of social trust on economic performance have been largely recognized, we analyze whether these effects can be generalized for economies at different stages of economic development. Contrary to previous studies on this issue based on average effects (mostly considering ordinary least squares estimations), we follow a quantile regression approach that enables us to capture heterogeneous effects of trust for different development levels. By considering data for 80 countries, and using trust indicators from five different waves of the World Values Survey (WVS), our results by quantile indicate that trust is not relevant for the poorest economies, showing the existence of a social poverty trap. In addition, results suggest that the impact of trust on income decreases as an economy becomes richer. This would suggest not only that trust benefits cannot be generalized for all countries, as some previous studies have proposed, but also that the extent of its implications are heavily dependent on the level of development.     

Dynamics between energy,output, openness and financial development in sub-Saharan African countries

This study aims to establish the connection between energy use, economic output, financial development and trade, based on the panel data of 15 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries during the period from 1983 to 2010. One full main panel and two subpanels were created by incorporating low-income and middle-income countries. The panel cointegration test results indicate a long-run relationship between the variables. The mean group (MG) estimators show that energy consumption, financial development, capital and international trade have significant impacts on economic output. In the case of middle-income countries, the Granger causality analysis reveals that rising economic output leads to higher energy consumption, but this is not true vice versa. This means that energy conservation measures are unlikely to have adverse impacts upon economic output. On the other hand, there is a complementary relationship between financial development and energy consumption. In this case, energy conservation measures should be critically analysed and implemented, so as not to have an unfavourable impact on financial development. In regard to low-income economies, there is no relationship between energy use and any of the other variables mentioned. Thus, a reduction in energy consumption has little or no significant impact on output, financial development, capital and trade.     

Implications of Economic Interdependence for Endogenous Wage Indexation Decisions

This paper shows how economic interdependence affects the indexation decisions of atomistic wage setters in an environment in which monetary authorities do not observe stochastic disturbances before making their policy choices. If stochastic disturbances are common across countries, interdependence has no effect on equilibrium indexation choices in identical countries. However, if disturbances are country specific, numerical simulations show that interdependence is likely to reduce equilibrium indexation choices relative to a small open economy. We also show that indexation choices may be either strategic complements or strategic substitutes, but that strategic complementarity becomes more likely as the degree of interdependence rises.     

Foreign direct investment and economic performance in transition economies: evidence from China

Based upon a production function with FDI representing updated technology from more developed, market‐based economies, this study tests the hypothesis that FDI contributes to the economic growth of less developed, transition economies via technology updating, using data for 30 Chinese provinces from 1985 to 2000. It is found that provinces with a higher FDI ratio experienced faster technology updating and more rapid economic growth. The study suggests that less developed, transition economies should encourage FDI from more developed, market‐based economies so as to accelerate technology updating and economic growth.     

Measuring the size and dynamics of U.S. state-level shadow economies using a dynamic general equilibrium model with trends

We use a two-sector dynamic deterministic general equilibrium model that specifically accounts for trends among time-series variables to estimate the size of the shadow economy for the 50 U.S. states from 1999 to 2019, following Solis-Garcia and Xie (2018, 2022). This paper improves on existing measures of the state-level shadow economy (such as the multiple indicators, multiple causes (MIMIC) methodology by Wiseman (2013a)). In particular, this new measure is based on theoretical foundations, extends the previous measure to include the Great Recession, includes dollar value estimates of the shadow economy, and produces considerably more variation over time and across states. Furthermore, we explore determinants of this new shadow economy measure using a panel vector autoregressive model and find that, on average, states with higher levels of economic freedom, lower regulatory barriers, and larger real GDP have smaller shadow economies. States with bigger governments, on average, have larger shadow economies, and the effect of corruption on shadow economic activity is non-linear, with a positive initial and subsequent negative impact.