The challenge of rural financial inclusion – evidence from microfinance

Financial inclusion is said to foster development and growth. However, progress in financial inclusion has been slow in rural areas where poverty is most pronounced. This is often attributed to higher transaction costs, higher risks and a more unfavourable contracting environment which makes it more difficult for financial institutions to achieve and maintain sustainability in rural compared to urban areas. Based on data covering 772 microfinance institutions (MFIs) over the period 2008–2013, we test whether rural financial inclusion, notably lending to rural borrowers, is hampered by stronger sustainability challenges than inclusion in urban markets. Our results suggest that a higher share of rural borrowers has no direct effect on MFI sustainability. However, we find that MFIs with a higher share of rural borrowers are less able to exploit economies of scale and productivity effects. Thus, our results provide support for the view that sustainability challenges make it more difficult to achieve progress in financial inclusion in rural than in urban areas.     

The effects of shocks on the Austrian unemployment rate – a structural VAR approach

Assuming full hysteresis in the Austrian labour market, a simple macroeconomic framework is used to model the effect of four structural shocks, i.e. shocks to productivity, demand, wages and labour supply. By using SVAR analysis, we derive impulse-response functions that show the effects of these shocks on unemployment. What constitutes a distinctive feature of our study is the deliberate use of overidentifying restrictions, allowing for a likelihood ratio test. The objection to SVAR methodology, that it relies on arbitrary assumptions, can thus be overcome, as invalid sets of identifying restrictions are rejected. First version received: September 2000/Final version received: March 2002 RID="*" ID="*"  I thank Juan F. Jimeno, Martin Wagner, Helmut Hofer and Bernhard B?hm for their assistance; Robert Kunst and Martin Spitzer for their discussion of an earlier version of this paper; Thomas Sparla, Michael Roos and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments.     

Board of directors’ quality and firms’ debt financing: the moderating effect of insider ownership – evidence from Omani firms

This study aims to examine the direct effects of board of directors’ quality and insider ownership on firms’ capital structure and the moderating effect of insider ownership on the relationship between board of directors’ quality and firms’ capital structure. The sample of this study consists of the time period 2005–2011. The final sample consists of 535 firm-year observations of public nonfinancial firms listed on the Muscat Securities Market (MSM). The hypotheses are tested using a random effects model. The results reveal that the coefficient sign on the board of directors’ quality is as predicted, but the coefficient sign is insignificant. Further, the results show that insider ownership is positively associated with leverage at the significant level of 10%, suggesting that the inside substantial shareholders employ higher leverage. With regard to the moderating effect of insider ownership, the findings show that the effect of the board of directors’ quality-leverage relationship becomes negative and stronger with increasing insider ownership.     

Labour effects of foreign and domestic remittances – evidence from Pakistan

Remittances are playing an increasingly important role in the economies of developing countries. In this paper, we study the effects of these flows on Pakistan’s labour market. We employ the 2007–2008 Household Integrated Economic Survey and Probit as well as Propensity Score Matching techniques to examine the impact on labour participation, quantity of work and activities of working as well as non-active members of remittance-receiving households. We find that both foreign and domestic remittances tend to lower labour supply of the recipient households. This impact is higher among women and among the young. The impact is more pronounced in the rural areas. In addition, foreign remittances increase the likelihood of household members attending middle school. We also examine the quantity of labour supplied by the remittance-recipient households. Results show little difference in the number of months and days worked between the households receiving and not receiving remittances. Furthermore, we find that the likelihood of being self-employed and cultivating one’s own land is higher among remittance recipients. In sum, our analysis highlights a higher role of foreign remittances in the labour market as compared to internal remittances.     

The forward pricing function of industrial metal futures – evidence from cointegration and smooth transition regression analysis

The prices of internationally traded metals have experienced wild swings and increased volatility in recent years. The relationship between spot and futures prices is an important topic in this context, as the current period’s price of a futures contract should be an unbiased estimator of next period’s spot price under the joint assumption of risk neutrality and rationality. Taking as a basis data from the Dow Jones UBS Commodity Index, which uses metals traded on the London Metal Exchange and US exchanges, this study adopts nonlinear smooth transition models to analyze whether the forward spread is a leading indicator of future spot price movements. Our findings suggest that such a price discovery function can in most cases only be identified in periods of low volatility or small previous spreads. Moreover, the underlying dynamics are captured best by the use of a logistic transition function.     

Export–led growth and structural change: evidence from Malaysia

Many studies have tried to establish the causal link between export expansion and economic growth. This contribution is to recognize that structural changes will change the sources of growth and this will affect the export-growth relationship. A country case study approach is used focusing on Malaysia, a country with one of the world's highest sustained growth rates and a long history of commodity trade. We use VAR analysis of Malaysian quarterly trade and GDP growth from 1965 to 1996. Trade data are disaggregated into primary and manufactures exports and causality tests are applied to the entire period as well as two subperiods #150 the 1965 #1501980 period when policy emphasis was on import substitution and the 1981#1501996 period when policies favoured export-led growth. Statistical tests confirm export-led growth for the full period and for the period to 1980 but tests on the 1981#1501996 period show growth causing exports. Primary exports had a stronger direct impact on economic growth than manufactures. The weakening support for export-led growth after Malaysia shifted to an export-oriented development strategy is associated with structural changes associated with industrialization. Interaction among trade and growth variables becomes more complex with a broadening export base and more diverse sources of growth.     

Agglomeration economies and clustering – evidence from German and European firms

This article empirically analyses the impact of agglomeration economies on the clustering of German and European firms using partial proportional-odds models. Firms are grouped according to industry and divided into departments. At the industry level, I find evidence for inter-industry economies derived from the New Economic Geography (NEG) framework for European firms in general and German knowledge-intensive firms in particular. At the department level, Marshallian Externalities such as the hiring of skilled labour and technological spillover, and therefore intra-industry economies, are empirically confirmed for European and German departments like Human Resources and R&D but rarely for others.     

Job creation and job types – New evidence from Danish entrepreneurs

We extend earlier analyses of the job creation of start-ups versus established firms by considering the educational content of the jobs created and destroyed. We define education-specific measures of job creation and job destruction at the firm level, and we use these measures to construct a measure of “surplus job creation”, defined as jobs created on top of any simultaneous destruction of similar jobs in incumbent firms in the same region and industry. Using Danish employer-employee data from 2002–2007 that identify the start-ups and that cover almost the entire private sector, these measures allow us to provide a more nuanced assessment of the role of entrepreneurial firms in the job-creation process than in previous studies. Our findings show that although start-ups are responsible for the entire overall net job creation, incumbents account for more than one-third of net job creation within high-skilled jobs. Moreover, start-ups “only” create approximately half of the surplus jobs and even less of the high-skilled surplus jobs. Finally, our approach allows us to characterise and identify differences across industries, educational groups and regions.     

Investment climate,foreign networks and exporting – evidence from Africa

This paper investigates the impact of investment climate variables and foreign networks on the exporting decisions of African firms. We use data from the World Bank Investment Climate Surveys for over 7000 firms in 24 Sub-Saharan African countries. The results highlight the crucial role of the access to, and the quality of, investment climate characteristics – infrastructure, external finance and telecommunications for Sub-Saharan African firms’ exporting propensities. Our results show that improving the investment climate to the level of best performers in the sample will considerably increase the propensity of domestic firms to export. The paper also finds that foreign networks have a significantly positive impact on firms’ export propensities.     

Financialization and the rentier income share – evidence from the USA and Germany

During the past two decades, there has been a shift of significance from the real to the financial sector. In the course of (financial) globalization, measures of liberalization and deregulation have contributed to a strengthening of financial capital. The concept of shareholder value orientation has become more powerful, capital income has increased tremendously, while real wages have stagnated. Most industrial countries have experienced a decline in the share of labor income. Based on a review of empirics and literature, this paper seeks to determine who gained from the fall in the labor share of income in the USA and Germany, respectively. If financialization is indeed responsible for the decline, rentiers should be the beneficiaries. In order to identify the relevant effects, the profit share of the two countries under observation is split between the share of retained earnings and the share of net property income (= rentiers’ income) using a modification of the approach chosen by Epstein and Jayadev (2005 Epstein, G. and Jayadev, A. 2005. “The rise of rentier incomes in OECD countries: Financialization, central bank policy and labor solidarity”. In Financialization and the world economy, Edited by: Epstein, G. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.  [Google Scholar]). The evidence presented shows that the development of the rentier income share indeed corresponds quite well with the stages of development of financialization in the two different countries: in the US, where the important shift towards financialization occurred in the early 1980s, the rentiers’ share of income shows a corresponding leap upwards exactly at that time and remains on a higher level until the end of the observation period. In Germany, the process of financialization started much later – in the beginning of the 1990s – and followed a much more gradual transition, which is perfectly mirrored by the development of income shares: from the 1990s onwards, the rentiers’ income share gradually increased over time.     

The dynamics of retirement saving — theory and reality

Pension problems and reforms are in the foreground of public interest and political action in many countries, yet economic theory offers inadequate support for finding viable solutions, because it is heavily loaded with simplifying concepts and unrealistic assumptions. These concepts and assumptions are briefly summarized in Chapter 1, while a generalized framework based on them is presented in Chapter 2. The basic stationary assumption is then relaxed in Chapter 3 what results in the conclusion that a profound, not just technical, but conceptual innovation is required. Chapter 4 outlines a few major issues and concepts for a more realistic pension economics. A summary is given in Chapter 5.     

Industry characteristics,spatial competition and industrial concentration – evidence from China

We study the determinants of a geographic concentration of manufacturing industries in a spatial competition framework. Based on a panel data set of China during 1995–2003, we have the following findings. First, some traditional comparative advantages in production factors such as labor endowment are becoming the major factors that prevent the industrial concentration. Second, the major factors that promote geographic manufacturing concentration are technology spillover and industry linkage. Third, the effect of economy of scale on manufacturing concentration is significant, but the direction depends on how the concentration is measured.     

Learning from private and public observations of othersʼ actions

We study the diffusion of dispersed private information in a large economy, where agents learn from the actions of others through two channels: a public channel, such as equilibrium market prices, and a private channel, for example local interactions. We show that, when agents learn only from the public channel, an initial release of public information increases agents? total knowledge at all times and increases welfare. When a private learning channel is present, this result is reversed: more initial public information reduces agents asymptotic knowledge by an amount in order of $\log (t)$ units of precision. When agents are sufficiently patient, this reduces welfare.     

Impact of social media on economic growth – evidence from social media

This article attempts to investigate the impact of social media (SM) on economic growth. Using information obtained from memberships to social networks, we find that SM has a negative and significant impact on economic growth. This provides evidence in favour of our hypothesis that SM increases the search costs for information and also increases the substitution effect from labour to leisure thereby producing a negative impact on growth.     

The public–private sector gender wage differential in Britain: evidence from matched employee-workplace data

This article shows that little of the gender earnings gap in the public and private sectors in Britain are explained by differences in employee characteristics. The differences in workplace characteristics, however, make a significant, sizeable contribution. It is shown that performance related pay and company pension schemes are associated with higher relative earnings in the private sector, whilst increased provision of family-friendly employment practices in the public sector is associated with higher relative earnings for women.     

When is the Greek Nation? The Role of Enemies and Minorities

This paper questions the importance and usefulness of identifying, through theoretical analysis and empirical study, an historical moment when a nation comes into being. In the first part of our study, we discuss briefly the theoretical background of the question 'when is the nation?'. The second part addresses this question with reference to the Greek case. We first look at the process of consolidation of Greek national identity during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The role of Turks, Bulgarians and other neighbouring countries in the development and crystallisation of Greek nationhood is highlighted. We show that although the Greek nation-state was established in 1829, the Greek nation has been in the process of becoming through the nineteenth century until the 1920s, when its ethnic and territorial components were brought together and irredentism was abandoned. However, as we show in the section that follows, the Greek nation has been further reshaped through its interaction with the Muslim minority of western Thrace, its fundamental 'Other within' during the twentieth century. In the concluding section, we look at more recent developments, such as the Greece-FYROM controversy, that have further influenced the definition of the Greek nation. By analysing the dynamic and constantly evolving nature of nation formation as a socio-political process, we show that fixing an historical moment when a nation comes into being is an analytic exercise for which there is little empirical grounding. Rather, we argue, scholarly research should concentrate on 'how' is the nation.     

Q-theory of investment and earnings retentions—evidence from Scandinavia

In a frictionless milieu, retentions should have no impact on investment behavior. Empirical studies, however, typically find that retentions are an important determinant of investment. Managerial discretion and financial constraints are two alternative explanations that have been suggested. This article uses a panel of listed Scandinavian firms to examine the importance of earnings retentions as a determinant of investment. Measures of Tobin’s Q, marginal q, and sales accelerator are used to control for investment opportunities. Scandinavian firms are found to depend on earnings retentions to a high degree, more so than in other developed economies. This high dependence on retentions suggests that the Scandinavian capital markets are suffering from allocational inefficiencies. This can be assumed to have detrimental effects on the speed of structural change. Moreover, these market frictions appear too large to per se be caused by information asymmetries or managerial discretion phenomena. Possible institutional explanations are suggested.     

The role of education and household composition for transitory and permanent income inequality–evidence from PSID data

Transitory and permanent shocks to income have been shown to be important determinants of household consumption. This paper shows that there are significant differences in the trends of transitory and permanent income inequality between demographic groups since the 1980s. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, educational attainment and the composition of a household are found to play a key role. While permanent inequality increases steadily for educated households, it is flat over large parts of the sample period for the less educated households. Transitory inequality increases for all households headed by couples whereas it is constant for single households. Altogether, permanent shocks account for a larger part of the income variance of educated households whereas transitory shocks are relatively more important for the less educated. These results are able to shed light on the transmission of changes in income inequality to consumption inequality.     

The effects of local govemment investment on economic growth and employment： evidence from transitional China

Based on the panel data of 28 provinces in the year of 1987-2001, this paper examines the effects of the local government investment on economic growth and employment. The empirical result shows that the local government investment plays a significant positive role in economic growth and employment. However, while the proportion of local government investment to GDP had a remarkable rise after 1998, the elasticity of local government investment on economic growth declined, which shows that there is a big room for raising the efficiency of local government investment. Moreover. the empirieal examination shows that although local government investment had positive effect on employment, the elasticity had a decrease after 1994 when the tax-sharing system reform was put into practice. This shows that the positive role of local government investment on employment is also limited This paper argues that the role of local governments as investors must be weakened, and local governments of different levels should lessen direct economic intervention and concentrate on public regulation.