Linkages between income inequality,international remittances and economic growth in Pakistan

This paper explores the dynamic linkages between income inequality, international remittances and economic growth using time series data over the period of 1976–2006 in case of Pakistan. The cointegration analysis based on the bounds test confirms the existence of a long-run relationship between income inequality, international remittances and economic growth. Our results reveal that income inequality and international remittances enhance economic growth. The causality analysis based on innovative accounting approach shows bidirectional causal relationship between income inequality and economic growth and same is true for international remittances and income inequality. International remittances are cause of economic growth but not vice versa. Although we find support for Kuznets hypothesis but Pakistan is yet to benefit, in terms of reducing the gaps of income inequality, from the international flow of remittances and economic growth. The paper argues that, from a policy perspective, there is an urgent need for policy makers in Pakistan to reduce the widening gap of income inequality by focusing on income redistribution policies and to go beyond the traditional factors in balancing income inequality.     

Foreign capital inflows and economic growth of Pakistan

This study investigates the relationship of foreign capital inflows, namely foreign direct investment, workers’ remittances, and external debt with economic growth of Pakistan by employing time series data from 1976 to 2015. Cointegration results indicate that foreign capital inflows and economic growth have a significant relationship with economic growth in the long run. Ordinary least square results indicate foreign direct investment has a significant and negative effect on economic growth, whereas a significant positive effect of remittances and external debts on economic growth is found. Rolling windows analysis highlights the yearly effect of three different models. Two different sensitivity analyses confirmed that initial results are robust. The final section concludes the study and provides some policy implications.     

Remittances and economic growth in Africa, Asia, and Latin American-Caribbean countries: a panel unit root and panel cointegration analysis

This study estimates the macroeconomic impact of remittances and some control variables such as openness of the economy, capital/labor ratio, and economic freedom on the economic growth of African, Asian, and Latin American-Caribbean countries using newly developed panel unit-root tests, cointegration tests, and Panel Fully Modified OLS (PFMOLS). We use annual panel data from 1985–2007for 64 countries consisting of 29 from Africa, 14 from Asia, and 21 from Latin America and the Caribbean region, respectively. We find that remittances, openness of the economy, and capital labor ratio have positive and significant effect on economic growth for all regions as a group and in each of the three in study. While the economic freedom index also has a positive and significant effect on growth in Africa and Latin America, however, its effect on the economic growth of Asia is mixed.     

Foreign capital inflows, economic growth and stock market capitalization in Asian countries: an ARDL bound testing approach

This study investigates the effects of foreign capital inflows and economic growth on stock market capitalization in 18 Asian countries by using the panel data from the period of 2000–2010. The ARDL bound testing cointegration approach confirms the valid long run relationship between the considered variables. Results indicate that foreign direct investment has significant negative and economic growth has significant positive relationship with the stock market capitalization, whereas, the results of workers’ remittances is found insignificant in long run. The error correction model confirms the significant positive relationship of economic growth and workers’ remittances while, FDI has negative and significant impact on stock market capitalization in short run. Results of causality test based on Toda and Yamamoto (J Econom 66: 225–250, 1995) show the bidirectional causal relationship of foreign direct investment and economic growth with stock market capitalization. However, no causal relationship is found in between workers’ remittances and stock market capitalization. It is suggested that investor should not idealize the inflow of workers’ remittances to invest in Asian stock markets in long run. Simultaneously, size of the economy is a better leading indicator for Asian stock markets. On the other hand, inflows of FDI may mislead the investor to invest. Investor should keep on eye whether FDI come in the competition of domestic market or not? If this happens so investor should not invest in the stock market of host country.     

Foreign inflows and economic growth: An emiprical study of the SAARC region

The study examines and highlights the impact of selected foreign inflows (aid, trade, FDI, debt and remittances) on the economic growth of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries. The existent literature lacks a comprehensive analysis of the SAARC countries as countries like Afghanistan, Bhutan and the Maldives have largely been ignored due to the shorter time periods of available data. The study is empirical in nature and utilizes panel data techniques on macroeconomic data for the period 2008–2015. Foreign aid and foreign direct investment are found to impact economic growth positively. Foreign debt and trade flows are found to adversely affect economic growth. No relationship is established between the flow of remittances and the economic growth of these countries. The obtained results are robust to different proxy variables and the addition of macroeconomic variables. For the first time, the study provides policy implications based on the data of all SAARC countries. The study recommends focusing on increasing the inflows of resources in the form of aid and foreign direct investment (FDI) from the developed world to achieve higher economic growth.     

Migrant wages,remittances and recipient labour supply in a moral hazard model

This paper analyzes the interaction between migrants’ income and remittances and between remittances and the labour supply of residents. The model is cast as a two-period game with imperfect information about the residents’ real economic situation. Residents subject to a good economic situation may behave as if they were in a poor economic situation only in order to manipulate remitters’ expectations. The latter, being aware of this risk, reduce the remitted amount accordingly. Therefore, in the equilibrium, residents who really are victims of the bad economic outlook are penalized as compared to the perfect information set-up. In some circumstances, they can signal their type by drastically cutting working hours, thus further enhancing their precarity right when their economic situation is the worst.     

Regional foreclosures and Mexican remittances: Evidence from the housing market crisis

This study investigates the extent to which Mexican workers’ remittances are affected from the recent housing market decline in the United States. Results from a multivariate model reveal that an increase in the national U.S. foreclosure rate has a negative and statistically significant impact on Mexican remittances. At the regional level, foreclosure rates of the South and the West have a significant impact on workers’ remittances in the same negative direction. However, foreclosure rates from the North Central and East Central regions do not appear to have this statistically significant impact. Lastly, in contrast to previous results in the literature, real exchange rate movements and Mexican remittances seem to be insensitive to one another once the housing market is accounted for in the analysis.     

BEYOND THE STARS

It is frequent to hear in economic seminars or read in academic papers that an effect is economically significant or economically important. Yet, the economic literature is vague on what economic importance means and how it should be measured. In this paper, I show that existing measures of economic importance are flawed and misused. I derive a new metric that measures, in percentage terms, the contribution of each explanatory variable to deviations in the dependent variable, ceteris paribus. As an illustration, the method is applied to study the determinants of migration and the determinants of fertility.     

The dynamics of indebtedness in developing countries: The case of the Philippines

The relationships between foreign capital inflows, the build-up of debt, and economic growth in a developing country are analyzed using a system dynamics model of the pertinent processes. The Philippines serves as an empirical case to apply the model. The model incorporates the macro-structure of economic growth, the micro-structure of market-clearing mechanisms, and an accounting of the money flows. The study shows that economic policies enhancing debt-servicing ability create better economic performance than those limiting acquisition of loans. Increasing capital-intensity is the most important part of such policies. They are further facilitated by encouraging investment through decreasing taxes and enhancing demand through increasing government spending and promoting exports. Thus, augmentation of domestic resources by foreign capital inflows appears to be a viable economic strategy.     

Machine learning model for Bitcoin exchange rate prediction using economic and technology determinants

In recent years, Bitcoin exchange rate prediction has attracted the interest of researchers and investors. Some studies have used traditional statistical and econometric methods to understand the economic and technology determinants of Bitcoin, few have considered the development of predictive models using these determinants. In this study, we developed a two-stage approach for exploring whether the information hidden in economic and technology determinants can accurately predict the Bitcoin exchange rate. In the first stage, two nonlinear feature selection methods comprising an artificial neural network and random forest are used to reduce the subset of potential predictors by measuring the importance of economic and technology factors. In the second stage, the potential predictors are integrated into long short-term memory (LSTM) to predict the Bitcoin exchange rate regardless of the previous exchange rate. Our results showed that by using the economic and technology determinants, LSTM could achieve better predictive performance than the autoregressive integrated moving average, support vector regression, adaptive network fuzzy inference system, and LSTM methods, which all use the previous exchange rate. Thus, information obtained from economic and technology determinants is more important for predicting the Bitcoin exchange rate than the previous exchange rate.     

Can migration reduce civil conflicts as an antidote to rent-seeking?

In this paper, I investigate whether access to migration reduces the positive effect of natural resources on the onset of civil conflicts shown in the literature. There is a negative and significant correlation between the interaction variable “migration rate-natural resources” and the probability of outbreak of civil wars, showing that the effect of natural resources is conditional on the migration rate. Simulations to quantify the marginal effects of the interaction term show that a migration rate equal to 6% or higher dampens the effect of natural resources on civil wars. To address the potential endogeneity problem in estimating the relationship between civil conflicts and migration, although I distinguish economic migrants from refugees, I also use an IV approach. In this respect, the negative effect of the two interacting variables on the probability of outbreak of civil wars remains robust after having instrumented the migration rate by using the gravity-based predicted emigration rate. Given the endogenous nature of the ratio of primary exports to GDP, in addition, the study directly utilizes the emigration rates as an alternate robust method to estimate the primary issue on civil conflicts. The results show that only the civil conflicts caused by natural resources are negatively impacted by emigration rates.     

The major determinants of logistic performance in a global perspective: evidence from panel data analysis

The global logistics industry has grown significantly and logistics has become an important sector of the business economic system and a major global economic activity in recent years. Logistics activities accelerate economic and productivity growth. Efficient logistics is also important to a country’s competitiveness and source of employment. The purpose of this paper is to uncover and understand the major determinants of logistics performance (LP) to further lift the LP of countries. Using unbalanced panel data of 93 selected countries from 2007 to 2014, the present research attempts to critically investigate the major determinants of LP. In estimating the model, this study prefers to use static panel data approach owing to limited data. The findings of the present study reveal that (a) countries with low level of corruption and stable political environment are likely to yield a high level of LP; (b) improvement in resources supply such as infrastructure, technology, labour, and education also have a significant positive effect on LP. Therefore, institutional reforms and upgrading resources will effectively accelerate LP.     

The impact of economic uncertainty on the decision of fertility: Evidence from Taiwan

Economic uncertainty has only recently begun to appear in research on the determinants of fertility. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate how economic uncertainty affects the fertility rate in Taiwan. Official county-level panel data from 1998 to 2016 for 20 counties are utilized in DIFF-GMM and SYS-GMM models in dynamic panel regression estimation. The major finding of this study is that higher volatility of household disposable income will reduce the fertility rate. The empirical results support the proposition that economic uncertainty might be an important determinant of fertility decisions, explaining the decline in fertility in Taiwan.     

Remittances and economic growth: A study of Guyana

Using an augmented Solow framework and an ARDL bounds test for cointegration, we explore the short- and long-run effects of remittances, aid and financial deepening on growth in Guyana using annual data for the period 1982–2010. The results show that remittances have a positive and significant effect both in the short and the long run. Aid has a negative effect in the long run and financial deepening is not statistically significant. The Granger-causality test reveals that capital stock, aid and financial deepening cause remittances inflow in Guyana.     

Exploring Nonlinearities in Path Models

In causal analysis, path models are an appropriate tool for studying relationships between social phenomena. However, they assume linear linkages between variables, and hence they are not always suitable for describing the complexity and richness of relationships in social phenomena. The aim of this work is to propose an exploratory graphical method to evaluate if the phenomena under analysis are actually characterized by non-linear linkages. In particular, the method is well suited to discovering interactions between the observed variables in path models. The proposed approach, which does not depend on any hypothesis on the error distribution, is based on a series of plots that can be easily interpreted and drawn using standard statistical software. As an additional feature, the plots – which we call joint effect plots – support qualitative interpretation of the non-linear linkages after the path model has been specified. Finally, the proposed method is applied within a case study. Non-linearities are explored in a casual model aiming to find the determinants of remittances of a group of Tunisian migrants in Italy.     

THE BENEFITS OF MIGRATION

This article focuses on the potential benefits of migration. Using the author's previous research on remittances and return migration, some of the welfare gains that can stem from the migratory process are highlighted. In the first part of the article, the impact of remittances on child well‐being in Vietnam is investigated. Both the incidence of child labour and school attendance rates in remittance recipient households are assessed. In the second part of the article, the contribution made by Tunisian return migrants to the development of their country of origin is examined. Both analyses suggest that, if certain conditions are met, migration can produce beneficial outcomes for the people and the countries involved in the process.     

Rural-urban migration and family ties: an analysis of family considerations in migration behaviour in India

The importance of family considerations in mobility decisions of rural to urban migrants in India was investigated by analyzing evidence on urban rural ties. The empirical basis was a survey of migrant heads of households in Delhi conducted from October 1975 to April 1976. Only 14% of the migrants in the sample were accompanied by family members when they moved to Delhi, and at the time of the survey 44% of the sample were living on their own as nonfamilial households. 82% of the migrants reported having family members living in the area. In 1/3 of these cases the rural household contained the wife of the migrant. Over 3/4 of the sample visited their origin regularly, and 2/3 were sending money. Migration decisions are discussed in the context of the mutlicentered family, and urban rural family links are classified into several distinct types, and the importance of visits and remittances to origin for each of these types are investigated. An econometric analysis of conjugal separation is presented, and the determinants of remittances are investigated. The salient methodological innovations are a 7-part typology of urban rural familial links and the use of logit analysis in the identification of the important determinants of conjugal separation. Nearly 4/5 of the migrants visited their place of origin. The proportion reporting visits was higher for migrants who had family members at place of origin, but as many as 60% of the migrants not having family links maintained contact with rural residents through visits. If migrants recognized mutual kinship rights and obligations dictated by the social system, they maintained close functional ties with their kin. Only 56% of unmarried migrants living as nonfamilial units reported visits to origin compared to 92% of those living with their nuclear unit. For migrants who reported presence of family members at origin, there was no significant difference between landowners and nonlandowners in the proportion who reported visits. Married migrants who had left their wives in the rural area were more likely to visit origin during the agricultural busy periods. A majority of the migrants maintained economic links with the rural area, and in early all these cases financial flows were from the urban to the rural area. Remittances tended to be related positively to urban earnings and needs of the rural household and negatively to obligations in the urban household. There was no evidence of ties weakening over time, but migrants who planned to settle in the city remitted less. To an extent conjugal separation was temporary and reflected husbands and wives making the journey at different times. Migrants were also inhibited from bringing their wives to the city if they owned land at origin or had migrated to obtain cash for specific needs. A part of the explanation also lies in varying regional cultural and environmental characteristics.     

THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF EXPORTS IN DETERMINING LEVELS OF REGIONAL OUTPUT AND INCOME: A Model and Empirical Evidence from Kenya

Exports have long been assumed by many to be the most important variable in driving regional growth, although factors such as government expenditure, investment demand, and remittances, among others, have also been recognized as significant. In addition, supply-side constraints to the promotion of regional growth and development have recently received increased attention in the literature. This paper evaluates the relative importance of exports, investment demand, and remittances, as well as supply-constrained agricultural production, in determining levels of regional output, value added, and household income in a single region in Kenya. The analysis is based on a mixed endogenous/ exogenous model derived from a social accounting matrix (SAM) which allows for incorporation of both demand and supply-side considerations. The paper finds that exports are, in fact, the most important factor in explaining regional output and wage income in the region studied, although not overwhelmingly so. In addition, the analysis demonstrates the importance of supply-constrained agricultural production as a determinant of income at the household level.     

Brain drain or brain bank? The impact of skilled emigration on poor-country innovation

The development prospects of a poor country or region depend in part on its capacity for innovation. In turn, the productivity of its innovators, whom are often concentrated around urban centers, depends on their access to technological knowledge. The emigration of highly skilled individuals weakens local knowledge networks (brain drain) but may also help remaining innovators access valuable knowledge accumulated abroad (brain bank). We develop a model in which the size of the optimal innovator Diaspora depends on the competing strengths of co-location and Diaspora effects for accessing knowledge. Then, using patent citation data associated with inventions from India, we estimate the key co-location and Diaspora parameters. The net effect of innovator emigration is to harm domestic knowledge access, on average. However, knowledge access conferred by the Diaspora is particularly valuable in the production of India’s most important inventions as measured by citations received. Thus, our findings imply that the optimal emigration level may depend, at least partly, on the relative value resulting from the most cited compared to average inventions.     

SUBSTITUTABILITY BETWEEN MOBILE AND FIXED TELEPHONES: EVIDENCE AND IMPLICATIONS FOR INDIA

Substitutability between mobile and fixed phones has become an important consequence of telecom sector deregulation in India since 1991. This paper estimates the socio‐economic determinants of household demand for mobile and fixed phones, and tests for substitutability between mobile and fixed phones, based on a binary logit model and using a small sample survey data from the Karnataka State in South India. The results show that the nature and magnitude of determinants are different between mobile and fixed phones. Estimated cross price elasticity offers empirical evidence for substitutability rather than complementarity between fixed and mobile phone services. This evidence is symmetric in mobile and fixed phone models. The empirical results are shown to have implications for policy discussion on subsidization by the Access Deficit Charge and bases for Universal Service Obligation. In view of rapid changes in the telecom market, a periodic nationally representative survey may be necessary to generalize the conclusions and implications of this paper.