DETERMINANTS OF SCHOOL ENROLMENT AND EDUCATION ATTAINMENT: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM KENYA1

This paper investigates the determinants of demand for schooling in Kenya. Probit and ordered probit methods are used to model enrolment and attainment respectively. The results show that child characteristics, parental education and other household characteristics, quality and cost of schooling are important determinants of demand for education services in Kenya. The results further show that girls would be more affected by policy changes than boys. The findings call for targeting in efforts to boost and sustain demand for schooling in Kenya. The study recommends immediate policy interventions focusing on improving quality of education and poverty alleviation.     

Housing demand in Shanghai: A discrete choice approach

In this study we apply a random utility modeling framework to analyze housing demand in the city of Shanghai. A Multinomial Logit Model taking account of latent choice sets is employed to investigate the impact of household characteristics, such as income, size and age composition, on the choice of dwelling, specified by location, size and unit price. In addition to the price and income effects on housing demand, the model identifies a quality indicator for dwelling attributes, which can be interpreted as the mean attractiveness in a money metric measure.The data used in this study are cross-sectional survey data. The estimated model is used to calculate demand elasticities and demand probabilities, for selected groups of households and types of dwellings. Among the results can be noted that the price–income ratios, the age composition and size of household are all important determinants of the demand. The impact of income distribution on housing demand is also studied.     

Do Remittances Induce Inflation? Fresh Evidence from Developing Countries

The goal of this article is to examine the determinants of inflation in both the short run and the long run for 54 developing countries using a panel data set covering the 1995–2004 period. Apart from the commonly used economic determinants of inflation, we model the impact of remittances and institutional variables on inflation. Using the Arellano and Bond panel dynamic estimator and the Arellano and Bover and the Blundell and Bond system generalized method of moments estimator, we find evidence that in developing countries remittances generate inflation. The effect of remittances on inflation is more pronounced in the long run. Moreover, we find that openness, debt, current account deficits, the agricultural sector, and the short‐term U.S. interest rate have a positive effect on inflation. We also find that improvements in democracy reduce inflation.     

对上海市住房市场的实证非均衡分析

文章首先通过理论分析表明,住房市场是一个非均衡的市场。随后把上海短期住房市场分为增量房和存量房两个市场,运用非均衡市场的供需函数模型对其进行了定量实证分析。结果表明住房市场的非均衡程度很高,因为上海住房市场中需求缺乏价格弹性,而对未来房价的预期使得投资需求的     

Determinants of Remittances: Recent Evidence Using Data on Internal Migrants in Vietnam*

The present paper examines the determinants of remittance behavior for Vietnam using data from the 2004 Vietnam Migration Survey on internal migrants. It considers how, among other things, the vulnerability of a migrant's life at the destination, their link to relatives back home, and the time spent at the destination affect remittances. The paper finds that migrants act as risk‐averse economic agents and send remittances back to the household of origin as part of an insurance exercise in the face of economic uncertainty. Remittances are also found to be driven by a migrant's labor market earnings level. The paper highlights the important role of remittances in providing an effective means of risk‐coping and mutual support within the family.     

On fertility,migration and remittances in LDCs

In this paper, we examine the effect of migratory opportunities for children on fertility when the decision by the child whether and how much to remit is endogenous to the analysis. We differentiate between two classes of motivations to remit and four changes that are likely to increase the return to migration. We demonstrate that the effect of each of these changes on remittances depends on the motive for remittances. Given that the demand for children as assets depends on the returns to them of which remittances constitute a part, we identify links between motivations to remit and the demand for children.     

The Role of Capital Flight and Remittances in Current Account Sustainability in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Abstract: The literature on capital flight and remittances is copious, as a plethora of studies in recent years have focused greater attention on the determinants and impact of capital flight and remittances in the development process. These issues are particularly pertinent to Africa in view of its relatively high incidence of capital flight in the presence of foreign exchange constraints, limited foreign capital inflows, external indebtedness and high dependence on overseas development assistance. The principal aim of this paper is to estimate the extent and magnitude of capital flights from Africa and remittance inflows to Africa, and to assess their role in current account sustainability. The paper employs standard methodological approaches to estimating capital flight and remittances for selected African countries and analyses their relationships with current account balance and key economic indicators. The findings from the statistical exercises in the paper yielded a number of important results:

• ? The magnitude of capital flight from Africa has increased considerably in recent years, with widespread fluctuations and volatility.
• ? The volume of remittances into Africa has increased dramatically but steadily.
• ? There is a negative association between balances on current account and capital flight, implying that capital flights tend to worsen current account difficulties.
• ? There is a positive relationship between remittances and current account, suggesting that remittances could play an important role in mitigating current account problems.
• ? The link between remittances and economic growth is positive, albeit insignificantly in the statistical sense, suggesting some evidence of the crucial role of remittances in the economic growth and development process.
• ? External debt and capital flight are positively intertwined, providing support to the so‐called ‘round‐tripping’ or ‘back‐to‐back’ hypothesis

The policy implications of these findings are that in spite of the good progress made by many African countries towards economic and political reforms, more innovative policy thinking and reform deepening must be initiated to create a conducive environment for private sector participation in general and foreign capital (including capital flight reversal) in particular. Similarly, there is a need for incentivising and mainstreaming remittances into national development strategies with the view to promoting the growth‐enhancing effects of remittances. A wide range of policy options and forward thinking analyses were advanced in the paper.     

Do International Remittances Affect Poverty in Africa?*

Abstract: International remittances flowing into developing countries are attracting increasing attention because of their rising volume and their impact on recipient countries. This paper uses a panel data set on poverty and international remittances for African countries to examine the impact of international remittances on poverty reduction in 33 African countries over the period 1990–2005. We find that international remittances—defined as the share of remittances in country GDP—reduce the level, depth, and severity of poverty in Africa. But the size of the poverty reduction depends on how poverty is being measured. After instrumenting for the possible endogeneity of international remittances, we find that a 10 percent increase in official international remittances as a share of GDP leads to a 2.9 percent decline in the poverty headcount or the share of people living in poverty. Also, the more sensitive poverty measures—the poverty gap (poverty depth) and squared poverty gap (poverty severity)—suggest that international remittances will have a similar impact on poverty reduction. The point estimates for the poverty gap and squared poverty gap suggest that a 10 percent increase in the share of international remittances will lead to a 2.9 percent and 2.8 percent decline, respectively, in the depth and severity of poverty in African countries. Regardless of the measure of poverty used as the dependent variable, income inequality (Gini index) has a positive and significant coefficient, indicating that greater inequality is associated with higher poverty in African countries, much in conformity with the literature. Similar results were obtained for trade openness. In the same vein, per capita income has a negative and significant effect on each measure of poverty used in the study. Our results also show that inflation rates positively and significantly affect poverty incidence, depth and severity in Africa. In all three poverty measures, the dummy variable for sub‐Saharan Africa is strongly positive, and strongly negative for North Africa. The policy implications of these results are discussed.     

Housing and Employment in Indonesia: Prospects for Employment Generation in the Construction Materials Sector 1

Indonesia experienced rapid growth in the housing sector in the 1980s, accompanied by large-scale improvement of existing dwellings. There are clear signs of a large potential demand for more and better dwellings; though several bottlenecks exist which hamper this potential. This paper critically examines the credit-related bottleneck and the subsidised credit schemes designed to address it.

Input-output analysis is used in the paper to study the structure of the construction materials sector. Examination shows that the adverse effects of a stimulation of housing demand on the balance of payments are small, and that employment in the construction materials sector is dominated by small-scale and household industry. Finally, an analysis of roofing materials shows that there is scope for further introduction of labour-intensive construction materials.     

Supply‐leading versus Demand‐following Hypothesis: Empirical Evidence from Three SSA Countries

Abstract: This study investigates empirically the direction of causality between financial development and economic growth in three sub‐Saharan African countries — Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania. The study seeks to answer one critical question: Does financial development in sub‐Saharan African countries exhibit a supply‐leading or demand‐following response? Using three proxies of financial development against real GDP per capita (a proxy for economic growth), the study finds that the direction of causality between financial development and economic growth is sensitive to the choice of measurement for financial development. In addition, the strength and clarity of the causality evidence is found to vary from country to country and over time. On balance, a demand‐following response is found to be stronger in Kenya and South Africa, whilst in Tanzania a supply‐leading response is found to be dominant. The study therefore recommends that for Kenya and South Africa the real sector of the economy should be developed further in order to sustain the development of the financial sector. However, for Tanzania, there is need for further development of the financial sector in order to make the economy more monetized.     

Remittances from international migration: A review in perspective

Remittances—the portion of international migrant workers' earnings sent back from the country of employment to the country of origin—have come to play a central role in the economies of labor-sending countries. Recent research has tended to focus on enumerating the costs and benefits of remittances. This paper proposes an alternative perspective and delineates the “Remittances System” as a heuristic to clarify intermediate relationships between determinants and effects of remittances. Using the heuristic as a framework for review of recent literature concerning remittances, the paper identifies gaps in currently available research and argues for greater focus upon the social and political consequences of remittance flows.     

应用BOT模式发展公共租赁住房探析

公共租赁住房是我国住房保障体系的重要组成部分,从各地实践来看,资金问题是其可持续发展的瓶颈。文章从公共租赁住房准公共产品特征及BOT模式应用条件入手,系统分析应用BOT模式发展公共租赁住房在需求、政策环境、经济上的可行性。结合理论和案例分析,作者还提出了吸引企业参与公共租赁住房建设运营的建议。     

Livestock Pricing in the Northern Kenyan Rangelands

This paper uses detailed, transactions-level data and an innovative,structural-heteroskedasticity-in-mean estimation method to identifythe determinants of livestock producer prices for pastoralistsin the drylands of northern Kenya. The empirical results confirmthe importance of animal characteristics, periodic events thatpredictably shift local demand or supply and, especially, rainfallon the prices pastoralists receive for animals. Price risk premiaare consistently negative in these livestock markets. The impositionof quarantines has a sharp negative effect on expected producerprices in the pastoral areas, revealing that Kenya's approachto animal disease control favours wealthier highlands ranchersand consumers at the expense of poorer drylands herders.     

Unlocking housing equity in Japan

Much prior literature on asset patterns among the elderly has mostly overlooked housing wealth as a determinant of retiree wealth, particularly in the Japanese context. Yet releasing equity in housing may be a natural mechanism to boost consumption, reduce public pension liability, and mitigate the demand for long-term care facilities in Japan. Our study evaluates what might be needed to implement reverse mortgages (RMs) in this country. Policies could include exempting RMs from capital gains tax and transactions tax, along with mechanisms to make annuity income flows nontaxable, along with interest rate accruals for RMs. In addition, housing market reforms to enhance information flows would be needed, particularly regarding new and existing housing trades, which could permit the securitization of housing loans and lines of credit. Other improvements in capital markets could also help, including the establishment of reinsurance mechanisms to help lenders offer these reverse mortgages while having some protection against crossover risk. In the Japanese case, demand for RMs will be dampened by declining residential housing values as well as low interest rates and long life expectancies. Nevertheless, we conclude that RMs can be a good way to finance elderly consumption in Japan, particularly against the backdrop of governmental financial stringencies. J. Japanese Int. Economies 18 (4) (2004) 466–505.     

What Drives Ireland’s Housing Market? A Bayesian DSGE Approach

We study the drivers of fluctuations in the Irish housing market by developing and estimating a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of Ireland as a member of the European Economic Monetary Union (EMU). We estimate the model with Bayesian methods using time series for both Ireland and the rest of the EMU for the period from 1997:Q1 to 2008:Q2. We find that housing preference and technology shocks are the main drivers of fluctuations in house prices and residential investment. A standard regression analysis shows that a good part of the variation of housing preference shocks can be explained by unmodeled demand factors that have been considered in the empirical literature as important determinants of Irish house prices.     

住房需求和住房供给——基于多重多元回归、分位数回归方法

利用因子分析、多重多元回归和分位数回归方法研究了全国房地产行业的住房需求和住房供给,结果表明房价与住房需求和供给均呈正相关关系,并随着分位数的不同而变化,房价对住房需求的影响比对住房供给的影响大而显著等,并提出了一些建议,为有关部门制定相关政策提供依据。     

Are Bilateral Remittances Countercyclical?

By putting together a relatively large data set on bilateral remittances of emigrants, this paper is able to shed light on the important hypothesis of smoothing. The smoothing hypothesis is that remittances are countercyclical with respect to income in the worker’s country of origin (the recipient of the remittance), while procyclical with respect to income in the migrant’s host country (the sender of the remittance). The econometric results confirm the hypothesis. This affirmation of smoothing is important for two reasons. First, it suggests that remittances should be placed on the list of criteria for an optimum currency area. Second, it brings into doubt plans by governments in some developing countries to harness remittances for their own use, in that government spending in these countries generally fails the test of countercyclicality which remittances pass.     

Migrants,urban poverty and the changing nature of urban–rural linkages in Kenya

In the literature on rural–urban linkages in sub-Saharan Africa the focus has so far been predominantly on the urban dwellers contributing to the livelihood of the rural ones, usually through remittances from family members living in the city. Although acknowledged in the last two decades, the reverse flow, i.e. the extent to which town dwellers realise part of their livelihood from rural sources, remains poorly understood. Based on recent research in Nakuru town, Kenya, this paper demonstrates that urban–rural linkages are not only important for the rural households, but are becoming an important element of the livelihood (or survival) strategies of poor urban households.     

The determinants of interregional migration in Kenya

The polytomous logistic model is applied to unpublished census data from Kenya to test recent theoretical advances in migration theory. In addition to reporting econometric results for interregional migration in Kenya, the accumulated knowledge on the key determinants of migration, as reported in some 20 econometric studies on internal migration in developing countries, are summarized.