Income Distribution,Household Debt and Growth in Modern Financialized Economies

Abstract:

We analyze some core features of the institutional transformation of the Canadian and U.S. economies over the last half century, as they became increasingly financialized economies resting on household consumption as the key contributor to economic growth, despite weak growth in real wages and personal disposable income. This growth in consumption spending is highly fragile not only because it is a debt-led growth that has relied on an unsustainable expansion of household indebtedness largely dependent on credit bubbles in the housing market, but also because of the perverse form of this indebtedness. Studied from the angle of disaggregated household consumption/saving behavior, it is the poorest and most vulnerable households who have been building up unsustainable debt, thereby presaging increasing financial fragility and crises.     

Trade Liberalisation in Developing Economies: Modest Benefits but Problems with Productivity Growth, Macro Prices, and Income Distribution

Microeconomically, the case for liberalisation is dubious under increasing returns to scale and when firms can invest directly in productivity enhancement. Distributional effects of commercial policy changes can be regressive and large, but the 'rents' they generate can serve as a basis for effective policy intervention contingent on firms' performance. Macroeconomically, the case of liberalisation rests on Say's Law, which is not always enforced. Recent combined current and capital market liberalisations have been associated with strong exchange rates and high interest rates and output and productivity growth have positive mutual feedbacks which liberalisation may well suppress.     

Feasible Net Income Distributions under Income Tax Evasion: An Equilibrium Analysis

We investigate how redistribution of income is affected by the fact that income is privately observed and agents may not be truthful in their reports to tax authorities. In response, the government establishes an audit mechanism with penalties. Adhering to a signaling equilibrium concept, we prove that agents resort to mixed strategies, which makes it difficult for tax authorities to identify the true types. The audit strategy has a cutoff property: All income declarations below the pivotal income are audited with a constant probability; other declarations are not audited. In spite of not necessarily being truthful, agents whose true income is below or equal to the pivotal income pay their liability and, consequently, the government is implementing the designated tax schedule for those agents. In equilibrium, penalties and tax corrections equal the audit cost. Consequently, the audit system does not contribute directly to revenues, and its role is restricted to supporting the equilibrium.     

Convergence of Income Distributions: Another Measurement Problem

According to EU-policy, the cohesion of the Communitydepends crucially on the convergence of per-capita incomes acrossEU member-states. By employing various indicators which are supposedto compare distributions on EU income-data, the paper shows thatthe EU-notion of cohesion faces a substantial measurement problem.Instead of arriving at a unique order, the indicators frequentlyyield conflicting results about the convergence of a particulardistribution. The paper examines the reasons and their consequencesfor institutional choice in the European Union; thus approachingthe cohesion versus conflict issue from an economic perspective.     

Trade Structure and Trade liberalization: The emerging pattern between the EU and Transition Economies

The purpose of this study is to find empirical evidence for the assumption that trade liberalization unlocks the potential of the Transition Economies (TEs) to achieve technological upgrading, productivity progress and catching-up (in terms of income). The study examines the trade structure now emerging between the European Union (EU) and the TEs in the light of two sets of differently liberalized trade items identified by the European Agreements. The aim is to determine whether trade liberalization has helped to supersede the structures – reflected mainly in the low quality of products – inherited by the TEs from the command economy. The empirical results are interpreted in the light of the Flam-Helpman quality-cycle model. We find evidence of an ongoing division of labor between high quality products (EU) and low quality products (TEs) according to a cycle. The first stage comprises the already well established dominance of quality advantage products by EU countries producing and exporting high-quality products, which crowd out the TEs' production of similar products. The second stage is the exploitation of cost-advantages by TEs in less liberalized trade, and there they appear to achieve better results. All these results may be taken as support for an active government in TEs.     

Export and Income Growth in Japan and Taiwan

Economic theory suggests that export growth promotes economic growth. Yet empirical research has not found clear support for the export-led growth hypothesis, even for the newly industrialized economies where the theory should be most applicable. This paper provides an explanation for the apparent discrepancy between the theory and the empirical results. It shows that causality inferences on the export-led growth hypothesis are sensitive to unit roots or near-unit roots in the time series and to the lag structure chosen for causality tests. Therefore, the issues of unit root and lag structure deserve scrutiny in empirical research.     

Remittances,Dutch Disease,and Manufacturing Growth in Developing Economies

Remittances have grown tremendously in magnitude and economic importance in the past four decades, providing economies with additional disposable incomes and even serving as buffers against economic downturns. It is thus but fitting to ask how remittances have impacted on growth, particularly on manufacturing growth. This note presents a simple model linking remittances and manufacturing growth via a ‘Dutch Disease’ channel. Using Blundell and Bond's (1998) system general method of moments on a panel dataset of 56 developing economies from 1992 to 2016, we verify that remittances adversely affect manufacturing growth in economies that experience high real appreciation rates. This result is robust to alternate specifications, such as the inclusion of financial development indicators, the expansion of the sample to include high‐income economies, and the use of different sample periods.     

Estimation of Concentration Measures and Their Standard Errors for Income Distributions in Poland

Measures of concentration (inequality) are often used in the analysis of income and wage size distributions. Among, them the Gini and Zenga coefficients are of greatest importance. It is well known that income inequality in Poland increased significantly in the period of transformation from a centrally planned economy to a market economy. High income inequality can be a source of serious problems, such as increasing poverty, social stratification, and polarization. Therefore, it seems especially important to present reliable estimates of income inequality measures for a population of households in Poland in different divisions. In this paper, some estimation methods for Gini and Zenga concentration measures are presented together with their application to the analysis of income distributions in Poland by socio-economic groups. The basis for the calculations was individual data coming from the Polish Household Budget Survey conducted by the Central Statistical Office. The standard errors of Gini and Zenga coefficients were estimated by means of the bootstrap and the parametric approach based on the Dagum model.     

Stochastic Growth and Factor Income Risk

Abstract. This paper examines the effects of aggregate factor income risk in a tractable version of the stochastic Romer endogenous growth model. Labor supply is endogenous. The presence of labor income risk unambiguously increases savings and growth due to precautionary motives. Households not only underaccumulate but also work less along the balanced growth path of the competitive economy when compared with the Pareto-efficient allocation. The paper also discusses distributive disturbances for the case of inelastic labor supply. Here, growth effects are negative for empirically plausible correlations of the underlying shocks.     

收入增长、劳动力外出与农村居民财产分布——基于四省农村的住户调查分析

本文在四省农村住户调查数据的基础上讨论了农村居民收入和外出行为对于家庭财产积累的影响。结果表明,农村居民的财产分布不均等程度要高于收入的不均等性,金融资产的不均等性尤其要高一些;财产不均等与收入不均等之间具有非常密切的关联性,收入不均等将转化为财产不均等。本文的结果也发现,家庭的外出决策对于财产积累,特别是金融资产的积累具有重要影响。     

Economic Growth and Income Support Policy in Australia*

This paper examines the growth in welfare spending in Australia over the 20 years from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. Particularly for pensioners and beneficiaries with children, the levels of benefit and high tax rates implicit in the tax and social security systems are shown to create disincentives over wide ranges of private income. A careful examination of the evidence indicates that more generous levels of benefits had a modest but significant part in the growth of unemployment since 1970. The paper concludes by suggesting that the efficiency costs of meeting society's distributional objectives can be minimized by targeting assistance to the most needy and by the careful use of income testing.     

Corruption, Income Distribution, and Growth

This paper uses an encompassing framework developed by Murphy et al. (1991, 1993) to study corruption and how it affects income distribution and growth. We find that (1) corruption affects income distribution in an inverted U-shaped way, (2) corruption alone also explains a large proportion of the Gini differential across developing and industrial countries, and (3) after correcting for measurement errors, corruption seems to retard economic growth. But the effect is far less pronounced than the one found in Mauro (1995). Moreover, corruption alone explains little of the continental growth differentials. In countries where the asset distribution is less equal, corruption is associated with a smaller increase in income inequality and a larger drop in growth rates.     

税收、收入不平等和内生经济增长

企业家(通过金融中介)从家庭借贷来支撑创新。二者在企业家的努力不为外人所见的情形下双方签订信用合同分享创新带来的垄断利润(即蛋糕)。两个有代表性经济人(企业家和家庭)的存在允许人们在内生经济增长模型里研究收入不平等。本文研究发现,企业家分配份额的增加一开始会提升增长速度,但是过了一定值后会拉低增长速度;而该份额的增加一直拉大企业家和工人间的收入差距。所以降低企业家获得的蛋糕的份额的分配改革可缩小收入差距。提高企业家来自创新的收入的税率将降低他们的努力程度,从而降低增长速度,但是该税率的提高有助于降低收入不平等程度。存款收入的税率提高尽管不会改变企业家的努力程度,但是也会降低经济增长速度,而且不会降低收入不平等(如果工人有一定比例的存款)。对于劳动收入(工人工资)的税率增加会加剧工人和企业家间的收入不平等,但对经济增长速度没有影响。     

Growth Effects of Fiscal Policy and Debt Sustainability in the EU

In this paper we study the relationship of fiscal policy and economicperformance of some core countries in the EU. Our aim is to find outwhether public deficit and public debt have consequences for real variables in the economies we consider. The background of our empirical study is a growth model that provides us with some predictions on the relationship between fiscal policy and economic growth. In a first step we then use Granger causality tests to analyze empirically whether some of the implications of our model arecompatible with the data. In a second step, we investigate whether the fiscalpolicies of the member states have been sustainable. Given this information,we then pursue the question of whether differences in the fiscal positions ofcountries have consequences as concerns the outcome of our empirical testsof step one. Finally, we study whether the impact of the public deficit ratiodepends on the magnitude of the debt ratio.     

收入增长和收入分配对城市减贫的影响

本文基于对贫困的分解,运用贫困弹性的动态特征,选取《中国统计年鉴》相关年份城市住户分组数据,深入分析收入增长和收入分配因素对中国1991-2009年间城市绝对贫困和相对贫困的影响。结果表明:(1)高速的经济增长对我国城市绝对贫困率下降起决定性作用,但收入分配恶化对城市相对贫困率上升有显著影响。(2)收入水平越高,则收入因素对城市减贫的促进作用越强,且分配因素所引起的贫困变动越大;收入分配越不平等,则收入因素对城市减贫的促进作用越弱,且分配因素所引起的贫困变动越小。因此,我国今后的城市减贫,应在继续保持经济较快增长的同时,以改善收入分配不平等为重点。     

收入差距、职业选择与经济增长

在寻租理论的基本模型中,假定经济个体具有相同的生产能力,结果发现富有个体选择寻租活动将比选择生产活动带来更多的长期效用,由此导致资本积累率降低和产出减少.扩展模型假定经济个体具有异质生产能力,结果发现富有个体如果在生产活动中具有比较优势,就会增加生产性投资,扩大社会产出.因此,提供高质量的、公平的教育或许是减少寻租活动,促进经济增长的长远措施,从中国的实际来看,当务之急就是要扩大农村地区的教育投资,改善农民的文化权益.     

人力资本积累与农户收入增长

采用2003—2010年全国农村固定观察点微观面板数据,运用统计性描述和计量分析方法,基于回报率和贡献率双重视角,本文研究了人力资本积累对农户收入增长的影响、作用路径及其变化趋势。研究发现:健康、基础教育、技能培训和工作经验所体现出的人力资本对农户收入增长有显著作用,总贡献率为38.57%。其中,健康和基础教育是影响农户收入的核心人力资本变量;人力资本主要是通过劳动性收入对农户收入产生影响,对以外出务工收入为核心的工资性收入的回报率和贡献率最为显著;随着农村市场化改革推进,人力资本对农户收入的回报率和贡献率却均呈现弱化趋势。坚持提升农户人力资本积累的基本战略,完善市场机制配置资源与财富的作用,对于农户收入水平提高具有重要作用。