Public external debt,informality and production efficiency in developing countries

This paper proposes an alternative approach to investigate the non-linear effect of external debt on growth. In the theoretical part, we develop an endogenous growth model with formal and informal sectors to analyse the effect of the public external debt on the production efficiency. We show that an increase of the public external debt share increases the production efficiency through a positive externality effect. However, it generates an opposite effect via the reduction of the formal sector’s size in favour of a less efficient informal sector. The resultant effect becomes negative beyond an optimal level. Besides, we show that a large stock of public external debt reduces the production efficiency when it leads to a tight fiscal policy which reduces the formal sector size. Empirically, using a stochastic frontier technique with unobserved heterogeneity, for a panel of 27 developing countries for the period of 1970–2005, we confirm that the turning point associated to the effect of the share external public debt is apparent at 84%.     

Intellectual property rights, multinational firms and economic growth

This paper develops a model of North-South trade with multinational firms and economic growth in order to analyze formally the effects of stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in developing countries. In the model, Northern firms invent new higher-quality products, multinational firms transfer manufacturing operations to the South and the Southern firms imitate products produced by multinational firms. It is shown that stronger IPR protection in the South (i.e., the adoption and implementation of the TRIPs agreement) leads to a permanent increase in the rate of technology transfer to the South within multinational firms, a permanent increase in R&D employment by Southern affiliates of Northern multinationals, a permanent decrease in the North-South wage gap, and a temporary increase in the Northern innovation rate.     

Intra-industry trade with multinational firms

Recent developments, including the analysis of firm-level adjustment to falling trade costs, have contributed to a revival of interest in intra-industry trade (IIT). Most empirical work still relies on the standard Grubel-Lloyd measure. This however refers only to international trade, disregarding income flows stimulated by repatriated profits of multinational firms. Given the overwhelming importance of the latter, this is a major shortcoming. This paper provides a guide to measurement and estimation of the determinants of bilateral IIT shares from the perspective of new trade theory with multinational firms. We develop an analytically solvable general equilibrium model to investigate the impact of investment costs, multinational activities and income flows from repatriated profits. We also discuss and quantify the bias of the Grubel-Lloyd index associated with repatriated profit flows of multinationals. Using bias-corrected versions of the Grubel-Lloyd index as the dependent variable, we demonstrate that the determinants motivated by our theoretical analysis offer important insights into variations in IIT shares.     

Financial globalization and debt maturity in emerging economies

This paper studies how financial globalization affects debt structure in emerging economies. We find that by accessing international markets, firms increase their long-term debt and extend their debt maturity. In contrast, with financial liberalization, long-term debt decreases and the maturity structure shifts to the short term for the average firm. These effects are stronger in economies with less developed domestic financial systems. The evidence is consistent with financial integration having opposite effects on the firms that are able to integrate with world markets and obtain financing globally, relative to the firms that rely on domestic financing only.     

A percolation model of eco-innovation diffusion: The relationship between diffusion, learning economies and subsidies

An obstacle to the widespread adoption of environmentally friendly energy technologies such as stationary and mobile fuel cells is their high upfront costs. While much lower prices seem to be attainable in the future due to learning curve cost reductions that increase rapidly with the scale of diffusion of the technology, there is a chicken and egg problem, even when some consumers may be willing to pay more for green technologies. Drawing on recent percolation models of diffusion, we develop a network model of new technology diffusion that combines contagion among consumers with heterogeneity of agent characteristics. Agents adopt when the price falls below their random reservation price drawn from a lognormal distribution, but only when one of their neighbors has already adopted. Combining with a learning curve for the price as a function of the cumulative number of adopters, this may lead to delayed adoption for a certain range of initial conditions. Using agent-based simulations we explore when a limited subsidy policy can trigger diffusion that would otherwise not happen. The introduction of a subsidy policy seems to be highly effective for a given high initial price level only for learning economies in a certain range. Outside this range, the diffusion of a new technology either never takes off despite the subsidies, or the subsidies are unnecessary. Perhaps not coincidentally, this range seems to correspond to the values observed for many successful innovations.     

The dynamic adjustment towards target capital structures of firms in transition economies*

We examine the capital structure dynamics of Central and Eastern European firms to get a better understanding of the quantitative and qualitative development of the financial systems in this region. The dynamic model used endogenizes the target leverage as well as the adjustment speed. It is applied to microeconomic data for ten countries. We find that during the transition process, firms generally increased their leverage, lowering the gap between the actual and the target leverage. Profitability and age are the most robust determinants of capital structure targets. Although banking system development has in general enabled firms to get closer to their leverage targets, information asymmetries between firms and banks are still relatively large. As a result, firms prefer internal finance above bank debt and adjust leverage only slowly.     

Discontinuous innovation capability accumulation in latecomer natural resource-processing firms

Most of the studies that describe the building of innovation capability in emerging and developing economies have focused on the ways in which latecomer firms develop continuously towards advanced capability levels along existing technological trajectories, particularly for the assembled products industries, especially in Asia. A slightly different approach is adopted herein by focusing on pathways of discontinuous capability building of firms in natural resource-processing industries. By drawing on evidence from a variety of case studies taken from 13 forestry, pulp, and paper firms in Brazil in the period 1950-2007, it was found that: (1) in contrast with the majority of case studies reported in the literature, the pathways followed by firms in their accumulation of innovation capability involved a qualitative departure from the established technological trajectory at an early stage in the development of their capability; (2) the pathways of firms along the new technological trajectories were nevertheless characterised by a high degree of variability (from intermediate to world leading innovators) in terms of the levels and speeds of the accumulation of innovation capability; (3) firms that have attained progressively higher levels of innovative performance have more rapidly developed a combination of internal and external research-based arrangements in order to undertake increasingly complex, but firm-centred innovation efforts. This paper sheds some light on some of the discussions that relate to the role of natural resources in the patterns of industrial progress and growth in those countries endowed with particular natural resource-based industries. It also provides a methodological contribution to the study of the long-term innovation strategies that make use of the dynamics of capability building, especially within natural resource-processing industries.     

Government spending and growth in second-best economies

This paper extends public spending-based growth theory along three directions: we assume a logistic trajectory for the ratio of government expenditure to aggregate income, self-limiting population change, and exogenous technological progress. By focusing on the choices of a benevolent social planner we find that, if the inverse of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution in consumption is sufficiently high, the ratio of consumption to private physical capital converges towards zero when time goes to infinity. Depending on the form of the underlying aggregate production function and on whether, for given production function, technological progress equals zero or a positive constant, our model may or may not yield an asymptotically balanced growth path (ABGP) equilibrium. When there is no exogenous technological progress, an equilibrium where population size, the ratio of government spending to aggregate income and the ratio of consumption to private physical capital are all constant does exist and the equilibrium is a saddle point. In case of positive technological progress numerical simulations show that the model still exhibits an ABGP equilibrium.     

Decentralizing antipoverty program delivery in developing countries

We study the effects on accountability in government service delivery of decentralizing administration of an antipoverty program. While governments at both central and local levels are vulnerable to antipoor policy biases owing to political capture, centralized delivery systems are additionally prone to bureaucratic corruption, owing to problems in monitoring bureaucratic performance. Decentralizing the delivery system promotes cost-effectiveness and improves intraregional targeting at low program scales. But interregional targeting may deteriorate, as central grants to high-poverty regions shrink, owing to high capture of local governments by local elites in such regions.     

Sovereign debt and the length of economic depressions

We analyze the duration of economic depressions to see if there is an association with consecutive years of high public-debt-to-GDP ratios. We find that there is a positive, non-linear association between the sovereign debt ratio and the length of depressions. Inflation is negatively and linearly correlated with depression duration. These associations are robust to the inclusion of controls for development, but we do detect cross-country heterogeneity in the probability of exit. An analysis of causality finds little evidence that high levels of sovereign debt cause depressions to be longer. Rather, it appears that longer depressions elicit higher debt relative to GDP. Public deleveraging during a depression is not likely, therefore, to help bring it to an end.     

Modelling economic growth with internal and external imbalances: Empirical evidence from Portugal

Thirlwall's Law considers that growth can be constrained by the balance-of-payments when the current account is in permanent deficit. The Law focuses on external imbalances as impediments to growth and does not consider the case where internal imbalances (budget deficits or public debt) can also constrain growth. The recent European public debt crisis shows that when internal imbalances are out of control they can constrain growth and domestic demand in a severe way. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by developing a growth model in line with Thirlwall's Law that takes into account both internal and external imbalances. The model is tested for Portugal which recently fell into a public debt crisis with serious negative consequences on growth. The empirical analysis shows that the growth rate in Portugal is in fact balance-of-payments constrained and the main drawback is the high import elasticity of the components of demand and in particular that of exports.     

The determinants of corruption in transition economies

This paper examines the determinants of corruption in transition economies. We found that the progress of structural reform, comprising marketization, rule of law, and democratization had a crucial impact on the extent of corruption control in former socialist countries.     

Mark-ups, economies of scale and the role of knowledge spillovers in OECD industries

Using R&D-based models of economic growth as a foundation, this paper argues that market-driven knowledge creation is necessarily linked as an engine of productivity growth to economies of scale and market-power. A cost function and factor demand model is applied to a cross-country industry data set to study market-power, economies of scale and the role of knowledge in an integrated approach. Empirical results reveal the presence of market-power and economies of scale in all of the industries investigated. R&D and spillovers explain some of the productivity growth observed. Spillovers are identified as an external source of economies of scale.     

Enforcement in informal saving groups

Informal groups cannot rely on external enforcement to insure that members abide by their obligations. It is generally assumed that these problems are solved by ‘social sanctions’ and reputational effects. The present paper focuses on roscas, one of the most commonly found informal financial institutions in the developing world. We first show that, in the absence of an external (social) sanctioning mechanism, roscas are never sustainable, even if the defecting member is excluded from all future roscas. We then argue that the organizational structure of the rosca itself can be designed so as to address enforcement issues. The implications of our analysis are consistent with first-hand evidence from rosca groups in a Kenyan slum.     

Employment protection, international specialization, and innovation

We develop a model to analyze the implications of firing costs on incentives for R&D and international specialization. The key idea is that countries with a rigid labor market will tend to produce relatively secure goods, at a late stage of their product life cycle. Consequently, their researchers tend to specialize in ‘secondary innovation’ which improves existing products, rather than ‘primary innovation’ which introduces new products. This is roughly consistent with the observed pattern of R&D in Europe versus the U.S. Employment protection does not necessarily harm the country where it prevails, but typically reduces world welfare and the world number of goods.     

Taxation base in developing countries

Informal sectors are larger in developing countries than in rich countries. This is a result of higher fixed costs of entry into the formal economy in developing countries. We show that raising barriers to entry is consistent with a deliberate government policy for raising tax revenue. By generating market power, and hence rents, for the permitted entrants, market entry fees foster the emergence of large taxpayers. The rents can be readily confiscated by the government through entry fees and taxes on profits at a low administrative cost. The relevance of the theory is assessed with a sample of 64 countries. Empirical analysis supports the results of the paper.     

The role of networking in the competitiveness of firms

Two main forces characterise production systems today: on the one hand, the increasingly global nature of markets and economies has resulted in increasing competition and a new, more global division of labour. On the other, the greater complexity of technology makes innovation a key aspect in the competitiveness of manufacturing firms. The establishment of cooperative networks seems to be important in both processes. This paper aims to explore these aspects by analysing the competitiveness of firms in four different sectors of the manufacturing industry: food, chemicals, electronics and vehicles. Data have been obtained from a survey conducted specifically for this purpose at company level in Spain. Findings from the empirical analysis, based on the application of the Polytomous Logistic Universal Model (PLUM), confirm the positive effects that the ability to network has on company performance. In particular, among all the potential organisations that work as partners of the firms, the paper shows the importance of intra-firm cooperation, the user-producer relationships and the cooperation between competitors.     

Economic reform,growth and the poor: Evidence from rural Ethiopia

A new decomposition of poverty changes is developed to analyse the determinants of poverty changes during a period of economic reform (1989–1995) in villages in Ethiopia. Poverty fell substantially, but with diverse experiences across villages. Shocks mattered, but the main factors driving consumption changes were relative prices changes, resulting in changes in the returns to land, labour, human capital and location. The experience of the poor is mixed: one group of the poor in 1989, with relatively good land and location, outperformed all other households, while another group with much poorer endowments and location experienced virtually unchanged and persistent poverty.     

Corporate taxation, debt financing and foreign-plant ownership

This paper compares domestically and foreign-owned plants with respect to their debt-to-assets ratio and analyzes to which extent the difference is systematically affected by corporate taxation. To derive hypotheses about influence of corporate taxation on a firm's debt financing we adapt a standard model of taxation and financing decisions of firms for the case of international debt shifting activities of foreign-owned firms. We estimate the average difference between a foreign-owned and a domestically owned firm's debt ratio, treating the mode of ownership as endogenous. Using data from 32,067 European firms, we find that foreign-owned firms on average exhibit a significantly higher debt ratio than their domestically owned counterparts in the host country. Moreover, this gap in the debt ratio increases with the host country's statutory corporate tax rate.     

Fiscal deficits and growth in developing countries

This paper examines the relation between fiscal deficits and growth for a panel of 45 developing countries. Based on a consistent treatment of the government budget constraint, it finds evidence of a threshold effect at a level of the deficit around 1.5% of GDP. While there appears to be a growth payoff to reducing deficits to this level, this effect disappears or reverses itself for further fiscal contraction. The magnitude of this payoff, but not its general character, necessarily depends on how changes in the deficit are financed (through changes in borrowing or seigniorage) and on how the change in the deficit is accommodated elsewhere in the budget. We also find evidence of interaction effects between deficits and debt stocks, with high debt stocks exacerbating the adverse consequences of high deficits.