Is the Calorie–Income Elasticity Sensitive to Price Changes? Evidence from Indonesia

The calorie–income demand elasticity is an important parameter in the development literature and in the policy arena. Yet, there is very little evidence on the extent to which it can be considered as an unchanging parameter or a time-shifting parameter that, for example, changes with the economic conditions faced by households. In this paper I use data from the 1996 and 1999 SUSENAS surveys in Indonesia to examine whether the relationship between income changes and caloric availability has changed and if so, how. Using the same questionnaire, the SUSENAS surveys collect detailed information on more than 200 different food items consumed over the last seven days by 60,000 households at the same point in time in each survey year. I use nonparametric as well as regression methods to examine two important relationships: (a) the relationship between income and total calories; and (2) the relationship between income and calories from cereals and other foods (excluding cereals and root crops). The empirical analysis finds that the income elasticity of the demand for total calories is slightly higher in February 1999 (the crisis year with dramatically different relative prices) compared to its level in February 1996. In addition, the calorie–income elasticity for cereals as a group increases while the calorie–income elasticity for other food items decreases. The latter finding is interpreted as behavior that is consistent with the presence of a binding subsistence constraint.     

Uncertainty and the arbitrage pricing theory

This paper tests the economic importance of income uncertainty in the context of a measured factor arbitrage pricing theory model. This provides a test of the importance of uncertainty using a different methodology and data set than are traditionally used. If income uncertainty affects the investment climate, a statistically significant risk premium will be associated with assets that are affected by uncertainty. The empirical work in this essay finds that a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity measure of income uncertainty is a priced factor in a model of the arbitrage pricing theory. The risk premium between a baa-rated 10-year corporate bond and a 10-year government bond, as well as the term structure, also are priced factors.     

The residential demand for electricity in Japan: An examination using empirical panel analysis techniques

This paper examines the residential demand for electricity in Japan, excluding Okinawa-prefecture, from 1975 to 2005 as a function of the disposable income per household and the overall unit price of electricity for general consumers, by using the empirical panel analysis techniques of a panel unit root test, a panel cointegration test, and group-mean dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) estimators to determine whether or not each variable is stationary. This study's contribution is twofold. First, for a more accurate empirical economic analysis, it divides Japan into a number of regions so that the estimation of coefficients becomes more powerful due to the increased degree of freedom from the utilization of the panel data. Second, the study chose Japan for this analysis on the basis of discussions regarding the deregulation of the residential electric power supply that is scheduled for the near future. All variables—sales per household, price, and income per household—can be assumed to have a unit root and cointegration relationship. The results determine that the price effect is negative and elastic and that the income effect is inelastic. These results correspond to other such studies on developed countries that are significant economic powers.     

A Survey of the literature on the determinants of foreign portfolio investments in the United States

Conclusions In the last several years we have seen a substantial theoretical advancement in our understanding of the factors determining international portfolio capital movements. From the mechanistic flow theory we have progressed to the portfolio-adjustment theory which rests on a firmer microeconomic foundation. However, because of the multifarious functions of the United States in the world economy the portfolio-adjustment theory is not quite adequate in explaining the foreign portfolio investments in the United States. There are other motives such as maintaining working balances and compensatory balances in addition to the expected utility maximization. In some studies ad hoc assumptions are introduced to account for these motives tor holding U.S. liabilities. Albeit some statistically successful results there is much to be desired in this simple portfolio approach modified withad hoc assumptions. Despite the theoretical weakness we might have seen more empirical research in this area if data on wealth for foreign countries were available. Furthermore, the few existing studies were carried out by doing away with the wealth variable without any convincing justification. Given the constraint of data a more persuasive argument will have to be presented in favor of deleting the wealth variable or using an alternative variable. It seems that a proper use of estimates of permanent income, which can be approximated empirically, may be successful in empirical estimations of capital flows.     

交通基础设施结构对城乡收入差距的空间溢出效应研究

为探究交通基础设施作为一项公共品对缩小城乡收入差距的贡献程度,以二元经济发展理论,新古典经济学理论为基础,运用空间自相关,空间误差模型,在我国2005—2017年30个省级行政区（除西藏）的面板数据基础上,引入交通基础设施密度作为核心解释变量,从空间的视角探讨,交通基础设施对于改善城乡收入差距的贡献程度。实证结果显示：公路交通基础设施的建设有助于缩小城乡收入差距,其中,一级公路,三级公路对于收入差距存在正向溢出,二级公路存在负向溢出,高速公路影响并不明显;铁路基础设施则与之相反。结果表明：优化交通基础设施的投建结构对于缩小城乡收入差距存在重要的现实意义,随着资本边际收益不断递减以及人口红利优势的逐渐消失,合理分配交通基础设施投资支出对于推动经济增长向效率方向转型变得日益迫切。     

自由贸易抑或贸易保护——国际贸易的经济增长效应再考察

全球经济复苏过程中,发达国家与新兴经济体之间关于自由贸易的争议也变得空前激烈。国际贸易是否有利于全球经济增长?这实际上是长期以来国际经济学与发展经济学领域颇具争议的问题之一,而在当下对这一问题进行重新审视更具有重要的现实意义。传统贸易理论对贸易合理性的探究尽管触及了经济增长问题,但在贸易静态收益理论的框架下,国际贸易究竟是否会促进一国经济增长,既取决于各个国家在各个发展阶段的经济增长究竟偏向于出口部门还是进口部门,也取决于各种贸易政策对各个部门的相对供给和相对需求的影响。本文对现有针对国际贸易与经济增长关系所做的实证研究作了系统回顾和分析总结,明确指出了目前各种看似矛盾的实证证据背后的理论和技术根源。在此基础上,运用两阶段最小二乘估计(2SLS)和GMM动态面板回归技术,对1960～2006年期间全球各国面板数据进行分析,对不同收入水平的国家组别分别就其贸易占GDP比重与GDP增长之间的关系进行实证检验。文章发现,上述实证研究证明国际贸易对经济增长的促进作用与一国经济发展阶段相关,但对不同收入水平的国家而言则存在差异,同时进口和出口在经济增长中的表现也存在差异性。总体来看,对中等收入国家而言,贸易占GDP比重与GDP增速之间的关系最强,进出口均有较强带动作用;高收入国家贸易占GDP比重与GDP增速之间关系较弱,进口的作用甚至大于出口;低收入国家贸易占GDP比重与GDP增速之间的关系最弱,进口甚至有抑制作用。     

Does inequality in health impede economic growth?

This paper investigates the effects of inequality in health on economic growth in low and middle income countries. The empirical part of the paper uses an original cross-national panel data set covering 62 low and middle income countries over the period 1985 to 2007. I find a substantial and relatively robust negative effect of health inequality on income levels and income growth controlling for life expectancy, country and time fixed-effects and a large number of other effects that have been shown to matter for growth. The effect also holds if health inequality is instrumented to circumvent a potential problem of reverse causality. Hence, reducing inequality in the access to health care and to health-related information can make a substantial contribution to economic growth.     

Modeling an early warning system for household debt risk in Korea: A simple deep learning approach

We construct an early warning indicator for household debt risk by analyzing the relationship between household debt and certain important macroeconomic determinants using a simple deep learning approach. A precise and informative indicator can help inform economic policies, especially in light of the recent growth in the ratio of household debt to income. Although several studies have analyzed the determinants of the household debt crisis, very few have examined early warning indicators for household debt risk. Some studies suggest that a situation can be regarded as a crisis if the household debt ratio is greater than 50% or 85%. However, as the household debt ratio in Korea is already over this threshold, this criterion is neither informative nor useful. Accordingly, we propose a transformed index that addresses long-term memory characteristics. Moreover, five categories for the degree of household debt crisis are considered instead of the binary variable that has been frequently used in previous studies. Furthermore, we use a well-known deep learning approach to find a non-linear relationship between crisis indices and many factors. The empirical results demonstrate that the proposed early warning indicator explains the household debt crisis quite well.     

Openness, Investment and Growth

In the empirical growth literature both investment and opennessto international trade have been identified as important determinantsof growth. These relationships appear to be robust in a numberof specifications. However, Sachs and Warner claim that opennessis such an important determinant of investment that the coefficienton investment will be insignificant in growth regressions, whichalready account for openness. I re-examine this result and canonly support it if I use their model specification and estimationmethod. I suggest that their ordinary least squares estimationsuffers from both endogeneity and omitted variable bias. Usingpanel data analysis, I show that ignoring unobserved country-specificeffects and endogeneity problems cause investment to be insignificant.Estimating the model with the Blundell and Bond system generalmethod of moments estimator, which allows me to address theomitted variable as well as the endogeneity bias, I find thatinvestment is significant in the Sachs–Warner model despitecontrolling for openness. Thus, my regressions confirm thatopenness has a significant, positive effect on income. However,this variable is not so important that it drives investmentout of the model. My re-examination of the Sachs–Warnermodel shows that results from single cross-country growth regressionscan be misleading when unobserved country-specific effects andendogeneity problems are ignored.     

高收入国家与中等收入国家的能源密度差异的实证研究

本文依据1990年至2000年间中国和11个OECD国家的14个工业产业的样本数据,运用可乘对数的Divisia指数分解方法,实证分析了这些国家的能源密度变化特性,解释推动能源密度变化的主要因素。实证分析结果显示,所有中等收入国家在这期间都经历GDP的快速增长和能源密度的迅速下降。尽管能源密度降低速度较快,但是从总体水平上看,中等收入国家的能源密度同高收入国家还存在较大的差距。另外,无论是中等收入国家还是高收入国家,纯密度变化都是能源密度降低的最主要原因。而且中等收入国家的能源使用效率的提高与经济开放、工业私有化和市场自由化过程相关。     

收入分布、厂商定价与耐用品的消费扩张

本文考察了收入差距对耐用消费品消费的影响。我们从厂商的定价理论出发。说明了收入差距对耐用消费品消费呈现出倒U型的影响：随着收入差距扩大，耐用消费品的消费量增加，但是，收入差距继续扩大则会减少耐用消费品的消费。这说明，适当的收入差距有利于社会消费水平提高和经济的发展，过大和过小的收入差距都无助于经济的起飞。我们最后运用城镇居民和农村居民彩电、洗衣机和冰箱的拥有量对该理论进行了实证检验，实证检验结果基本上支持了我们的理论分析。     

The role of creative innovation in economic growth: Some international comparisons

For many countries, export-driven policies have thus far produced dramatic increases in real per capita income. At the same time, sustainable growth requires that technological innovation proceed at comparable rates if mutual gains from globalization are to be realized. In this paper, we derive a measure of innovation and test the extent to which institutional policy choices enhance or delay its diffusion. To do so we use a panel regression model, with data on a sample of 103 countries in different geographic regions for the 1980–2005 period. Our findings provide empirical evidence of the positive role of creative innovation in economic growth, and from which we derive several basic policy conclusions.     

Intergenerational income persistence and transmission mechanism: Evidence from urban China

In this paper I investigate the intergenerational income association and its transmission channels amid China's economic transition period using urban data from the Chinese Household Income Projects in 1995 and 2002. The estimated intergenerational income elasticity is 0.43 and 0.51 for cohorts educated prior to and after the market reform respectively, and reaches 0.71 among households with above average income in the post-reform era. Besides the conventional channel of education, this paper estimates the contribution from social capital and ownership of work unit across cohorts and income groups. There is weak evidence that prior to market reform, ownership of work unit contributes most to the intergenerational income persistence for households with below average income, while social capital leads the three contributors in households with above average income. However, in the post-reform era, parents with below average income invest statistically significantly in children's education which contributes most to the intergenerational income persistence. The leading contributor in families with above average income shifts to social capital. Possible explanations for such a shift lie in the ability and incentive of parents from different income categories to invest in their children. The results are tested through a series of robustness checks, and provide empirical support for promoting policies on the equality of opportunity.     

Testing export-led growth in Bangladesh in a multivarate VAR framework

Although the link between trade and growth has long been discussed, systematic empirical investigation of the relationship has been undertaken only relatively recently. A number of time-series studies exist for individual countries in the area of export-led growth, but for Bangladesh there has been little work in this area. This study seeks to bridge an important gap in the literature, and is perhaps the first to use Johansen's multivariate framework taking the terms of trade as an additional variable for Bangladesh. The findings suggest that the direction of both long and short-term causality is from income to exports. This result is hardly surprising as, for most of the period covered, Bangladesh has followed an inward-looking strategy of development that discriminated against exports.     

我国中老年人健康需求影响因素的实证研究——基于CHARLS数据的分析

本文依据中国健康与养老追踪调查(CHARLS)2012年的数据,运用Probit有序选择模型,对影响我国中老年人健康需求的因素进行实证研究。由模型估计结果得出结论:1男性的健康水平高于女性的健康水平,城镇居民的健康水平高于农村居民;2综合来看,年轻时良好的健康水平和稳定的婚姻状况对中老年健康有正向的显著影响。年龄和教育对健康需求的影响比较符合Grossman模型的预测结果,且显著,收入对健康的影响不太符合Grossman模型的预测;3以性别做为分组变量的模型估计结果显示,教育对女性的健康影响更大,婚姻状况和收入对男性的影响更显著;以城乡为分组变量的模型估计结果表明,收入和教育对农村居民的健康水平有更大的影响。     

温州经济技术开发区出口贸易的劳动力效应——基于制造业细分行业面板数据的实证研究

在劳动力成为经济发展的关键因素背景下,文章利用温州经济技术开发区制造业24个细分行业的面板数据研究出口贸易对行业劳动生产率、劳动收入份额和单位资产就业吸收量等劳动力现象的影响,研究发现出口贸易会降低劳动生产率,同时出口贸易会提高行业劳动收入份额并且会增加单位资产就业吸收量.此外,劳动密集型产业样本数据的实证研究得出了相同的结论,但在劳动密集型产业中,出口贸易对劳动生产率的负面影响较弱,对劳动收入的正面影响较强,且对就业的正面影响较弱.     

Early inequality and industrialization: Introduction

Seeking to enrich our understanding of inequality movements, economic historians have used new data to illuminate the earlier darkness that Kuznets urged us to explore. To explore earlier worlds without income tax returns or modern household surveys, they have turned to non-income measures of purchasing power and well-being. The articles in this issue give a good sampling from this new wave of the economic history of inequality.     

Intergenerational income mobility and economic freedom

Numerous studies have found that income inequality reduces the chances of upward relative mobility (i.e., climbing up the income ladder). However, most of this work ignores the role played by institutional quality (namely, economic freedom) in determining mobility and increasing the individual's set of choices. We fill this gap by empirically testing the direct and indirect (through economic growth) impacts of economic freedom on intergenerational income mobility. We find that economic freedom has both direct and indirect effects on intergenerational income mobility, while income inequality is a strong predictor of downward income mobility. When we incorporate findings about the purely mechanical relationship between inequality and intergeneration income mobility, we find that the legal system and property rights component of economic freedom matters more than inequality. These results suggest that good institutions can increase intergenerational income mobility.     

FDI对中国收入分配差距的影响及对策——基于多维变量基础上的实证研究

FDI对中国城乡总量收入差距之间并不存在关联,但与人均收入差距有着明显的正相关关系。FDI与地区生产总值的差异存在很大关联,但只在东部和中部地区以及东部和西部地区的实证数据得到验证。FDI和产业生产总值的差距,由于FDI在第二产业上的大量存在,使得一、二产业和二、三产业间的现象比较明显。正因为FDI对地区和行业收入分配的复杂影响,加上FDI的溢出效应、产业和劳动力转移等因素,使得FDI和全国基尼系数之间的关联并不显著,FDI并不是全国收入分配差距拉大的重要变量。因此,为更好地利用FDI,发挥其对收入分配的积极影响,应鼓励和引导外商投资企业在中西部地区投资,进一步降低外资在某些产业上的进入门槛,培育和壮大国内民营企业。     

基于VAR模型的安徽省经济增长因素实证分析

针对安徽省1980-2012年度数据,利用VAR模型和现代计量经济学方法对安徽省近30年的GDP、固定资产投资、居民人均收入和全社会零售商品总额进行了实证分析,结果表明:各经济变量之间在数量之间有着密切的联系,且各经济变量对GDP的影响程度从大到小依次为固定资产投资、全社会零售商品总额和居民人均收入。