Not by growth alone: The role of the distribution of income in regional diversity in poverty reduction

This study examines the role of the distribution of income in determining the responsiveness of poverty to income growth and changes in income inequality using panel data of 58 developing countries for the period 1980-1998. We show that the large cross-regional variation in the capacity of income growth to reduce poverty, i.e. the income elasticity, is largely explained by differences in the initial distribution of income and present region and time specific estimates of the income and Gini elasticities of poverty. We find that the income elasticity of poverty in the mid-1990s equals −1.31 on average and ranges from −0.71 for Sub-Saharan Africa to −2.27 for the Middle East and North Africa, and that the Gini elasticity of poverty equals 0.80 on average and ranges from 0.01 in South Asia to 1.73 in Latin America. Furthermore we show that while differing income growth rates account for most of the regional diversity in poverty trends, the additional impact of differences across regions in rates of inequality change and income and inequality elasticities of poverty is almost always significant and far too large to be ignored, most notably so in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.     

The Neolithic Revolution from a price-theoretic perspective

The adoption of agriculture during the Neolithic period triggered the first demographic explosion in history. When fertility returned to its original level, agriculturalists were more numerous, more poorly nourished, and worked longer hours than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. We develop a dynamic price-theoretic model that rationalizes these events. In the short run, people are lured into agriculture by the increased labor productivity of both adults and children. In the long run, the growth in population overrides the productivity gains, and the later generations of agriculturalists end up being worse-off than the hunter-gatherers. Counter-intuitively, the increase in the labor productivity of children causes the long-run reduction in welfare. In the long run, the increase in adult labor productivity only contributes to population growth.     

Corruption and local democratization in Indonesia: The role of Islamic parties

Indonesia has a tradition of corruption among local officials who harass and collect bribes from firms. This paper examines whether corruption is affected by local democratization and by the party composition of local assemblies. Democratization occurred in 1999 and decentralization in 2001. We have firm-level data for 2001 and 2004. The 2001 data benchmark corruption at the time of decentralization. We find that corruption declines between 2001 and 2004 overall, but much less so in districts with more secular party as opposed to Islamic party representatives in district assemblies. For a larger sample of districts, correspondingly, we find that corruption in 2004 is more in districts which voted more in favor of secular party representatives in the first elections in 1999. We argue that the effects seem to be causal, over above any effects of changing religiosity and economic circumstances across districts.     

Redistribution, fertility, and growth: The effect of the opportunities abroad

This article analyzes the effect of the opportunities abroad on the growth path that a small open economy, in which redistribution policy in favor of less prosperous segments takes place, is expected to follow. The model shows that redistribution policy raises fertility among the unskilled recipients, lowers fertility among the contributing skilled, slows human capital accumulation, and reduces per-capita output growth. The paper demonstrates that the opportunities abroad determine the share of income redistributed and ultimately induce the offspring of the unskilled to invest in human capital and decrease their family size.     

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.     

Consumption versus asset smoothing: testing the implications of poverty trap theory in Burkina Faso

Despite solid theoretical foundations for the notion that poor, borrowing-constrained households will intertemporally manage assets to smooth consumption, the consumption-smoothing hypothesis has not always withstood empirical scrutiny. This paper reassesses the intertemporal asset management problem with a poverty trap model and shows that we would expect to see asset smoothing, not consumption smoothing, in the neighborhood of critical asset levels at which optimal accumulation behavior bifurcates. We then employ threshold estimation techniques to empirically confirm the co-existence of consumption and asset smoothing regimes using a household panel data set from West Africa. Households above the estimated threshold almost completely insulate their consumption from weather shocks, whereas those below the threshold do not. These results not only indirectly provide evidence of the existence of poverty traps but also speak to the level and incidence of the costs of uninsured risk.     

An aspect of variable population poverty comparisons

This paper demonstrates that the property of Replication Invariance, generally considered to be an innocuous requirement for the extension of fixed-population poverty comparisons to variable-population contexts, is incompatible with other plausible variable- and fixed-population axioms. This fact raises questions about what constitutes an appropriate headcount assessment of poverty, in terms of whether one should focus on the proportion, or the absolute numbers, of the population in poverty. This observation, in turn, has important implications for tracking poverty and setting targets for its reduction or elimination.     

The relative weight of manufacturing and services in Europe: An innovation perspective

This paper uses an innovation-based taxonomy of both manufacturing and service industries to assess the role of the process of structural change of the last 25 years on the rate of productivity growth in Europe, US and Japan. The empirical analysis exploits the shift-share methodology for a decomposition of aggregate labor productivity growth. A modified version is applied, that allows to interpret whether employment has shifted to higher or lower productivity sectors. The results are discussed in light of the role that the different industries play according to the innovation-based taxonomy.     

External factors in emerging market recoveries: An empirical investigation

We estimate conditional duration models to analyse recovery processes in emerging market economies. Our reduced form specification is parsimonious, as we focus on exogenous factors, such as the effect of growth in the US, EU, and Japan on the prospects for recovery in emerging market economies experiencing recessions. The model confirms the importance of external factors in recovery processes. However, the short-run effect of Japanese growth on recovery prospects is unconventional: weak economic conditions in Japan turn out to facilitate recoveries.     

The Paretian Ratio Distribution — An application to the volatility of GDP

Recently, Gabaix suggested that the volatility of GDP could come from the Pareto distribution of the firm sizes. This paper describes and gives an approximation of the Paretian Ratio Distribution (PRD), which represents the weight of the firm in GDP.     

Investment in the absence of property rights; the role of incumbency advantages

In many situations the individuals who can generate some output must enter a contest for appropriating this output. This paper analyses the investment incentives of such agents and the role of incumbency advantages in the contest. Depending on the advantages, an increase in the productivity of the investment can decrease or increase the amount of investment. The results are applied to autocrats’ investment behavior and job specific investment in organizations.     

FDI and productivity growth: the role of inter‐industry linkages

Abstract There is a large literature on the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on productivity through inter‐industry economic linkages. This paper contributes to the literature by focusing on the developed economy of Canada. It finds that FDI generates strong effects on total factor productivity (TFP) growth through both forward and backward inter‐industry linkages, and increase in an industry's absorptive capacity raises the effects of FDI on TFP growth through forward inter‐industry linkages. For R&D intensive industries, the effects of FDI on TFP growth through inter‐industry linkages are small, but imports turn out to be an important source for TFP growth.     

Equity-regarding poverty measures: differences in needs and the role of equivalence scales

Abstract .  The paper investigates the definition of equity-regarding poverty measures when there are different household types in the population. It demonstrates the implications of a between-type regressive transfer principle for poverty measures, for the choice of poverty lines, and for the measurement of living standard. The role of equivalence scales, which are popular in empirical work on poverty measurement, is clarified.     

Land tenure differences and investment in land improvement measures: Theoretical and empirical analyses

This article develops a theoretical framework to examine the relationship between land tenure arrangements and households' investment in soil-improving and conservation measures. It then analyzes this relationship with a multivariate probit model based on detailed plot-level data from villages in the Brong Ahafo region of Ghana. A major hypothesis tested is that investment in productivity-enhancing and conservation techniques are influenced by land tenure arrangements. The theoretical analysis and empirical results generally reveal that land tenure differences significantly influence farmers' decisions to invest in land-improving and conservation measures. The findings also show that tenure security does affect farm productivity.     

The composition of growth matters for poverty alleviation

This paper contributes to explain the cross-country heterogeneity of the poverty response to changes in economic growth. It does so by focusing on the structure of output growth itself. The paper presents a two-sector theoretical model that clarifies the mechanism through which the sectoral composition of growth and associated labor intensity can affect workers' wages and, thus, poverty alleviation. Then, it presents cross-country empirical evidence that analyzes, first, the differential poverty-reducing impact of sectoral growth at various levels of disaggregation, and, second, the role of unskilled labor intensity in such differential impact. The paper finds evidence that not only the size of economic growth but also its composition matters for poverty alleviation, with the largest contributions from unskilled labor-intensive sectors (agriculture, construction, and manufacturing). The results are robust to the influence of outliers, endogeneity concerns, alternative explanations, and various poverty measures.     

The empirical content of Cournot competition

We consider the testable implications of the Cournot model of market competition. Our approach is nonparametric in the sense that we abstain from imposing any functional specification on market demand and firm cost functions. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for (reduced form) equilibrium market price and quantity functions to be consistent with the Cournot model. In addition, we present identification results for the corresponding inverse market demand function and the firm cost functions. Finally, we use our approach to derive testable restrictions for the models of perfect competition, collusion and conjectural variations. This identifies the conditions under which these different models are empirically distinguishable from the Cournot model. We also investigate empirical issues (measurement error and omitted variables) related to bringing our testable restrictions to data.     

Disorganization and financial collapse

Since the fall of communism, the former Soviet Union experienced a strong output decline and a dramatic increase in arrears and barter. We develop a model which explains how these three phenomena are connected. We introduce liquidity and credit constraints into a model of disorganization and show how these problems can alleviate the hold-up problem. We argue further that barter creates a hostage that allows to deal with disorganization when credit enforcement becomes prohibitively costly. Based on a firm survey in Ukraine in 1997, we test how input shortages, financial shortages and barter affect output growth of firms.     

Entry and exit as a source of aggregate productivity growth in two alternative technological regimes

This paper proposes a neo-Schumpeterian model in order to discuss how the mechanisms of entry and exit contribute to industry productivity growth in alternative technological regimes. Our central hypothesis is that new firms generate gains in aggregate productivity by increasing both the productivity level and competition intensity. By assuming that firms learn about the relevant technology through a variety of sources, and by allowing a continuous flow of entry and exit into the market, our study shows that firm exit and output contraction take mostly place among less productive firms, while output expansion and entry are concentrated among the more efficient ones. The greater is the competitive pressure generated by new entrants, the higher is the expected productivity level of established firms. Overall, our analysis suggests that micro analysis is the proper complement to aggregate industry studies, as it provides a considerable insight into the causes of productivity growth.