Foreign Capital in a Growth Model

Within the mechanism of endogenous growth, this paper empirically investigates the impact of financial capital on economic growth for a panel of 60 developing countries, through the channel of domestic capital formation. By estimating the model for different income groups, it is found that while private FDI flows exert beneficial complementarity effects on the domestic capital formation across all income‐group countries, the official financial flows contribute to increasing investment in the middle income economies, but not in the low income countries. The latter appears to demonstrate that the aid‐growth nexus is supported in the middle income countries, whereas the misallocation of official inflows is more likely to exist in the low income countries, suggesting that aid effectiveness remains conditional on the domestic policy environment.     

Women as policy makers and donors: Female legislators and foreign aid

This paper investigates whether the gender composition of national legislatures in donor countries impacts the level, composition, and pattern of foreign aid. We provide evidence that the election of female legislators leads countries to increase aid both in total and as a percentage of GDP. Consistent with existing research examining domestic expenditures, we find that the empowerment of women in national legislatures is associated with a reallocation of aid flows in favor of education and health-related projects. These increased flows occur predominately through bilateral aid and reflect a redistribution of aid toward developing countries.     

Macroeconomic impacts of remittances in Bangladesh: The role of reverse flows

Das and Serieux (2010; 2015) and Serieux (2011) used the term “reverse flows” to define the part of external resources that is not domestically absorbed; instead used to finance debt obligations, capital flight, and accumulate reserves. While there is a vast literature on the growth and development impact of remittances in developing countries, the existing empirical literature has mostly ignored the potential diversion of remittances to reverse flows. This paper bridges the gap in the literature by estimating the reverse flows in the case of Bangladesh, which is one of the top remittance recipient countries in the world. The data set runs from 1976 to 2015. Econometric results obtained by employing the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach show that almost 13–14% of remittances (as the ratio of gross domestic product, GDP) are diverted to finance reverse flows. In other words, the effects of remittances (as the ratio of GDP) on consumption and investment rates are no more than 86–87%. Therefore, the underlying assumption made in the existing literature that all remittances are used to increase consumption and/or investment overstates the impact of this external resource flow in Bangladesh. Findings from this study have important policy implications not only for Bangladesh but for other remittance recipient developing countries. Our findings will help the government to design policies to ensure the optimum allocation of remittances in the domestic economy.     

Foreign Aid and the Business Cycle

This paper documents empirical regularities in the foreign aid flows to developing countries over three decades. In spite of a large body of literature on foreign aid and its impact on recipients, surprisingly little is known about its business cycle characteristics. The authors show that for the vast majority of African recipients, aid flows are a major source of income that is highly volatile and, most importantly, overwhelmingly procyclical. For recipients outside of Africa, there is a similar—if somewhat less pronounced—pattern of aid procyclicality. In contrast, there is little evidence of aid procyclicality with the business cycle of donors. In light of the very high volatility of output in developing countries, the procyclicality of foreign aid flows from the recipients' perspective raises serious questions related to their welfare and growth.     

A model of trust in quality and North–South trade

Why do some countries produce higher quality goods than other countries? This paper suggests that one reason is self-perpetuating reputations, modelling the idea with a Klein–Leffler reputation model embedded in a general equilibrium model of trade. Reputation differences are particularly interesting because reputation is a form of “social capital”. Like product differentiation, it can explain why countries might trade even if their technologies and endowments are identical, why firms could profit from exports even if the foreign price is no higher than the domestic one, and why governments like to have “high-value” sectors. Ideally, a developing country would shift its own producers to a high-quality equilibrium; if that is not possible, the next best thing is to import experience goods and substitute to home production of goods for which reputation is not important.     

Foreign aid,institutional quality and economic growth: Evidence from the developing world

This paper examines the effect of sectoral foreign aid and institutional quality on the economic growth of 74 developing countries from Africa, Asia and South America, and covers the period 1980–2016. We consider bilateral aid flows into three sectors, namely education, health and agriculture, and find that among the three types of aid, education aid is more effective for aid-receiving countries. The effect is conditional on the current level of institutional quality and varies substantially across regions. While education aid is more effective in South America, health aid is more effective in Asia and agricultural aid is more effective in Africa. As the level of institutional quality improves, the gap between the marginal effect of education, health and agricultural aids widen. Our findings have strong policy implication for donor countries and international aid organisations, which shows that it is more desirable to shift aid flows towards the education sector as the level of institutional quality improves.     

A re-examination of the savings displacement hypothesis

This paper re-examines the savings displacement hypothesis. It uses a new dataset that disaggregates aid into project aid, financial programme aid, technical assistance grants and programme food aid. When considering the whole sample of 97 countries, results obtained from estimating a savings function using the GMM-System approach to dynamic panel suggest that project aid flows are the only type of aid exerting a negative effect on domestic savings. The results also show that the effects of the different categories of aid on domestic savings vary across regions, thus highlighting the importance of regional disaggregation in cross-country studies. The author would like to thank Jean-Louis Grolleau at the OECD Credit Reporting System for his helpful advice and his encouragements during the construction of the disaggregated aid database used in this paper.     

Home Bias and High Turnover in an Overlapping-generations Model with Learning

This paper develops a two‐country overlapping‐generations (OLG) model under the assumption that investors are on a learning path. While investors from both countries receive identical information flows, domestic investors start off with less precise prior beliefs concerning foreign fundamentals. On a learning path, differences in beliefs and estimation risk generate portfolio biases that match the empirical evidence: home bias in equity portfolios and trend‐chasing in international flows. In addition, due to the higher volatility of the estimates of foreign state variables, our model produces excessive turnover in foreign securities. We calibrate the model on the historical path of quarterly real GDP data for the US and Europe. Under the assumption of a financial liberalization in the 1970s, the model produces preference for domestic securities and turnover.     

Differential Impacts of Foreign Capital and Remittance Inflows on Domestic Savings in Developing Countries: A Dynamic Heterogeneous Panel Analysis

The study examines the role of foreign capital and remittance inflows in the domestic savings of 63 developing countries for 1971–2010, paying attention to likely differential effects of FDI, portfolio investment, foreign aid and remittances. The conventional homogeneous panel estimates suggest that foreign aid and remittance flows have a significant negative impact on domestic savings. However, these techniques ignore cross‐section dependence and parameter heterogeneity properties and hence yield biased and inconsistent estimates. When we allow for parameter heterogeneity and cross‐sectional dependence by employing Pesaran's ( 2006 ) Common Correlated Effects Mean Group estimator technique, only remittances crowd out savings.     

Growth in Africa: does the source of investment financing matter?

This paper examines empirical evidence for 11 sub-Saharan African countries on the relationship between economic growth and three principal sources of investment funds: foreign aid, foreign direct investment, and domestic saving. In light of the shortcomings of traditional cross-section analyses, the time series approach is used instead. Modern time series methods are rigorously applied, beginning with unit root tests and followed by model specifications that reflect the revealed temporal behaviours of the variables in each of the 11 countries. Domestic saving seems to play a somewhat more important role in generating economic growth than foreign direct investment or foreign aid. However, the mixture of results across the 11 countries implies that, in general, it is not possible to rank one source of investment financing ahead of any other.     

Risk sharing role of foreign aid in developing countries

The effects of foreign aid on economic growth have been extensively investigated over the past 40 years. However, even though foreign aid can be a significant source of insurance against domestic output shocks for developing countries, its risk-sharing role has not been well explored. Using a sample of 22 developing countries over the period 2003–2013, we estimate the degree of income smoothing generated by foreign aid serving as an effective channel of international income smoothing. In particular, for the period 2003–2008, we estimate that foreign aid offset about 4% of the domestic output shocks. Furthermore, we investigate the determinants of the extent of risk sharing via foreign aid, recognizing the diversification of the originating countries as a key factor. Surprisingly, humanitarian aid seems to have a negative effect, which might be explained by its predominant role in the short run.     

Is trade liberalization a solution to the unemployment problem?

This paper examines how trade liberalization affects the growth rate of sectoral employment in developed and developing countries. The estimation results imply that trade openness in the form of higher trade volumes has not been successful in generating jobs in developing countries. The overall weak, negative employment response to trade volumes may be explained by the negative output response to trade openness in these countries. Our estimates also indicate that higher trade volumes have adverse effect on industrial employment in developed countries. Moreover, while they have positive effect on employment in industry and services in developing countries, trade barriers have adverse effect on employment growth in services for developed countries. Our overall results imply that while trade barriers have relatively little adverse effects and/or in some case a positive effect on employment both in developing and developed countries, higher trade volumes have an adverse effect on industrial employment in developed economies. Thus, trade openness is not in itself a solution to the unemployment problems of developing countries and yet it has not been the prime factor to blame for the lower employment levels in developed countries.     

Political Institutions, Capital Flows, and Developing Country Growth: An Empirical Investigation

The paper examines the real per-capita growth effects of the quality of democracy, the rule of law, and capital flows in developing countries. The direct growth effects of democracy are positive and often statistically significant. Moreover, the estimates from a three-stage least-squares regression offer evidence that democracy has indirect growth effects that work by encouraging schooling and that the rule of law influences growth indirectly by encouraging foreign direct investment. A higher FDI to GDP ratio is associated with a faster growth rate. The estimated growth effect of the FDI to GDP ratio is several times higher than the estimated growth effect of the domestic investment to GDP ratio. By contrast, this study does not find a clear asso-ciation between other types of capital flows and growth.     

Aid,Terrorism, and Foreign Direct Investment: Empirical Insight Conditioned on Corruption Control

ABSTRACT

This paper checks the effect of foreign aid on terrorism–foreign direct investment (FDI) nexus, while considering the extent of domestic corruption control (CC). The empirical evidence is based on a sample of 78 developing countries. The following findings were established: the negative effect of terrorism on FDI is apparent only in countries with higher levels of CC; foreign aid dampens the negative effect of terrorism on FDI only in countries with high level of CC. Also, the result is mixed when foreign aid is subdivided into its bilateral and multilateral components. While our findings are in accordance with the stance that bilateral aid is effective in reducing the adverse effect of terrorism on FDI, we find that multilateral aid also decreases the adverse effect of other forms of terrorism that can neither be classified as domestic or transnational. Policy implications are discussed in the paper.     

Unconventional monetary policy and capital flows

This paper examines the connection between the stance of domestic monetary policy and international capital flows. It first provides a simple theoretical framework describing the mechanisms behind the cross-border spillovers of domestic monetary policy. Then, it empirically investigates the impact of U.S. unconventional monetary policies (UMPs), implemented in the aftermath of the recent global financial crisis, on U.S. capital flows to developing economies and non-UMP advanced economies. The results suggest that the use of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve has been associated with increased net portfolio flows to developing countries and, to a lesser extent, non-UMP advanced economies. An exit from these UMPs is likely to cause capital flow reversals in U.S. capital-importing countries. Countries with greater exchange rate flexibility, stronger fiscal and current account positions, and higher capital mobility are likely to fare well following an exit from UMPs in the U.S.     

Changing aid regimes? U.S. foreign aid from the Cold War to the War on Terror

This paper explores how U.S. bilateral economic aid has changed over time, focusing on how the recent era-in which the War on Terror has played a prominent role in the Bush administration's aid policy-differs from previous eras. In particular, has the renewed geopolitical role of aid coincided with a reduction of aid to the poorest countries or less weight on need in U.S. aid allocation decisions? We start with an analysis of annual U.S. aid budgets from 1955 to 2006. Controlling for domestic political and economic conditions, we find that the War on Terror's effect on the aid budget is significantly larger than is immediately apparent. To explore how the emphasis on need may have changed over time, we use country-level panel data on aid allocations to 119 countries across the same time period. This shows that U.S. aid flows-for the poorest as well as other developing countries-increased with the War on Terror. However, after rising for 35 years, the emphasis placed on need has been falling steadily for core aid recipients during the War on Terror.     

The determinants of hospital size: a survivor analysis

A common criticism of foreign aid is that it reduces domestic tax effort. Empirical research on the issue has been hampered by the failure to tackle endogeneity issues effectively. We use measures of geographical and cultural distance to donor countries as instrumental variables to uncover the causal effect of aid on tax revenue in a panel of 93 countries. The tax to GDP ratio is found to decrease following aid inflows. This reduction in tax effort is statistically and economically significant; a one SD increase in aid causes a 0.52 percentage point drop in the tax-to-GDP ratio. The results indicate that the effect is driven by unconditional grants, whereas aid given as loans induces recipient governments to improve their tax effort. Our results are robust to changes in the sample and the use of a nearest neighbour matching technique to account for nonrandom assignment of aid. Our identification strategy is sharpened by the use of a difference-in-difference estimation strategy that leverages a natural experiment in which aid flows exogenously increased for some countries following the Iranian Revolution in 1979.     

Foreign-owned firms around the world: A comparative analysis of wages and employment at the micro-level

This paper provides the first microeconomic cross-country analysis of the effects of foreign ownership on wages, employment and worker turnover rates. Using firm-level and linked worker-firm data, we apply a standardised methodology for three developed (Germany, Portugal, UK) and two emerging economies (Brazil, Indonesia). We find that wage effects are larger in developing countries, and that for each country the largest effect on wages comes from workers who move from domestic to foreign firms. Employment growth after foreign takeover is concentrated in high-skill jobs. In contrast to widespread fears, there is no evidence that wage gains come at the expense of greater job insecurity; separation rates actually fall slightly after takeover. We conclude that the positive effect of foreign ownership on wages is not primarily driven by its impact on incumbent wages, but by its impact on the creation of high-wage jobs.     

The effect of aid on growth: evidence from a Quasi-experiment

The literature on aid and growth has not found a convincing instrumental variable to identify the causal effects of aid. This paper exploits an instrumental variable based on the fact that, since 1987, eligibility for aid from the International Development Association (IDA) has been based partly on whether or not a country is below a certain threshold of per capita income. The paper finds evidence that other donors tend to reinforce rather than compensate for reductions in IDA aid following threshold crossings. Overall, aid as a share of gross national income (GNI) drops about 59 % on average after countries cross the threshold. Focusing on the 35 countries that have crossed the income threshold from below between 1987 and 2010, a positive, statistically significant, and economically sizable effect of aid on growth is found. A 1 percentage point increase in the aid to GNI ratio from the sample mean raises annual real per capita growth in gross domestic product by approximately 0.35 percentage points.     

Growth with endogenous migration hump and the multiple,dynamically interacting effects of aid in poor developing countries

We show empirically that aid given to poor developing countries enhances growth and reduces emigration, once several dynamically interacting effects of aid are taken into account in a system of equations. We estimate equations for net immigration flows as a share of the labour force and Gross Domestic Product Per Capita (GDPPC) growth and also for all their regressors including remittances and official development aid. We use dynamic panel data methods for a sample of poor countries with GDPPC below $1200 (2000), for which aid is about 9.5% of GDP. The partial effects in these regressions are working against each other. Therefore, we integrate all equations into a dynamic system and run a simulation. One result is an endogenous migration hump with several peaks. In a counterfactual simulation, we double aid with the consequence that for more than a 100 years migration is reduced and the GDPPC is enhanced, because the positive effects of aid on investment and education dominate the negative direct effects of aid on growth and the unfavourable effects on savings, tax revenues and labour force growth.