Civil war and economic growth: the case for a closer look at forms of mobilization

This paper explores the idea that the lack of robust evidence on the growth impact of civil war could partially be a consequence of considering civil war as a unified conceptual category, regardless of the ordinate of group identity invoked in mobilizing for war. To do so, we distinguish explicitly between episodes of internal conflict where contestants mobilized along the lines of ethnicity and ones where mobilization occurred along other markers of group identity. Using alternative definitions of civil war and System GMM estimation to address the endogeneity of conflict and per capita income, we obtain a negative contemporaneous impact of non-ethnic civil war on economic growth over the period 1975–2005. By contrast, the impact of ethnic war is statistically insignificant.     

Multiple equilibria, coordination, and transitional growth

We study a small open economy with two sectors and two factors of production. In one of the sectors, external economies of scale are generated through the industry-level capital input. This leads to a divergence between private and social production possibility frontiers as well as to multiple equilibria. The equilibrium selection problem that arises is solved by agents who follow a simple trial-and-error learning rule. The growth path of the economy as agents learn lies below the production possibility frontier and may display cyclical transitional dynamics. We also show that coordination problems which may prevent the economy from attaining the “good” equilibrium may be alleviated by the temporary use of policy instruments that shape the allocation of resources.     

Mechanism design in queueing problems

Summary.   A well-known result in incentive theory is that for a very broad class of decision problems, there is no mechanism which achieves truth-telling in dominant strategies, efficiency and budget balancedness (or first best implementability). On the contrary, Mitra and Sen (1998), prove that linear cost queueing problems are first best implementable. This paper is an attempt at identification of cost structures for which queueing problems are first best implementable. The broad conclusion is that, this is a fairly large class. Some of these first best implementable problems can be implemented by mechanisms that satisfy individual rationality. Received: October 19, 1999; revised version: March 13, 2000.     

Agglomeration Economies as Manifested in Technical Efficiency at the Firm Level

This paper makes an attempt to assess the significance of agglomeration economies in the case of two Indian industries, electrical machinery and cotton and cotton textiles. Using firm level data, an efficiency index based on a statistical stochastic frontier model is generated to examine its relationship with external scale variable(s). A positive association between technical efficiency and city size is evident although after a certain threshold level city size works more as diseconomies than economies of scale. Undue emphasis on industrial dispersal may, therefore, lead to suboptimal utilisation of resources.     

Infinite-horizon competitive programs are optimal

For infinite-horizon optimal-growth problems the standard result in the literature says that a program is optimal if and only if associated with it is a sequence of present-value prices at which the program satisfies (i) a set of myopic competitive conditions, and (ii) an asymptotic transversality condition. The principal result of this paper points out the interesting and surprising fact that at least for a class of multisector models where the production side is described by a simple linear model, and there are some limiting primary factors, the competitive conditions alone characterize an optimal program.     

Intellectual Property Government Open Data: Australian Business Number Links to All Intellectual Property Data in Australia

Intellectual property rights protect the fruits of investment in intangible assets, such as inventions and innovations, creative content, designs, brand recognition and reputation, through five broad arms: patents, trade marks, design rights, plant breeder's rights and copyright. All of these rights, with the exception of copyright, are administered by IP Australia. To facilitate analysis of these rights, IP Australia released Intellectual Property Government Open Data (IPGOD) on < data.gov.au >. IPGOD is a weekly updated, publically accessible database that provides access to 100‐plus years of non‐sensitive administrative data on intellectual property rights held in IP Australia's databases that are linked to Australian Business Numbers and Australian Company Numbers.     

Media freedom and gender equality: a cross-national instrumental variable quantile analysis

We investigate the impact of media freedom on gender equality in education for a sample of 63 countries taken over the period 1995–2004. Our analysis is motivated by the idea that the impact of media freedom on gender equality may differ over the conditional distribution of the response variable. Using instrumental variable quantile regression to control for endogeneity in per capita income, we find that greater freedom of the media improves gender equality only in the 0.25 and 0.50 quantiles of the conditional distribution. Countries with the greatest disparities in gender outcomes experience no significant impact of media freedom.     

Total Factor Productivity Growth and Urbanization Economies: A Case of Indian Industries

Based on panel data for fifteen major states in India, this paper provides evidence in favor of the existence of urbanization economies. In eleven of seventeen two-digit industry groups, total factor productivity growth is responsive to urban population or industrial spread. Although the impact of these variables taken to capture agglomeration economies on total factor productivity growth is not monotonic, economic policy would yield a sub-optimal outcome by ignoring the positive effect of the size factor. Urban population or industrial spread benefits firms by possibly improving the quality of labor and enhancing the productive utilization of resources.     

Comparing private and government schools in India: the devil is in the maths

Recent research shows that the gap in learning achievement between private and government schools in India can be explained away by self-selection. Analysing four rounds of panel data and distinguishing between ‘knowing’ and ‘applying’ dimensions of maths learning, I find that there is no private school advantage in the applying domain but that there is an advantage in the knowing domain.