Drivers of ad spend trends among global marketers

This research study attempts to examine whether there is consistency in the advertisingto-sales ratio (%) pattern for global marketers in their home region and at a worldwide level, through a systematic sequence of analyses. It attempts to understand the variation in the advertising spend to sales ratio for the home region and global markets for a sample of marketers by analysing along the variables of category (surrogate for advertising task), region (home base) and companies themselves. This has been done by applying the C&RT technique of the automatic interaction detector (AID) family. The key point emerging from this analysis is that, at every level, the category is the main determinant for explaining the variation in global advertising to spend ratio as well as the home region advertising to spend ratio.     

Do people really support trade restrictions? Cross-country evidence

We investigate the effect of trade restrictions on the perception of well-being. Using combined cross-sectional micro data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey of individuals in 89 countries, we find that citizens of a country with a lower degree of trade restrictions are more satisfied with their lives. The results are also robust across different measures of well-being, different definitions of trade restrictions, different estimation methods, and different sample sizes.     

The First and Second Stage Pass‐through of Exchange Rates: A Developing Country Perspective

This paper investigates the validity of the conventional wisdom that, unlike in developed countries, exchange rate pass‐through (ERPT) should be ‘complete’ for developing economies. To test this hypothesis, we construct new variables as well as original data sets, which are not readily available in the literature, and employ an alternative error correction model technique for a typical small open developing economy—Bangladesh. The transmission of exchange rate movements to import prices is found to be ‘complete’; however, the ‘second stage pass‐through’ is ‘partial’ both in the short and long run. The response of traded goods prices to exchange rate shocks is found to be significant and larger in the long run compared with the short run. Trade liberalization is also a significant phenomenon for ERPT. The analysis has wider applicability to other small open economies.     

Decomposition of inter-regional poverty gap in India: a spatial approach

This paper examines the impact of various socio-economic factors on consumption in rural West Bengal, an eastern state of India, using a regression-based technique reformulated in a spatial framework. The difference of incidences of poverty (head count ratios) in two parts (North and South) of rural West Bengal is then decomposed using the familiar Oaxaca decomposition methodology into an aggregate characteristics effect, which is interpreted as a resource effect and an aggregate coefficients effect, which is interpreted as an efficiency effect. An important observation from the present analysis is that the poorer North Bengal has a scarcity in terms of availability of characteristics (resources) compared to that in South Bengal and the resource scarcity in North Bengal is the dominant factor causing the poverty gap between the two parts of West Bengal. Thus, attention needs to be paid to North Bengal with respect to enhancement of important policy variables like education level, Government aid, and employment opportunities.