Binding constraints to productive investment in Malawi: A modified HRV framework

The paper applies a modified Hausmann, Rodrik, and Velasco (HRV) growth diagnostics framework to analyse Malawi's growth challenges. The study finds five critical binding constraints affecting productive investment and output growth in Malawi. These include land administration, taxation, customs and trade regulations, political governance, and cost‐of‐finance. Land constraints are evidenced by highly urban and rural population growth, an inverse co‐movement between the rural population and investment per capita, and low land administration indices. Tax constraints are evidenced by the negative growth of investment per capita. Customs and trade regulations constraints are evidenced by nontariff measures, such as high costs and the time it takes to export and import. Political governance constraints are evidenced by rising government debt and the low score on transparency, accountability, and corruption based on the World Bank's Public Transparency Scale. Lastly, high cost‐of‐finance constraints are evidenced by monetary policy challenges, such as high real interest rates, inflation rate, uncompetitive exchange rate, and foreign aid ineffectiveness. Therefore, we recommend that the formulation of crucial policy strategies to alleviate these five significant binding constraints be encouraged. The government should base such an approach to sound growth therapeutics that fully account for each challenge's root causes.     

Inequality and Income Distribution in Global Value Chains

Global value chains (GVCs), led by transnational corporations (TNCs), have reshaped the world division of labor over the past two decades. GVCs are pervasive in low technology manufacturing, such as textile and apparel, as well as in more advanced industries like automobiles, electronics, and machines. This hierarchical division of labor generates wild competition at the lower value-added stages of production, where low wages and low profit margins prevail for workers and contract manufacturers in developing countries. At the top of the hierarchy another kind of competition prevails, centered on the ability to monitor and control intellectual property rights related to innovation, finance, and marketing. We argue that GVCs have had crucial effects on income inequality and the appropriation of rents in modern capitalism.     

Why Do Property‐Liability Insurers Destroy Liquidity? Evidence from South Africa

This paper examines liquidity creation behaviour in the property‐liability insurance market in South Africa. Using annual data on 76 insurers from 2007 to 2014, the paper employs the three‐stage approach to estimate liquidity creation. The results suggest that property‐liability insurers are characterised by liquidity destruction by transforming liquid assets in cash and investable securities into illiquid reserves liabilities. The findings also indicate that the R1.32 billion in liquid assets were transformed into illiquid reserves liabilities in 2014, an increase from the R700 million liquidity de‐created in 2007. The increases were mainly driven by large insurers which accounted for about 70% liquidity de‐created. The results of panel regression analysis provide evidence in support of the “risk‐absorption” hypothesis which argues that high levels of capital increases liquidity creation. In addition, size, leverage and reinsurance were also identified as the firm‐level factors that explain liquidity creation. The policy implications of the findings are discussed.     

Oligopoly and welfare: A unified presentation with applications to trade and development

We develop a unified sequence of models to examine the determinants of price, output, profitability and concentration for different kinds of oligopolistic market. We relate various magnitudes of significance to judges of welfare and to policy makers, such as consumer surplus, profit, or added benefits of employment or trade surplus, to observable magnitudes such as the size and concentration of the market. It emerges that various appropriately formulated Herfindahl indices are useful in several of these relations. We attempt to present results in a way that is useful for empirical investigations and pay particular attention to applications in trade and development.     

A Macroeconomic Stabilization Game: Design,Development, and Testing

The author describes a computer game involving macroeconomic stabilization policy. Students are asked to take the part of government in manipulating tax rates, expenditures, monetary policy in an attempt to influence employment and inflation in an open economy.     

The Effect of Carbon Taxes on Agricultural Trade

This study evaluates the implications of an existing carbon tax on international trade in the agricultural sector. Applying uniformly to all fossil fuels combusted within its borders, the province of British Columbia unilaterally introduced a carbon tax on July 1, 2008. In 2012, the province granted an exemption from the tax to certain agricultural sectors. Using commodity‐specific trade flows and exploiting cross‐provincial and intertemporal variation, we find little evidence that the carbon tax is associated with any meaningful effects on agricultural trade despite the sector being singled out as “at risk” by the provincial government. Our findings suggest that there is not compelling evidence to support exempting the agricultural sector from the tax. Discussion of potential policy remedies to address the tax's potential effects on firm profitability and international competitiveness is also included.     

On Measuring the Value of a Nonmarket Good Using Market Data

We use line integral theory to lay out in a more general theoretical framework the conditions under which it is possible to measure with market data the welfare effects of a change in a nonmarket good. We present in detail a numerical method of measuring the value of nonmarket goods using market data, under either weak neutrality or weak complementarity. Our numerical method is more flexible than the existing analytical method because it can be used with any well-behaved Marshallian demand function, and can be used even when the willig condition does not hold.     

British relative economic decline revisited: The role of competition

This paper examines the role of competition in British productivity performance over the period from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. A detailed review of the evidence suggests that the weakness of competition from the 1930s to the 1970s undermined productivity growth but since the 1970s stronger competition has been a key ingredient in ending relative economic decline. The productivity implications of the retreat from competition resulted in large part from interactions with idiosyncratic British institutional structures in terms of corporate governance and industrial relations. This account extends familiar insights from cliometrics both analytically and chronologically.     

Trade openness and government size of small developing countries

This paper examines the causal effect that trade openness has on government size in small developing countries (SDCs). We use the construction of the trade cost variables based on Baltic Dry Index in primary goods as instruments of trade openness to address the endogeneity issue. We find that the increase in trade openness leads to an increase in government size: a 1 percent expansion in trade openness (trade GDP ratio) raises government consumption over GDP ratio by approximately 0.1–0.2 percentage points on average. Its quantitative significance emphasizes the importance of rethinking the costs and benefits of trade openness for SDCs.