Institutions and economic growth in Portugal: a quantitative exploration

This paper presents a broad diagnostic of the level of institutional development in Portugal in the legal, corporate governance and financial systems. A comparative assessment suggests that Portuguese institutions are less developed than their European Union and East Asian counterparts, more developed than Greek institutions and on a level similar to that of Spanish institutions. We use data for a wide cross-section of countries since 1960 and correlate indicators of institutional development with the long-term average growth rate, identifying issues where reform is likely to significantly affect economic growth. We construct three new indices that measure the potential of institutional reform - the impact of reform on growth, the required reform effort and the efficiency of reform index - by taking into consideration the institutional distance between Portugal and the European Union. These indices measure, respectively, which reforms have the most payoff in terms of growth, which are less costly to undertake and which deliver the most growth per required effort. Our results strongly suggest that in a large number of issues, institutional reform may translate into substantially higher rates of economic growth. Of the ten most promising reforms, six are in the legal area, irrespective of which of the indices is considered. Whereas legal reform is promising at the aggregate and the microeconomic levels, in the financial sector aggregate indicators offer the wider scope for productive reform, while in the corporate governance area it is indices at the micro level that hold the most promise. These results support the view that a comprehensive reform effort is likely to deliver higher rates of growth in Portugal, allowing faster real convergence with the rest of the European Union.Received: January 2003, Accepted: February 2004, JEL Classification: O0, O5, K00, K4, G2, G3This paper is based on Firms, Financial Markets and the Law: Institutions and Economic Growth in Portugal, prepared for the conference Desenvolvimento Económico Português no Espaço Europeu: Determinantes e Políticas, organized by the Banco de Portugal. Financial support by the Banco de Portugal, NOVA FORUM and FUNDAÇÃO Para a Ciência e tecnologia and Polti through feder are gratefully acknowledged. Comments from Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, two anonymous referees and the editor are sincerely appreciated. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Economic Growth and Transboundary Pollution in Europe: An Empirical Analysis

The existing empirical evidence suggests that environmental Kuznets curvesonly exist for pollutants with semi-local and medium term impacts.Ansuategi and Perrings (2000) have considered the behavioral basis for thecorrelation observed between different spatial incidence of environmentaldegradation and the relation between economic growth and environmentalquality. They show that self-interested planners following a Nash-typestrategy tend to address environmental effects sequentially: addressingthose with the most immediate costs first, and those whose costs aredisplaced in space later. This paper tests such behavioral basis in thecontext of sulphur dioxide emissions in Europe.     

关于可持续发展理论与实践的若干思考

可持续发展理论与实践的深入有赖于在四个方面的重新认识：首先，可持续发展是观念性、战略性实践性的统一；其次，可持续发展是层次性与阶段性的统一；第三，可持续发展是区域性与综合性的统一；最后， 制度变革与创新是影响可持续发展的关键因素。     

The Middle Class Consensus and Economic Development

A middle class consensus is defined as a high share of income for the middle class and a low degree of ethnic divisons. The paper links a middle class consensus to resource endowments, along the lines of the provocative thesis of Engerman and Sokoloff (1997 and 2000). This paper exploits this association using tropical resource endowments as instruments for inequality. A higher share of income for the middle class and lower ethnic divisions are associated with higher income and higher growth, as well as with more education, better health, better infrastructure, better economic policies, less political instability, less civil war and ethnic minorities at risk, more social modernization and more democracy.     

The nature of the steady state in models of optimal growth under uncertainty

Summary. We study a one-sector stochastic optimal growth model with a representative agent. Utility is logarithmic and the production function is of the Cobb-Douglas form with capital exponent . Production is affected by a multiplicative shock taking one of two values with positive probabilities p and 1-p. It is well known that for this economy, optimal paths converge to a unique steady state, which is an invariant distribution. We are concerned with properties of this distribution. By using the theory of Iterated Function Systems, we are able to characterize such a distribution in terms of singularity versus absolute continuity as parameters and p change. We establish mutual singularity of the invariant distributions as p varies between 0 and 1 whenever . More delicate is the case . Singularity with respect to Lebesgue measure also appears for values such that . For and Peres and Solomyak (1998) have shown that the distribution is a.e. absolutely continuous. Characterization of the invariant distribution in the remaining cases is still an open question. The entire analysis is summarized through a bifurcation diagram, drawn in terms of pairs .Received: 9 April 2002, Revised: 29 October 2002, JEL Classification Numbers: C61, O41.Correspondence to: Tapan MitraThis research was partially supported by CNR (Italy) under the "Short-term mobility" program and by M.U.R.S.T. (Italy) National Group on "Nonlinear Dynamics and Stochastic Models in Economics and Finance" . We are indebted to Rabi Bhattacharya for providing us with the reference to Solomyak's (1995) paper. The present version has benefitted from comments by Mukul Majumdar and two anonymous referees.     

Evaluating Projects and Assessing Sustainable Development in Imperfect Economies

We are interested in three related questions:(1) How should accounting prices be estimated?(2) How should we evaluate policy change in animperfect economy? (3) How can we check whetherintergenerational well-being will be sustainedalong a projected economic programme? We do notpresume that the economy is convex, nor do weassume that the government optimizes on behalfof its citizens. We show that the same set ofaccounting prices should be used both forpolicy evaluation and for assessing whether ornot intergenerational welfare along a giveneconomic path will be sustained. We also showthat a comprehensive measure of wealth,computed in terms of the accounting prices, canbe used as an index for problems (2) and (3)above. The remainder of the paper is concernedwith rules for estimating the accounting pricesof several specific environmental naturalresources, transacted in a few well knowneconomic institutions.     

科研开发与经济增长——兼论科研开发的溢出效应

经济划分为科研部门和非科研部门，科研开发对经济增长的作用及科研对非科研部门具有外溢效应。1999-2003年30个省市自治区的面板数据表明，科研开发对经济增长具有较大的拉动作用，同时科研开发部门对其他部门的外溢作用明显为正。     

非国有经济发展对中国经济增长质量影响机理研究——来自VEC模型的新证据

转轨以来,中国非国有经济的发展促进了经济增长的数量扩张.这是因为,经济非国有化改革作为一种制度创新,是一种增量式改革.这种改革使得体制内利益在未受影响的条件下,实现了帕雷托式的增长.然而,非国有经济的发展并没有带来中国经济增长质量的同比改善.这是因为,中国民营企业发展一般都过分强调以利润为中心,忽略环境成本,并且由于融资困难等因素导致了其技术创新能力的弱化;其次,中国引进的外资不仅在技术和管理创新的扩散效应上没能达到预期效果,而且日益增加的加工贸易通过转移定价方式使中国经济不能充分享有出口增长带来的利润贡献.     

河北省农村经济增长的消费因素影响及对策研究

当社会经济发展的主要矛盾从供给约束向需求约束转变，经济增长的主要支撑因素从供给扩张向需求拉动转变时，扩大需求成为必要。农村居民的消费水平是影响农村经济增长的重要因素，本文在介绍河北省农村居民的消费现状基础上，分析制约农村居民消费水平的因素，追而提出发展河北省农村消费市场，促进农村经济增长的对策。     

The Productivity of US States since 1880

This study uses state-level variation in labor productivity levels at twenty-year intervals between 1880 and 1980 to examine the relative importance of institutional and geographical influences in explaining observed and persistent differences in standards of living over time and across regions. Focusing on fundamental rather than proximate influences, we find that both institutional characteristics and some physical geography characteristics account for a high proportion of the differences in state productivity levels: states with navigable waterways, a large minerals endowment, and no slaves in 1860, on average, had higher labor productivity levels throughout the sample period. However, we find little support for two other influences that have previously received attention—climate and latitude.