The colonial origins of fiscal capacity: Evidence from patronage governors

We combine historical personnel data from the British colonial administration with modern public finance data to study the impact of colonial governors on fiscal capacity. Exploiting rule-based variation in the allocation of governors connected to their superior at the time of appointment, we find that modern-day countries exposed to more patronage governors exhibit lower fiscal capacity today. These negative effects are persistent over time and driven by indirect taxes that patronage governors disproportionately controlled in the colonial period. The results thus provide evidence for a public finance channel through which the effects of patronage appointments extend beyond decolonization.     

Hierarchy Leadership and Social Distance in Charitable Giving

This article investigates the effect of hierarchy leadership and social distance on prosocial behavior in a field experimental setting of sequential charitable giving conducted in an organization. The treatments vary in whether the leading (first) donor's identity is revealed to the following donors as a hierarchy leader, a peer, or a stranger. The followers' giving in the Leader and Peer treatments responds positively to the leader's giving, but no significant response is found in the Stranger treatment. However, on average, the followers in the Leader treatment give less than those in both the Peer and Stranger treatments. This is due to a negative effect on the followers' giving when the leaders contribute a small amount in the Leader treatment.     

A review of tourism and climate change mitigation: The scales,scopes, stakeholders and strategies of carbon management

Tourism needs to reduce emissions in line with other economic sectors, if the international community's objective of staying global warming at 1.5°-2.0 °C is to be achieved. This will require the industry to half emissions to 2030, and to reach net-zero by mid-century. Mitigation requires consideration of four dimensions, the Scales, Scopes, Stakeholders and Strategies of carbon management. The paper provides a systematic review of these dimensions and their interrelationships, with a focus on emission inventory comprehensiveness; allocation principles at different scales; clearly defined responsibilities for decarbonization; and the identification of significant mitigation strategies. The paper concludes that without mitigation efforts, tourism will deplete 40% of the world's remaining carbon budget to 1.5 °C. Yet, the most powerful decarbonization measures face major corporate, political and technical barriers. Without worldwide policy efforts at the national scale to manage the sector's emissions, tourism will turn into one of the major drivers of climate change.     

Financial frictions and stabilization policies

After the financial crisis of 2007, in many economies, public and private debt have moved in opposite directions, as opposed to pre-2007 evidence. Private deleverage and public debt build-up may affect the recovery path of countries after a recession. In a new Keynesian model with financial frictions, we show that when the economy is hit by a credit risk shock, the negative correlation arising between public and private debt amplifies the response of GDP. In our setup, the traditional monetary-fiscal policy mix is not enough to offset this private-public debt mechanism and therefore bring back economic stability. When macroprudential policy is part of the policy mix, the private-public debt channel can be broken. Interestingly, depending on the macroprudential instrument, a trade-off may arise between private debt and output stabilization.     

Performance of primary education in Burkina Faso: a multi-output stochastic frontier analysis

Primary education plays an important role in the development of human capital in developing countries. Consequently, Burkina Faso has taken steps to ensure both access to, and better quality of, primary education. However, comparisons between the different provinces of Burkina Faso reveal that there is a greater disparity between provinces in terms of access to, and the quality of, education, than there is in the provision of resources. Therefore, the objective of this study is to examine the efficiency of the resources used in providing primary education in Burkina Faso. We apply a stochastic frontier model in order to estimate the efficiency with which the 45 provinces of Burkina Faso provide primary education. The proposed model not only allows two outputs for primary education to be included, but also provides for an assessment of the factors that may affect inefficiency. Our results indicate that, overall, the primary education system in Burkina Faso operates at an efficiency level of approximately 63%. In addition, the living conditions of the population, as well as some factors internal to the education system, appear to have a relationship with the efficiency of primary education in the various provinces of Burkina Faso.     

中药材初加工废水处理工程设计与运行

针对亳州某产业园中白芍初加工废水,包括清洗废水和蒸煮脱皮废水,其中白芍清洗废水处理采用“旋流沉砂器+平流沉淀池”工艺,白芍蒸煮脱皮废水处理采用预处理和“UASB+A/O+混凝沉淀(保障工艺)”工艺,并考察其运行效果。结果表明:清洗废水经处理后出水水质可以达到清洗回用标准,使废水可循环再利用;蒸煮脱皮废水处理后达标排放,出水水质满足《中药类制药工业水污染排放标准》(GB21906-2008)中污染物最高允许排放浓度的一级标准。该废水处理工程运行稳定、出水达标,可为同类工程设计提供参考。     

The transition of China's monetary policy regime: Before and after the four trillion RMB stimulus

This paper studies the monetary policy of China in a flexible time-varying parameter vector autoregression model with stochastic volatility, with a focus on the monetary policy regime change around 2009 when the four trillion RMB stimulus started. We find that China has been transiting from targeting money quantity to targeting interest rate since 2009. The interest rate policy instrument played a bigger role in the central bank's monetary policy toolbox. We check an alternative identification strategy and a couple of different model settings to show the robustness of this conclusion.     

Off‐Shoring,Specialization and R&D

This paper investigates whether off‐shoring promotes technological specialization by reallocating resources towards high‐tech industries and/or stimulating within industry R&D. Using data for the USA, Japan and Europe, our results show that material off‐shoring promotes high‐tech specialization through input reallocation between sectors, while service off‐shoring favors technologically advanced production by increasing within‐industry productivity, mainly via its positive impact on R&D. Conversely, we find that the increasing fragmentation of core production tasks, captured by narrow off‐shoring, has adverse effects on technological specialisation, which suggests that this type of off‐shoring is mainly pursued for cost‐reduction motives.     

Macroeconomic effects of monetary policy in Korea: A time-varying coefficient VAR approach

Using a time-varying coefficient vector autoregressive (TVC-VAR) model, we assess how the efficacy of monetary policy innovations in stimulating real activity has evolved over time in Korea, as an example of emerging market countries, since 2000. We show that the responsiveness of output toward monetary policy innovations has decreased gradually since the early to mid-2000s, but monetary policy remains effective in boosting output even for the most recent sample. In addition, we find that the volatility of exogenous disturbances has decreased dramatically in the post-2000 period, and that this is the main driver of the recent volatility reductions of both output and inflation.     

Seasonal rural labor markets and their relevance to policy analyses in developing countries

Seasonality is a salient feature of rural livelihoods and particularly within agriculture the demand for labor varies with the seasons and weather. In low-income countries, agriculture employs almost two-thirds of the labor force and incomes from labor are a major determinant of welfare. Therefore, an appropriate model representation of rural labor markets is critical when analyzing agricultural and food policies. Economy-wide models are commonly used for ex-ante policy analysis, but have so far ignored the influence of seasonality, implicitly assuming separability of seasonal labor demand and supply. This study relaxes that assumption using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model calibrated to the Bhutanese economy as an illustrative case. Using model setups with and without seasonal labor markets, a cereal export ban of India is simulated leading to higher import prices for Bhutan. Results demonstrate that neglecting the influence of seasons on rural labor markets systematically biases model results. Assuming homogeneity of labor units, i.e., allowing substitution across seasons, understates the impacts of policy changes on rural wage rates, distorts households' labor-leisure trade-off decisions and overstates agricultural supply response. Given the widespread use of economy-wide models, the results are important for understanding the implications of domestic and global policy changes for agriculture and welfare in developing economies.