Economic Growth,Globalisation and Beer Consumption

We analyse the evolution of beer consumption between countries and over time. Historically, there have been major changes in beer consumption in the world. In recent times, per capita consumption has decreased in traditional beer drinking countries while it increased strongly in emerging economies. Recently, China has overtaken the US as the largest beer economy. A quantitative empirical analysis studies the relationships among economic growth, globalisation and beer consumption. The relationship between income and beer consumption has an inverse U‐shape. Beer consumption initially increases with rising incomes; but at higher levels of income beer consumption falls. Increased globalisation has contributed to a convergence in alcohol consumption patterns across countries. In countries that were originally beer drinking countries, the share of beer in total alcohol consumption reduced, while this is not the case in countries which traditionally drank mostly wine or spirits.     

Information-driven stock return comovements across countries

This article analyses stock market comovements at a global level for 37 advanced and emerging countries in the last two decades. The article reports that international stock return comovements were greater in advanced countries than in emerging ones, but increased more rapidly in emerging countries than in advanced ones. The driving forces behind these comovements were country-specific fixed effects and time-varying factors over the period 2007–2015. These factors include not only the openness of international trade and finance but also institutional factors representing the development of information and communication technologies, the protection of property rights, and the transparency of information disclosure. These institutional factors worked in line with an information-driven comovement theory.     

Globalisation,poverty and corruption: Retarding progress in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Poverty and corruption can both immiserate a nation. Globalisation through open trade can potentially increase economic growth, providing employment and increased incomes to the poor. Corruption can dampen or even reduce these positive developments. Although globalisation is considered instrumental in development strategies, theoretically, the impact of globalisation on poverty reduction is ambiguous, an ambiguity that is also reflected in the empirical literature. The corruption-poverty literature clearly reveals that empirical findings on such association are at best heterogeneous. This article examines the effects of globalisation and corruption on poverty using time series data for South Africa for the period 1991–2016. Three indicators of poverty and recently developed measures of globalisation and corruption were employed in the logistic regression model used for estimation. The results confirm that globalisation reduces poverty while corruption intensifies it. The globalisation findings are robust across the different measures of poverty while unidirectional results show corruption increases poverty.     

The role of inbound tourist flows in promoting exports

While it is established that tourism benefits growth through increased employment and investments, it is not well understood whether tourism has an effect on exports. This paper explores exports as an additional channel through which tourism affects domestic economic activity. Using bilateral tourist and trade flows, the paper explores the causal effect of tourist flows on exports. To deal with endogeneity, two instruments are constructed and subsequently used on two different sets of exporters, one of the instruments being the number of casualties due to terrorism in a country. We find that tourism affects mainly the exports of differentiated products. Specifically, we find that tourism benefits the exports from non‐OECD exporters of processed food products and this effect is only estimated for South–North trade with an elasticity close to 1. For European countries, the findings point in the same direction; tourism affects differentiated consumer products and processed food with elasticity close to 1, which adds plausibility to the earlier results. We also find a lagged effect for tourism mainly on the export of consumer goods (for the two samples) and processed food products (for European countries). The results suggest that exporting is an additional channel through which tourism can stimulate domestic economic activity in the tourist destination.     

Three decades of globalisation: Which countries won,which lost?

The world average exports-to-GDP ratio increased from 17% in 1985 to 27% in 2015. Hence, world exports have grown much faster than world GDP. However, despite this overall trade integration, which is a key aspect of globalisation, the exports-to-GDP ratios have declined for 29 of the 118 countries with such data from 1985 to 2015. Some countries have been driving globalisation, while others have become marginalised. This paper examines three decades of globalisation to shed some light upon which countries might be considered winners and which countries might be considered losers of globalisation. After summarising the evolution of income and income per capita, we examine the evolution of exports and net inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Contradictory to previous decades, we show there are now many countries from all income groups that have either experienced marginalisation or been driving globalisation. We then use novel regression analysis to review the robustness of generally accepted drivers of globalisation and marginalisation, with education and macroeconomic stability being the two most robust determinants.     

Expanding the Division of Labour: Trade Costs and Supply Chains in the Global Economy

In the pre-1914 globalisation reduction in trade costs allowed finer specialisation. The quantitative evidence is strong for some components of trade costs, but less so for aggregate trade costs. In the second globalisation, international supply chains have become an important element of the global economy, and we have better data to examine the links between trade costs and supply chains. After a brief review of the standard account of the evolution of supply chains, the article examines the quantitative evidence; regional value chains (RVCs) are especially strong, but the origins and nature of RVCs differ in Europe, the Americas and Asia. The paper then presents evidence on trade costs, focusing on the years since 1990 when both data and computing facilities became more comprehensive, and analyses the relationship between trade costs and supply chains.     

Misthinking Globalisation: Twentieth-Century Paradigms and Twenty First-Century Challenges

Accounts of globalisation fail to distinguish the current globalisation from that which followed the industrial revolution. Before the industrial revolution most economic activity was local, with production and consumption bundled in the close geographic proximity. In the first globalisation, production and consumption unbundled on an unprecedented global scale as natural and man-made trade costs fell. In the second unbundling the production process itself is being unbundled globally, with traditional ‘made in’ labels losing meaning as supply chains become more and more complex.     

Post-neoliberal developmental regimes in Latin America: Argentina under Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner

This article seeks to analyse the concept of post-neoliberalism through state theory, grounded in an understanding of the state as a historical institution influenced by both domestic and international forces. This theoretical exercise is complemented with a discussion of contemporary Argentina under the Presidency of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, showing that focus on a ‘developmental regime tripod’ reveals underlying tensions in the post-neoliberal model as a result of a desire to ‘deepen that model’ combined with shifts in the nature of international political economy in the wake of the global financial crisis.     

Inter-country distancing,globalisation and the coronavirus pandemic

Originating in China, the coronavirus has reached the world at different speeds and levels of strength. This paper provides an initial understanding of some driving factors and their consequences. Since transmission requires people, the human factor behind globalisation is essential. Globalisation, a major force behind global well-being and equality, is highly associated with this factor. The analysis investigates the impact globalisation has on the speed of initial transmission to a country and on the scale of initial infections in the context of other driving factors. Our cross-country analysis finds that measures of globalisation are positively related to the spread of the virus, both in speed and in scale. However, the study also finds that globalised countries are better equipped to keep fatality rates low. The conclusion is not to reduce globalisation to avoid pandemics, but to better monitor the human factor at the outbreak and mobilise collaboration forces to curtail diseases.