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The financial crisis has re-ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalization and its implications for growth, especially for developing countries. The empirical literature has not been able to conclusively establish the presumed growth benefits of financial integration. Indeed, a new literature proposes that the indirect benefits of financial integration may be more important than the traditional financing channel emphasized in previous analyses. A major complication, however, is that there seem to be certain "threshold" levels of financial and institutional development that an economy needs to attain before it can derive the indirect benefits and reduce the risks of financial openness. This paper develops a unified empirical framework for characterizing such threshold conditions. The analysis finds that there are clearly identifiable thresholds in variables such as financial depth and institutional quality - the cost-benefit trade-off from financial openness improves significantly once these threshold conditions are satisfied. The findings also show that the thresholds are lower for foreign direct investment and portfolio equity liabilities compared with those for debt liabilities.
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This paper investigates the sources of growth in manufacturing productivity in Cote D'Ivoire, Ethiopia and Tanzania in comparison with the case of Bangladesh. Based on the analysis of establishment census data since the mid-1990s, it finds that reallocation of market share between firms contributed substantially to productivity growth in each of the four countries, although to a varying extent. In Ethiopia, the impact of market share reallocations among survivors tended to be larger than those associated with increases in within-plant productivity. In addition, plant closure (or exit) boosted productivity more than new plant openings (or entry) did in the sense that the relative productivity of survivors (or continuing plants) was higher relative to that of closing plants (or exit cases) than it was relative to the productivity of newly opening plants (or new entrants). Reallocation of market share plays an important role in raising aggregate productivity in Cote d'Ivoire as well. But the pattern here is opposite to that in Ethiopia in that in Cote d'Ivoire entering (or newly opening) plants have larger impact on aggregate productivity growth than closing (or exiting) plants. Unlike the case with Cote D'Ivoire and of Ethiopia, the reallocation of market share among surviving plants is a smaller source of manufacturing productivity growth in Tanzania than the new plant openings and plant closure. The data suggest that the reallocation of market share among surviving plants and exiting plants has larger impact on productivity growth in Bangladesh than the productivity gap between new plants and survivors, as in the case of Ethiopia.
Aggregate Productivity --- Economic Growth --- Industrial Economics --- Industrialization --- Industry --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Manufacturing --- Microeconomic Analyses --- Productivity
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Inappropriate regulation can influence productivity performance by affecting incentives to invest and adopt new technologies, as well as by directly curbing competitive pressures. Results of a labor productivity growth model for European Union countries suggest that improving the regulatory environment-proxied by the Worldwide Governance Indicators regulatory quality indicator-and boosting effective exposure to competition through increasing trade integration-expressed as the ratio of exports plus imports to gross domestic product-have positive effects on productivity growth. In Romania a 10 percent increase in openness to global trade over 1995-2010 would have boosted productivity growth by 9.7 percent per year. A 10 percent increase in openness to European Union trade, in particular, would have led to an annual increase in productivity of 7 percent. Realizing the benefits from trade integration depends to some extent on regulation. In this regard, the effects of regulation on productivity growth are found to be positive, regardless of the indicator used to measure regulation, and both through direct and indirect channels (by increasing the speed at which a country catches up with productivity leaders). Simulation results also show how countries with different levels of regulatory quality would benefit from a regulatory improvement: had Romania improved its regulatory environment to the same level as Denmark in 2010, its annual productivity growth would have been 14 percent higher over 1995-2010.
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Uganda's growth in gross domestic product of the 2000s was accompanied by high growth rates of labor productivity across industries producing tradable goods and services. This came about primarily as a result of investment in equipment and other fixed assets, but also entailed substantial gains in total factor productivity Based on data from two waves of the Uganda Business Indicators survey this paper estimates that economy wide aggregate labor productivity and aggregate TFP grew at average annual rates of 13 t and 3 percent, respectively between survey years 2002 and 2009. Part of the growth in productivity on each measure reflected gains from technical progress made at the establishment level and within narrowly defined industries. But it was also in part the outcome of reallocation of labor and capital within as well as across industries. In particular, the paper estimates that about one-fifth of the aggregate growth in labor productivity between the two years reflected the shifting of labor toward industries and sectors where it was more productive on average and at the margin. The rest of the observed growth in labor productivity reflected gains made within narrowly defined industries. But almost in every case 55 to 90 percent of the observed "within industry" growth in labor productivity represented allocative efficiency gains from the correction of intra-industry inter-firm misallocation of labor. The balance of the observed within-industry growth in labor productivity represented establishment-level gains in technical efficiency.
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Major output collapses are costly and frequent in the developing world. Using cross-country data, we classify five-year periods using a two-dimensional state space based on growth regimes and political institutions. We then model the joint evolution of output growth and political institutions as a finite state Markov chain, and study how countries move between states. We find that growth is more likely to be sustained under democracy than under autocracy; output collapses are more persistent under autocracy; and stagnation under autocracy can give way to outright collapse. Democratic countries appear to be more resilient.
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"We prove that the change in welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by the current and expected future values of the standard Solow productivity residual. The equivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking prices parametrically. This result justifies TFP as the right summary measure of welfare (even in situations where it does not properly measure technology) and makes it possible to calculate the contributions of disaggregated units (industries or firms) to aggregate welfare using readily available TFP data. Based on this finding, we compute firm and industry contributions to welfare for a set of European OECD countries (Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain), using industry-level (EU-KLEMS) and firm-level (Amadeus) data. After adding further assumptions about technology and market structure (firms minimize costs and face common factor prices), we show that welfare change can be decomposed into three components that reflect respectively technical change, aggregate distortions and allocative efficiency. Using the appropriate firm-level data, we assess the importance of each of these components as sources of welfare improvement in the same set of European countries"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
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While the world is focused on addressing the near-term ramifications of the COVID-19 shock, we turn attention to another important aspect of the pandemic: its fallout on medium-term potential output through scarring. Taking Australia and New Zealand as examples, we show that the pandemic will likely have a large and persistent impact on potential output, broadly in line with the experience of advanced economies from past recessions. The impact is driven by employment, capital stock, and productivity losses in the wake of an unprecedented sectoral reallocation, hightened uncertainty, and reduced migration. Maintaining fiscal and monetary policy support until the recovery is firmly entrenched and putting in place a strong structural policy agenda to counter the pandemic’s adverse effects on medium-term potential output will be important to support standards of living and strengthen economic resilience in case of renewed shocks.
Business and Economics --- Macroeconomics --- Economics: General --- International Economics --- Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment: General (includes Measurement and Data) --- Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity: General --- Measurement of Economic Growth --- Aggregate Productivity --- Cross-Country Output Convergence --- Economywide Country Studies: Oceania --- Economic & financial crises & disasters --- Economics of specific sectors --- Financial crises --- Economic sectors --- Currency crises --- Informal sector --- Economics --- Pandemics --- COVID-19 (Disease) --- Business and Economics. --- Macroeconomics. --- Economics: General. --- International Economics. --- Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity: General. --- Measurement of Economic Growth. --- Aggregate Productivity. --- Cross-Country Output Convergence. --- Economywide Country Studies: Oceania. --- Economic & financial crises & disasters. --- Economics of specific sectors. --- Financial crises. --- Economic sectors. --- Currency crises. --- Informal sector. --- Economics. --- Economic aspects.
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This paper shows that the welfare of a country's representative consumer can be measured using just two variables: current and future total factor productivity and the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country, as well as welfare differences across countries. The result holds regardless of the type of production technology and the degree of market competition. It applies to open economies as well, if total factor productivity is constructed using domestic absorption, instead of gross domestic product, as the measure of output. It also requires that total factor productivity be constructed with prices and quantities as perceived by consumers, not firms. Thus, factor shares need to be calculated using after-tax wages and rental rates and they will typically sum to less than one. These results are used to calculate welfare gaps and growth rates in a sample of developed countries with high-quality total factor productivity and capital data. Under realistic scenarios, the U.K. and Spain had the highest growth rates of welfare during the sample period 1985-005, but the U.S. had the highest level of welfare.
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Major output collapses are costly and frequent in the developing world. Using cross-country data, we classify five-year periods using a two-dimensional state space based on growth regimes and political institutions. We then model the joint evolution of output growth and political institutions as a finite state Markov chain, and study how countries move between states. We find that growth is more likely to be sustained under democracy than under autocracy; output collapses are more persistent under autocracy; and stagnation under autocracy can give way to outright collapse. Democratic countries appear to be more resilient.
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This paper provides estimates of potential output growth in post-apartheid South Africa using both time trend techniques and a production function approach which indicates a potential growth rate of around 3 percent. The implied output gap provides statistically significant information for predicting inflation and could thus provide valuable input for formulating macroeconomic policy. Growth accounting and regression analysis suggest that an increase in trend GDP growth after the end of apartheid in 1994 is attributable to higher TFP growth driven by trade liberalization and greater private sector participation.
Macroeconomics --- Production and Operations Management --- Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity: General --- Measurement of Economic Growth --- Aggregate Productivity --- Cross-Country Output Convergence --- Economywide Country Studies: Africa --- Macroeconomics: Production --- Production --- Cost --- Capital and Total Factor Productivity --- Capacity --- Total factor productivity --- Potential output --- Output gap --- Capacity utilization --- Production growth --- Economic theory --- Industrial productivity --- Industrial capacity --- South Africa
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