International Economics Commons^™

Interest Rate Policy In China: The Impact Of Suppressed Deposit Rates On Household Income From 2000-2007, Zhuliang James Zhang

Undergraduate Economic Review

An often-overlooked impact of China’s policy of maintaining low interest has been the suppression of household interest income, which has increased the propensity of households to save while decreasing their consumption rates. This paper posits that from 2000 to 2007, deposit rates in China were suppressed annually by around 720 basis points, imposing an implicit tax on annual per-capita income of 12.8% on average. Raising deposit rates will increase household income and boost consumption in the medium-term if the Chinese government is able to initiate policy shifts that distribute the gains of economic growth more equitably to households. Research advised …

Essays On An Asean Optimal Currency Area, Kathryn J. Whittaker Huff

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Many regions of the world would like to replicate the financial and monetary integration of the European Monetary Union (EMU). Member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have shown an interest in such an arrangement. ASEAN is a political, cultural, and economic association that includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Many of these nations are experiencing rapid economic development while others are still relatively poor and under developed. As such, they appear to be an unlikely group for currency unification. Older studies suggest that multiple currency union groupings may be …

The Resource Curse And Peru: A Potential Threat For The Future?, Sergio Cruz

Master's Theses

What explains the ability of some countries to successfully use their natural resources towards development and economic growth while for others stagnation and impoverishment? The resource curse theory has helped economists explain this observation. This work examines how Peru has been able to produce strong economic growth in the last 20 years despite the economy’s strong dependence on its natural resource extractive industry. Peru has been able to avoid many of the pitfalls and traps that resource curse literature considers to be detrimental to economic growth. This article examines the resource based economies of four other countries (Venezuela, Chile, Nigeria, …

Beneath And Beyond The Chinese Miracle, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

China’s rapid economic progress from an impoverished communist state to the world’s second largest economy within just three decades has enthralled many economists. That the country shifted from the classical centrally-planned command economy to one espousing free market practices while maintaining communist rule, has all given rise to this question: What exactly is the China model? Is it the hybrid of innovative state ownership and tight political control? Or is the rapid growth the result of liberal economic and political reforms?

Extreme Risks In Financial Markets And Monetary Policies Of The Euro-Candidates, Hubert Gabrisch, Lucjan T. Orlowski

WCBT Faculty Publications

This study investigates extreme tail risks in financial markets of the euro-candidate countries and their implications for monetary policies. Our empirical tests show the prevalence of extreme risks in the conditional volatility series of selected financial variables, that is, interbank rates, equity market indexes and exchange rates. We argue that excessive instability of key target and instrument variables should be mitigated by monetary policies. Central banks in these countries will be well-advised to use both standard and unorthodox (discretionary) tools of monetary policy while steering their economies out of the financial crisis and through the euro-convergence process.

Diaspora Bonds: A Viable Source Of External Financing For Nigeria?, Omolara O. Duke

Bullion

The paper examines the need for external funding, arises from the inadequacy of domestic sources of funds to meet supply gaps and balance of payments (BOP) challenges and the potentials of Nigeria sourcing external financing through the issuance of Diaspora bonds. Following this introduction, Section ll reviews conceptual and empirical literature as well as country experiences on Diaspora bonds issuance. Section lll, discusses the bond market in Nigeria. ln Section lV. the prospects and challenges of issuing Diaspora bonds in Nigeria were highlighted. Section V concludes the paper.

Introduction To The Symposium On 'Financial Risks And Economic Stability In Emerging Market Economies', Lucjan Orlowski

WCBT Faculty Publications

Developing resilience to contagion effects from global financial crises and economic recessions has been an ongoing crucial task for policymakers in emerging market economies. The recent global financial crisis of 2007-2009 has underscored the importance of pursuing disciplined macroeconomic policies and of devising sound macroprudential regulations that would strengthen the immunity of emerging markets and their institutions to various types of risks, including credit, default, sovereign, liquidity and market risks. The studies included in this symposium are not intended to provide a comprehensive overview of financial vulnerabilities in a broad spectrum of emerging markets. Rather, they share a common aim …

World Food Crisis: Imperfect Markets Starving Development, A Decomposition Of Recent Food Price Increases, Christine Costello

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The recent decade has experienced two rather substantial food price spikes. This thesis sets out to provide an in-depth look at the recent food price increases by achieving two goals: assessing the forces driving food prices, and determining the magnitude of those forces. These goals are reached by reviewing selected rhetoric on the recent food price increases, analyzing case studies, and lastly determining our modeling capabilities in decomposing food price changes. Additionally, this thesis will serve as a tool for stakeholder's to better address critical policy issues surrounding food, agriculture, and energy policies.

Adviser: Hendrik Van Den Berg

The Impact Of Public Credit Programs On Brazilian Firms, Joao Alberto Denegri, Alessandro Maffioli, Cesar M. Rodriguez

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of public credit lines in promoting the performances of Brazilian firms. We focus on the impact of the credit lines managed by BNDES and FINEP in fostering growth measured in terms of employment, labor productivity and export. For this purpose, we use a unique panel data set developed by the Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada (IPEA), which includes information on both firm-level performances and access to public credit lines. This particular data setting allows us to use quasi-experimental techniques to control for selection bias when estimating the impact of the public credit lines. The core …

International Capital Flows With Limited Commitment And Incomplete Markets, Jürgen Von Hagen, Haiping Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Recent literature has proposed two alternative types of financial frictions, i.e., limited commitment and incomplete markets, to explain the patterns of international capital flows between developed and developing countries observed in the past two decades. This paper integrates both types of frictions into a two-country overlapping-generations framework to facilitate a direct comparison of their effects. In our model, limited commitment distorts the investment made by agents with different productivity, which creates a wedge between the interest rates on equity capital vs. credit capital; while incomplete markets distort the investment among projects with different riskiness, which creates a wedge between the …

Transmission Linked To Structural Vulnerability: How Low-Income Countries Endured The Great Recession, Rachel F. Hartgen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The implosion of the 2008 financial crisis ignited fears that integration would transmit the crisis’ effects throughout the global system. Examining two countries, Bangladesh and Zambia, this project shows that low-income countries with relatively little integration also saw negative impacts. This occurred through three main transmission mechanisms: trade flows, rising prices and financial flows that could have possible long-term effects at the macro and micro level. The manner and impact of each transmission mechanism, however, varied among LICs according to each country’s individual structural economic and financial vulnerabilities. Bangladesh saw a delayed impact but did not avoid the crisis completely, …

Watching The Clock: Challenges For The World's Fastest Growing Economies, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Double-digit economic growths that are set to propel it to the second biggest economy in the world, overtaking Japan, has made people see China’s rise as remarkable. So confident are the pundits that they have dubbed this to be an “Asian century” and many more are urging for the world to learn Chinese in anticipation of a new world order. But, to renowned historian Wang Gungwu, this fast-paced growth associated with China is not something that is peculiar to the Asian giant only.

The Informal Economy And Bribery In North Korea, Byung-Yeon Kim, Yumi Koh

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper uses the data of 227 North Korean refugees who have settled in South Korea to investigate the relationship between working in the informal economy (market component of the economy) and bribe-giving, and between bribe-giving and the number of hours worked in the formal sector (planned component of the economy). The first relationship is positive, and the second relationship is negative. These results imply that widespread informal economy activities in North Korea have been undermining the socialist regime through bribery.

Government Ideology, Democracy And The Sacrifice Ratio: Evidence From Latin American And Caribbean Disinflations, Tony Caporale

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

This study uses a sample of 34 disinflations undertaken by thirteen Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) nations to test if political institutions impact the cost of policy induced disinflations. We find, after controlling for several of the most important covariates in the literature, that disinflations are less costly for right vs. left governments and that sacrifice ratios are lower for more democratic vs. authoritarian governmental regimes. This is robust to different measures of government ideology as well as to alternative ways of computing the sacrifice ratio and lends support for political economy literature which argues that political institutions have significant …

Sanctioning Policies-Australian, American And British Cross-National Reflections And Comparisons, Harry Savelsberg

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Over the last two decades welfare policies have undergone major reforms in Anglo-Western nations such as the U.S., U.K. and Australia. Central to these reforms have been the revision of welfare recipient entitlements and responsibilities and the emergence of a responsibility and obligations agenda. The essence of this agenda is conditionality and reciprocity, and it includes the threat of punitive sanctions for failing to comply with mandatory participation requirements. This paper highlights the potent influence of the ideas of American conservatives on policy reforms in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia and provides a thematic crossnational comparison of sanctioning policies …

The Wto Trade Effect, Pao Li Chang, Myoung-Jae Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper re-examines the GATT/WTO membership effect on bilateral trade flows, using nonparametric methods including pair-matching, permutation tests, and a Rosenbaum (2002) sensitivity analysis. Together, these methods provide an estimation framework that is robust to misspecification bias, allows general forms of heterogeneous membership effects, and addresses potential hidden selection bias. This is in contrast to most conventional parametric studies on this issue. Our results suggest large GATT/WTO trade-promoting effects that are robust to various restricted matching criteria, alternative GATT/WTO indicators, non-random incidence of positive trade flows, inclusion of multilateral resistance terms, and different matching methodologies.

Risk And The Technology Content Of Fdi: A Dynamic Model, Pao Li Chang, Chia-Hui Lu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper incorporates risk into the FDI decisions of firms. The risk of FDI failure increases with the gap between the South's technology frontier and the technology complexity of a firm's product. This leads to a double-crossing sorting pattern of FDI firms of intermediate technology levels are more likely than others to undertake FDI. It is with the attempt to relax the upper bound of the technology content of FDI, we argue, that many FDI policies are created. The theory's predictions are consistent with the empirical pattern of FDI in China by US and Taiwanese manufacturing firms.

Is The Wto Quietly Fading Away?: The New Regionalism And Global Trade Rules, Stephen J. Powell, Trisha Low

UF Law Faculty Publications

While scholars and governments alike view the liberalization of international trade as a positive development, they disagree on the medium that will accomplish this objective with the highest economic returns. Some experts believe that multilateralism through the 150+ member World Trade Organization (WTO) is the only way to achieve truly open and efficient trade. Others view multilateralism as but an aspiration and find that regionalism offers the only viable prospect for the meaningful further opening of markets.

In light of what we label the "new regionalism," our paper explores in detail the positive and negative effects of regional trade arrangements …

Geopolitics: A Guide To The Issues, Bert Chapman

Libraries Research Publications

Provides overview of how geography influences international relations and international politics including climate change, energy security, international economics, and international security.  Introduces key figures in geopolitics development as a discipline such as Alfred Thayer Mahan and Halford Mackinder, covers the geopolitical interests of individuals countries, describes disciplinary divisions within geopolitics, details international geopolitical crisis areas and provides maps of some of these areas, emphasizes geopolitics information resources, and stresses the critical importance of geography in studying international politics and security.

Chaebol And Korea's Industrial Finance, Murat Doral, Michael Patrono

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

The Korean economy is based on a government led and export oriented growth model centered on business groups or conglomerates known as chaebols which have close relationships with the government. The government led growth model, also known as Guided or Managed Capitalism, relies on a government dominated, but privately owned, business sector. The private business sector is itself dominated by chaebols which are family owned or controlled business groups. These groups are supported by preferential relationships with the government. While the chaebol system was an important element of South Korea's early industrial growth, it ultimately had to be reformed. The …

In Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Could Commerce Foster Trust, Tolerance, And Peace?, Nathan B. Oman

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Common Currency Examined In Latin America, Jack William Mccloskey

Honors Theses

Maintaining a stable currency with economic growth and prosperity has always been an obstacle for countries in Latin America. Debt crises and high poverty rates have plagued economies in the region for decades now. A possible solution to these problems is a shared currency. This approach has positive and negative attributes, and other solutions are also discussed.

Vertical Linkages And The Collapse Of Global Trade, Rudolfs Bems, Robert C. Johnson, Kei-Mu Yi

Dartmouth Scholarship

A common view is that cross-border vertical linkages played a key role in the 2008-2009 collapse of global trade. This paper presents two accounting results from a global input-output framework that shed light on this channel. We feed in observed changes in final demand and find that trade in final goods fell by twice as much as trade in intermediate goods. Nevertheless, intermediate goods account for more than two-fifths of the trade collapse. We also find that vertical specialization trade fell 13 percent, while value-added trade fell by 10 percent, because declines in demand were largest in highly vertically-specialized sectors.

The Labor Market Effects Of U.S. Immigration: What Is The Latest Evidence?, Orn Bodvarsson

Western Migration Conference Series

Bio:

Örn Bodvarsson is Professor of Economics, Chair of the Department of Management, and Interim Chair of the Department of Social Work at St. Cloud State University. He is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. A labor economist, Bodvarsson has been working in the immigration field since 2001, focusing on host country distributional effects of immigration, determinants of migration, internal migration in China, and wage discrimination against the foreign-born. In 2009 Springer published his co-authored book, The Economics of Immigration: Theory and Policy, recently reviewed in Journal of Economic …

Recruitment And Retention Of Immigrants In A Global Labour Market: Implications For Policy, Christopher Robinson

Western Migration Conference Series

Bio:

Chris Robinson studied economics at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago, and has been a faculty member at the University of Western Ontario since 1977. His research has focused on human capital and wage issues including human capital specificity, labour supply, migration, and unions and he has published a wide range of articles on these topics in scholarly journals. From 1993 to 2003 he served as associate editor of the Journal of
Labor Economics. From 2001 to 2010 he held the CIBC Chair in Human Capital and
Productivity at the University of Western Ontario …

Regional Trade Agreements And The Pattern Of Trade: A Networks Approach, Rossitza Wooster, Javier A. Reyes, Stuart Shirell

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

This paper uses a complex network approach for the analysis of bilateral trade data between countries over the period 1970-2000. We compute the network community structure for every year between 1970 and 2000 and compare it to null community structures that emerge from various models based on regional and geographic classifications, the implementation of RTA's and/or on gravity models of trade. Our results show that RTA formation appears to have a cyclical pattern on the world trade network community structure. We document periods where bilateral trade flows and the structure of the world trade network are consistent with those predicted …

The Effects Of Trade And Other Factors On Income Distribution: The Cases Of Chile, Dominican Republic, And Venezuela, George G. Lluberes

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the factors affecting income distribution in Latin America, specifically, the cases of Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela. The focus of this study is to identify economic, as well as, political factors that may be causing the inequality levels of income distribution to increase or decrease within the countries previously stated. Economic factors investigated include freedom to trade, trade as a percentage of GDP, economic growth, and educational enrollment levels. Furthermore, the political factors analyzed in this thesis are: corruption levels, legal structures, security of property rights, rule of law, democratic or non-democratic status, expenditure in social …

Three Essays On Fdi In China, Mingming Pan

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has contributed a great deal to China’s extraordinary growth by injecting capital into the economy, creating jobs, transferring technology and knowledge, enhancing trade, bringing in competition for local enterprises, improving the quality of local labor and intermediate goods suppliers, and connecting China’s gradually opening economy to the global market. For over a decade, China has been the second largest recipient of inward FDI in the world behind the United States. In 2009, China received $95 billion, which is 8.5% of the world’s total. However, the large amount of inward FDI has been unevenly distributed across Chinese …

El Rol Esencial De La Educación Y La Salud En La Estrategia Microfinanciera: Un Comentario Sobre El Neoliberalismo Contemporáneo, Julia Smith

Latin American Studies Honors Projects

Abstract

This thesis answers the question: “What is the relationship between microfinance and neoliberalism?” by arguing that microfinance is an effective strategy for poverty eradication and community development only when it is coupled with public education and health for all members of society. Therefore, countries need to change their policies in these areas to ensure that microfinance institutions are successful in ending poverty. This thesis engages with scholars such as David Harvey and Mohammed Yunus who provide the theoretical framework for neoliberalism and microfinance and more importantly with Milford Bateman and Yogendra Bahadur Shakya who argue that microfinance can never …

Do Foreign Direct Investment And Trade Openness Accelerate Economic Growth?, Donna Chan Wah Hak

Honors Projects in Economics

This research investigates the impact of trade openness and foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth. Using a framework proposed by Barro (1991), panel data regression analysis is performed on 5-year time periods between 1985 and 2005. A sample of 89 countries is analyzed using data collected from the World Development Indicators (WDI), Penn World Table, Barro and Lee (2010), and Polity IV Project datasets. The empirical analysis shows that conditional convergence occurs among the countries in the sample and that FDI net inflows per worker slightly increases the speed of conditional convergence. This study also finds evidence that FDI …