Download or read book Three Essays on Determinants and Impact of Institutional Quality written by Fahad Hassan Khan and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sizeable recent literature has convincingly demonstrated that the quality of institutions is a fundamental determinant of economic growth. However, there is still much debate on the determinants of institutional quality and the channels through which it influences economic policies and growth. This thesis aims to contribute to this debate by focusing on three selected themes. The three papers are enveloped in a stage-setting survey of the wider literature on institutional change and economic growth, and a concluding chapter which summarizes the key findings and makes suggestions for further research. The approach of the three papers is empirical in nature, but the model formulation is well informed by the relevant theory. The empirical analysis is based on annual panel data covering a large number of countries at varying stages of development and the models are estimated using state-of-the-art econometric methodology, paying particular attention to potential endogeneity of the explanatory variables. The first paper (Chapter 2) investigates the implications of the composition of government revenue for the quality of political institutions. It is found that an increase in tax revenue increases political openness, whereas higher natural resource rents are detrimental to democracy. These relationships, however, become less pronounced with an increase in the level of GDP per capita. Overall, the findings are consistent with the historical political-economy literature which postulates that fiscal imperatives of the state are the driving force for the development of democratic systems of government. The second paper (Chapter 3) examines the implications of foreign trade exposure for the quality of economic institutions as represented by the extent of corruption and bureaucratic quality. The novelty of the analysis is the estimation of the impact of trade intensity (trade to GDP ratio) on institutional quality conditional on the nature of the trade policy regime. The results indicate that increased trade intensity improves institutional quality only in the context of liberalized trade policy regimes. There is also evidence that the dependence on exports of natural resources is harmful for institutional quality, but liberalization of the policy regime has the potential to mitigate this adverse impact. The findings are consistent with the predictions relating to the determinants of institutional quality in the 'rent-seeking' and 'resource-curse' literatures. The third paper (Chapter 4) explores the implications of political openness and corruption for the size and the growth impact of public-sector infrastructure investment. Based on a public choice literature, it is hypothesized that the relationship between institutional quality and public investment differs across democratic and autocratic countries. The results suggest that corruption enhances public investment in fixed capital, only in countries with autocratic regimes. Moreover, the growth impact of public investment in fixed capital is also negative only in these countries; the negative impact, however, is mitigated as autocratic countries become more politically open. These findings point to the suboptimal nature of the use of public funds in autocratic countries.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Effects of Institutional Quality on Economic Growth and Development written by Oguzhan C. Dincer and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Institutions and Economic Performance written by Donato De Rosa and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three essays contained in this thesis aim at filling part of the gap in the literature by empirically exploring specific instances of the importance of institutions for economic performance. The first essay examines how corruption affects productivity in a sample of firms from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Results indicate that the payment of bribes has, on average, a negative effect on firm level productivity. Moreover, firms in countries with generally poor institutional quality - proxied by greater prevalence of corruption at the country level and a by weak legal framework - see their productivity more negatively affected by the payment of bribes. The second essay examines whether regional institutional conditions have an effect on the exporting behaviour of Russian manufacturers between 1996 and 2001. Results indicate that the quality of the institutional environment, while it is inconsequential for the export decision per se, has a positive effect on the intensity of exporting to more developed foreign markets. The final essay investigates the consequences of dependence on natural resources for institutional quality in a panel of countries worldwide from the late 1990s to the late 2000s. Results point towards a negative association between an export structure dominated by extractive industries and the quality of the institutional environment measured by an indicator of government effectiveness.

Download or read book Estimating Institutional Quality with Instruments written by Peter D. Hull and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1 IsoLATEing: Identifying Counterfactual-specific Treatment Effects with Crossstratum Comparisons -- 2. Leveraging Lotteries for School Value-added: Testing and Estimation -- 3. Estimating Hospital Quality with Quasi-experimental Data.

Download or read book Essays on Institutions in the Process of Development written by Maty Konte and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays on institutions in the process of development. Chapter 2 considers to what extent the existence of multiple regimes is associated to the quality of institutions in a country, and analyses the difference of the role played by political and economic institutions in the growth process. The results indicate that economic institutions are proximate causes and have a direct impact on the growth rate. On the other hand political institutions are deep causes, and thus are the key determinant for which growth regime a country belongs to. In chapter 3, I re-examine the question of the resource curse. I test to which extent the impact of natural resources on the growth rate depends truly on the growth regime to which a country belongs. I find two different growth regimes. One is a resource-blessed regime in which natural resources increase signicantly the growth rate. The second one is a resource-cursed regime in which natural resources do not stimulate the growth rate. The analysis of the determinants of whether a country belongs or not to the blessed resource regime indicates that high level of democracy increases the probability for a given country to belong to this regime. Chapter 4 tries to understand and to provide potential explanations to why women are less supportive of democracy than men in Sub-sahara Africa. We test whether this gap is due to individual differences in policy priorities or to country-wide characteristics. The results support that in Sub-sahara Africa the gender gap in support for democracy disappears in countries with high level of the Human Development Indicator and of political rights.

Download or read book Three Essays on Institutional Investment written by Nida Abdioglu and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis investigates the investment preferences of institutional investors in the United States (US). In the second chapter, I analyse the impact of both firm and country-level determinants of foreign institutional investment. I find that the governance quality in a foreign institutional investor's (FII) home country is a determinant of their decision to invest in the US market. My findings indicate that investors who come from countries with governance setups similar to that of the US invest more in the United States. The investment levels though, are more pronounced for countries with governance setups just below that of the US. My results are consistent with both the 'flight to quality' and 'familiarity' arguments, and help reconcile prior contradictory empirical evidence. At the firm level, I present unequivocal evidence in favour of the familiarity argument. FII domiciled in countries with high governance quality prefer to invest in US firms with high corporate governance quality. In the third chapter, I investigate the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) on foreign institutional investment in the United States. I find that, post-SOX, FII increase their equity holdings in US listed firms. This result is mainly driven by passive, non-monitoring FII, who have the most to gain from the SOX-led reduction in firm information asymmetry, and the consequent reduction in the value of private information. The enactment of SOX appears to have changed the firm-level investment preferences of FII towards firms that would not be their traditional investment targets based on prudent man rules, e.g., smaller and riskier firms. In contrast to the extant literature, which mostly documents a negative SOX effect for the US markets, my chapter provides evidence of a positive SOX effect, namely the increase in foreign investment. In the fourth chapter, I examine the effect of SOX on the relation between firm innovation and institutional ownership. I find that US firms investing in innovation attract more institutional capital post-SOX. Prior literature highlights two SOX effects that could cause this result: a decreased level of information asymmetry (direct effect) and increased market liquidity (indirect effect). My findings support the direct effect, as I find that the positive relation between innovation and institutional ownership is driven by passive and dedicated institutional investors. A reduction in firms' information asymmetry is beneficial for these investors while they gain less from increased market liquidity. Overall, my results indicate that SOX is an important policy that has strengthened the institutional investor's support for firm innovation.

Download or read book Institutional Efficiency and Its Determinants written by Silvio Borner and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication discusses the impact of institutions on economic development and the determinants that shape institutional quality, using a new institutional economics (NIE) model based on a multidisciplinary approach to understanding issues including growth, efficiency and income distribution. Using the experience of Argentina under the Menem government as a case study, a methodology is developed and applied to test theoretical hypotheses regarding the concept of institutional quality and how delineation between economic and political institutions work in practice. It also considers systems of democracy and autocracy, and the impact of traditional, legal and cultural frameworks on institutional efficiency.

Download or read book Fiscal Transparency Its Determinants and Consequences for Developing Countries written by Yves Mathurin Tehou Tekeng and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis has addressed the issue of fiscal transparency for developing countries in three essays. The first essay provided an overview of the existing literature on fiscal transparency and related questions, focusing on different angles and measurement methodologies involved. Our review was structured around four principal axes that include the determinants of fiscal transparency; the links between fiscal transparency and some selected institutional factors relating to international capital markets, and fiscal discipline, corruption, and economic growth. One of the major shortcomings discovered in the literature is the lack of exclusive attention devoted to developing countries on this important issue of fiscal transparency and how this could affect their growth potential. The second essay proposed a new, replicable and more objective index of fiscal transparency based on criteria of developing countries as used by the World Bank in 2009. We also provided an analysis of the determinants of fiscal transparency based on information from 27 developing countries, taking into account a number of institutional and socio-economic determinants of fiscal transparency. For example, we examined the impacts of natural resources (wealth), quality of institution, openness on the above-mentioned index of fiscal transparency by the means of OLS and Two-Stage Least Square methods. Our empirical findings indicated that the performance of our proposed index appeared to be consistent with other existing indices. The third essay presented an analysis of some potential consequences of fiscal transparency for developing countries. More specifically, based on the availability of data across the 27 countries of the sample, it was found that fiscal transparency can have some impact on the structure of government spending, education and health outcomes, attraction of international capital, but not economic growth.

Download or read book Essays on Foreign Direct Investment Institutions and Economic Growth written by Fathi A. Ahmed Ali and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this thesis is to explore and study various dimensions of the interaction between one of the most important institutional quality aspects, namely property rights, and one important aspect of integration into the world economy: foreign direct investment (FDI), and links them to economic growth. In particular, this thesis explores whether the interaction between institutions and FDI has any implication for economic growth and whether there is any complementarity between the role of institutions and the role of FDI in fostering economic growth. To achieve this aim, the thesis was designed to include four empirical chapters in addition to two chapters: one for the introduction and the other for the conclusion. The first two empirical chapters studied the interrelationship between FDI and institutions. And the other two empirical chapters studied the implication of the interrelationship and the complementarity between FDI and institutions for economic growth. Chapter one motivated the thesis and set its aim and structure. The second chapter studies the role of institutions in determining FDI inflows and shows that institutional quality is one of the most important determinants of FDI. Based on this result, chapter three introduces a hypothesis that foreign investors will create a demand for better institutions in host countries, and that governments competing to attract more FDI will be induced to provide such institutions, leading to improvements in institutional quality in host countries. The empirical evidence reported in this chapter supports this hypothesis and shows that FDI inflows have a positive impact on property rights in host countries. Chapter four explores whether institutions play a role in determining the contribution of FDI to economic growth. The results presented in this chapter show that a host country needs to achieve a minimum level of institutional quality in order to be able to benefit from the positive externalities offered by FDI. Based on the results of chapter three, chapter five investigates whether the positive impact of FDI in institutional quality on host countries can be considered as a new growth-enhancing role for FDI. The results reported in chapter five show that the impact of FDI on economic growth that works via institutions, is a significant one, and is generally greater and more robust than the direct impact. Over all, the major contribution of this thesis is that it shows that a better understanding of the contribution of FDI to economic growth requires taking into account the interrelationship and the complementarity between FDI and institutions.

Download or read book Foreign Aid and Rent seeking written by Jakob Svensson and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1998 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: February 1998 Why has foreign aid had so seemingly poor a macroeconomic impact in many developing countries? Is there a relationship between concessional assistance, widespread corruption, and other types of rent-seeking? To address the relationship between concessional assistance, corruption, and other types of rent-seeking activities, the author provides a simple game-theoretic rent-seeking model. Insights with interesting implications emerge from the analysis: - An increase in government revenue (from windfalls, for example, or from increased foreign aid) does not necessarily lead to the provision of more public goods and in certain circumstances may reduce it. - The mere expectation of aid may suffice to increase rent-dissipation and reduce productive public spending. But if the donor community can enter into a binding policy commitment, this result may be reversed. The author provides some preliminary empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis that windfalls and foreign aid, in countries suffering from a divided policy process, are on average associated with more extensive corruption. He finds no evidence that donors systematically allocate aid to countries with less corruption. The results accords with recent empirical findings that aid is more effective, the greater the effort to direct it to good performers. But such a regime shift may involve an aid policy that in the short run provides more assistance to countries in less need and less aid to those in most need. Enforcing such a regime shift might be difficult. This paper--a product of the Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to study the effectiveness of foreign aid.

Download or read book Scarcity Conflicts and Cooperation written by Pranab Bardhan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-11-05 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging review of some of the major issues in development economics focuses on the role of economic and political institutions. Drawing on the latest findings in institutional economics and political economy, Pranab Bardhan, a leader in the field of development economics, offers a relatively nontechnical discussion of current thinking on these issues from the viewpoint of poor countries, synthesizing recent research and reflecting on where we stand today. The institutional framework of an economy defines and constrains the opportunities of individuals, determines the business climate, and shapes the incentives and organizations for collective action on the part of communities; Pranab Bardhan finds the institutional framework to be relatively weak in many poor countries. Institutional failures, weak accountability mechanisms, and missed opportunities for cooperative problem-solving become the themes of the book, with the role of distributive conflicts in the persistence of dysfunctional institutions as a common thread. Special issues taken up include the institutions for securing property rights and resolving coordination failures; the structural basis of power; commitment devices and political accountability; the complex relationship between democracy and poverty (with examples from India, where both have been durable); decentralization and devolution of power; persistence of corruption; ethnic conflicts; and impediments to collective action. Formal models are largely avoided, except in two chapters where Bardhan briefly introduces new models to elucidate currently under-researched areas. Other chapters review existing models, emphasizing the essential ideas rather than the formal details. Thus the book will be valuable not only for economists but also for social scientists and policymakers.

Download or read book Communities in Action written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Download or read book Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality written by Ms.Era Dabla-Norris and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper analyzes the extent of income inequality from a global perspective, its drivers, and what to do about it. The drivers of inequality vary widely amongst countries, with some common drivers being the skill premium associated with technical change and globalization, weakening protection for labor, and lack of financial inclusion in developing countries. We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down. This suggests that policies need to be country specific but should focus on raising the income share of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class. To tackle inequality, financial inclusion is imperative in emerging and developing countries while in advanced economies, policies should focus on raising human capital and skills and making tax systems more progressive.

Download or read book Institutions Innovation and Industrialization written by Avner Greif and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together a group of leading economic historians to examine how institutions, innovation, and industrialization have determined the development of nations. Presented in honor of Joel Mokyr—arguably the preeminent economic historian of his generation—these wide-ranging essays address a host of core economic questions. What are the origins of markets? How do governments shape our economic fortunes? What role has entrepreneurship played in the rise and success of capitalism? Tackling these and other issues, the book looks at coercion and exchange in the markets of twelfth-century China, sovereign debt in the age of Philip II of Spain, the regulation of child labor in nineteenth-century Europe, meat provisioning in pre–Civil War New York, aircraft manufacturing before World War I, and more. The book also features an essay that surveys Mokyr's important contributions to the field of economic history, and an essay by Mokyr himself on the origins of the Industrial Revolution. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Gergely Baics, Hoyt Bleakley, Fabio Braggion, Joyce Burnette, Louis Cain, Mauricio Drelichman, Narly Dwarkasing, Joseph Ferrie, Noel Johnson, Eric Jones, Mark Koyama, Ralf Meisenzahl, Peter Meyer, Joel Mokyr, Lyndon Moore, Cormac Ó Gráda, Rick Szostak, Carolyn Tuttle, Karine van der Beek, Hans-Joachim Voth, and Simone Wegge.

Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2009-07 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Financial Liberalization Country Risk and Low Growth Traps in Argentina Mexico and Turkey written by Firat Demir and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book U S Health in International Perspective written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.