Narrow Results

Using a new dataset of Thai financial institutions, this paper analyzes the dynamics of productivity over the past decade (1989–1998), including the impact of the financial crisis of recent history. We find productivity increased substantially in the wake of Thailand's financial liberalization (1992–1996); this was followed by a precipitous fall during the crisis (1996–1997). To test the robustness several specifications are undertaken: four models (differing with respect to whether or not risk and deposits are included as inputs), and two frontiers (one where banks and finance companies are treated separately, the other where the data are pooled) are analyzed.

The role of agriculture in the process of growth and development arises mainly from its linkages with other sectors of an economy. The agricultural sector in developing countries in recent times has recorded secular declines in terms of its contribution to export earning and domestic consumption. This observation is associated with policy inertia among other factors. The Structural Adjustment Programme adopted in Nigeria in the 1980s, is one policy shift aimed at boosting agricultural production. This article aims at empirically verifying the effects of policy reform on agricultural exports in Nigeria by estimating a simple impact assessment model using a slope-dummy method. The estimates among others indicate that agricultural export is significantly influenced by domestic consumption and economic liberalization. The findings suggest that policy reforms on agricultural productivity should go beyond liberalization of the economy.

During the last few decades an important feature of the on-going process of globalization is production fragmentation. Owing to the growing importance of international fragmentation of production processes the composition of international trade has indeed altered in recent years. Here we want to focus on production fragmentation which actually implies that the requirement for the intermediate goods can be met by producing it domestically or it can be imported from abroad. In this paper we want to examine the probable causes for a developing economy to switchover from a regime of no fragmentation to fragmentation. Here the impact of such a regime change has also been examined on wage inequality as well as on the incidence of skill formation within the economy. Moreover, we have examined here the impact of perfect international capital mobility on the economy in the context of regime change between fragmentation and no fragmentation.

IMF policies have been widely criticized in the aftermath of the Asian crisis. Key critics questioned the appropriateness and the sequencing of financial liberalization programs which, along with insufficient monitoring and inadequate prudential regulations, left the financial sectors of the affected countries highly leveraged and exposed. This paper examines the impacts of similar reforms on the efficiency of the banking system in Tunisia, a country whose economy has been reshaped by the IMF/World Bank prescribed economic adjustment plans since 1987. Using various DEA models and panel data covering the period 1992–1997, we evaluate the individual effects of each component of the reforms on the banking industry overall.

Meanwhile, we compare the effects on banks because of the different ownership structures over time. We also pay particular attention to specific factors that have kept the financial sector in Tunisia relatively stable in the midst of the global market turmoil caused by the Asian crisis.

Of late, technology entrepreneurship and ecosystem for technology based start-ups are attracting the attention of policy makers and empirical researchers alike, across the world. In India, Bangalore has been receiving increased global recognition as a tech start-up hub; as of now, Bangalore is considered to be the home for the largest number of tech start-ups in the country and third largest in the world. An important factor that contributed to this “status and recognition” of Bangalore is the emergence of a unique entrepreneurial ecosystem, which supports and promotes tech start-ups. Given this, it is important to understand how a favorable entrepreneurial ecosystem for tech start-ups emerged in Bangalore. What are its major components? What role do these components play in different stages of the life cycle of tech start-ups in Bangalore? How mature is the ecosystem of Bangalore to support the emergence, sustenance and growth of tech start-ups to nurture them? What are the key lessons that can be derived out of the Bangalore tech hub experience? This article is an attempt to shed light on these issues.

Synopsis

The research problem

In recent decades, the Chinese government has taken several measures to liberalize its stock market to attract foreign investment. In this survey, we described these liberalization measures and reviewed the research on their consequences.

Motivation

Along with the rapid development of the Chinese stock market, increasing numbers of global investors have shown interest in this market. As a result, we also witness a steady growth in the number of empirical research and review studies published in the international journals. However, no published reviews have focused on stock market liberalization, which is an important perspective requiring further investigation. Our study bridges the gap by making a thorough and in-depth review on issues associated with the stock market liberalization in China.

The discussed questions and implications

In analyzing this literature, we focused on two dimensions: (1) how liberalization impacts five corporate-level accounting and financial issues—corporate governance, information environment and financial disclosure, earnings quality, value-relevance of accounting information, and auditing, and (2) how liberalization improves the Chinese stock market as a whole and affects asset pricing in this market. Based on the issues explored in the literature, we provide suggestions for future research in our concluding remarks.

This paper examines the political complexities of retail liberalization in a developing country such as India in the overall context of liberalization of trade in services. Drawing on the experiences of other developing countries and India's experiences in the past decade of allowing FDI in retail, the paper found that retail modernization is a part of economic development and it will continue to happen. The governments of developing countries have to take into account multiple perceptions related to retail liberalization and design a policy that is non-discriminatory and transparent. Appropriate policies should be in place to support the traditional retailers to face competition. Developing countries should be willing to bind their unilateral liberalization in trade agreements and this will enhance their bargaining power.

Since 1991, India has witnessed wide-ranging economic reforms in its policies governing international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) flows which has consequently led to a dramatic rise in both trade and FDI flows since then. Using firm-level panel data, this paper investigates whether these trends have contributed to significant productivity improvements since 2000, as measured by total factor productivity (TFP). In addition, the paper also examines the determinants of TFP across a range of different industry categories. The results suggest the existence of significant productivity improvements since 2000 and also identify variables such as imports of raw materials and capital goods, size of operation, quality of employment captured by wage rates, and technology imports as crucial determinants of productivity.

This paper addresses the effect of international trade on cultural outcomes from both economic and anthropological perspectives. Definitions of culture are informed by anthropology and then incorporated into a standard economic trade models in two distinct ways. In the “cultural affinity from work” model, workers receive a non-pecuniary cultural benefit from work in a particular industry. In the “cultural externality” model, consumers of a product receive utility from other consumer’s consumption of a domestic good. We show that resistance to change due to cultural concerns can reduce the national benefits from trade liberalization. Complete movements to free trade will have a positive national welfare impact in the cultural affinity case, whereas it may lower national welfare in the cultural externality case. We also show that a loss of cultural benefits is more likely to occur when culture is an externality.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about the effects of trade liberalization on productivity performance of the Australian passenger motor vehicle industry, which has experienced significant liberalization over the years. Our analysis indicates that trade liberalization had a negative impact on productivity growth, at least in the immediate post-liberalization period. Empirical results suggest that economies of scale and tariff protection improve productivity, while industry assistance (such as the local content and duty drawback schemes and production subsidies) retards productivity. Policy implications of these findings are that there are dividends in terms of improved productivity by encouraging economies of scale, providing tariff protection and lowering industry assistance.

Developing countries have continued to experience an unprecedented increase in direct foreign investment (FDI) inflows for the past two decades. However, the quantitative impact of the same on private domestic investment (PDI) is still imprecise. Using a system GMM approach and panel data from Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) for the period 1996–2013, we provide evidence in support of the crowding out role of FDI on PDI but the observed nexus is precipitated by the presence of liberalization, human capital development and institutional quality. Interestingly, when we consider the latter variables uninteracted, the improvement of each appears to significantly benefit PDI. In addition, the substitution role of FDI in PDI appears to be stronger in resource-rich than in the resource-poor countries. Additionally, we find that public investment crowds out private investment whereas infrastructure development, past private investment, credit depth, and GDP per capita are supportive of the PDI. However, we document mixed evidence for sub-samples of the East African Community, the Southern Africa Development Corporation, the Economic Community and West African States, and the Economic Community of Central African States. Overall, our study underscores the urgent need for well-directed policies in line with improving institutions, school enrolment, financial systems, infrastructure, and the government prioritization of productive investment that is supportive of the private as well as foreign sector. We advocate for reviews of incentive packages to foreign firms that discourage fair competition if the PDI-FDI complementarity and consequential positive spillovers to other sectors are to be realized for economic development in SSA.

In this study, we revisit a recent study that examined the role of GATT/WTO membership on trade flows. With this aim, we re-examine Rose (2004a)’s study and extend the data until 2007. Furthermore, we alternatively estimate the role of the organization, GATT/WTO, on trade by including more control variables that are believed to influence bilateral trade such as a defense pact (military alliance), military disputes, joint democracy and policy similarity. Empirical results clearly demonstrate that GATT/WTO membership does have a significant positive effect on trade.

This is a study of competing visions or designs of trans-Pacific economic cooperation, and attempts to unify, or retain, the differences that have evolved, in the organization and objectives of the multilateral Asia — Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. This analysis also demonstrates the challenges faced by groups of countries with very different political-economy structures and values as they attempt to constitute an arrangement to gain trade advantages. Differences over how best to reach APEC's goals of trade liberalization, the extent to which APEC should be institutionalized, and the items to be put on the agenda of the annual conferences are at times so deep that the effective functioning of the forum itself gets questioned. There has been no shortage of meetings or reports within APEC, except that they typically lead to extremely few concrete proposals that all parties could agree on to implement and evaluate together, and even fewer results.

The contention in designing alternative visions for APEC may be seen as a reflection of opposing interests on liberalization and institutionalization within the forum between the United States, developed or industrialized countries and open export-oriented market economies on the one hand, and China and developing or industrializing countries on the other hand, with Japan having moved from the predominantly “Western” “camp” to the mostly “Asian” one. Fundamentally, while adherents of the “Western” design would like to promote economic competition and perpetuate the advantages that they enjoy with trade and investment liberalization, advocates of the “Asian” vision still believe to some extent in preserving the business-political nexus and industrial policies that have brought a respectable measure of political stability, material prosperity and diplomatic influence to countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. These two roadmaps reflect differences of interest and value, and are not easily reconcilable.

This paper shows how unilateral liberalization in one country can increase the voting support for reciprocal reduction in trade barriers in a partner country. When trade policies are determined simultaneously in the two countries, we show the possibility of multiple political equilibria — one in which the countries are both protectionist and another in which they trade freely with each other. Starting with trade protection in both countries, a unilateral reform in one country is shown to bring about a free trade equilibrium that obtains majority support in both countries.

Since 1991, India has witnessed wide-ranging economic reforms in its policies governing international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) flows which has consequently led to a dramatic rise in both trade and FDI flows since then. Using firm-level panel data, this chapter investigates whether these trends have contributed to significant productivity improvements since 2000, as measured by total factor productivity (TFP). In addition, the chapter also examines the determinants of TFP across a range of different industry categories. The results suggest the existence of significant productivity improvements since 2000 and also identify variables such as imports of raw materials and capital goods, size of operation, quality of employment captured by wage rates, and technology imports as crucial determinants of productivity.