This paper explores the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and the productivity of host country domestic firms. We rely on a specially designed survey of over 4000 manufacturing ...firms in Vietnam, and separate out productivity gains along the supply chain (obtained through direct transfers of knowledge/technology between linked firms) from productivity effects through indirect FDI spillovers. In addition to identifying indirect vertical productivity spillovers from FDI, our results show that there are productivity gains associated with direct linkages between foreign-owned and domestic firms along the supply chain not captured by commonly used measures of spillovers. This includes evidence of productivity gains through forward linkages for domestic firms which receive inputs from foreign-owned firms.
This paper uses household panel data from rural Vietnam to explore the effects of having a relative in a position of political or bureaucratic power. Our results suggest that households increase ...their investment in land improvements due to such ties. Likely explanations are that connections to office holders strengthen de facto land property rights and access to both credit and transfers. Results also indicate that officials prefer to use informal rather than formal channels of redistribution to relatives.
•Study of rural Vietnam.•Politically connected families increase their investment in land-related goods.•Politically connected families have more secure property rights.•Politically connected families have better access to credit and transfers.•Results are robust to inclusion of household fixed effects in regressions.
Inequality has emerged as a key development challenge. It holds implications for economic growth and redistribution and translates into power asymmetries that can endanger human rights, create ...conflict, and embed social exclusion and chronic poverty. For these reasons, it underpins intense public and academic debates and has become a dominant policy concern within many countries and in all multilateral agencies. It is at the core of the seventeen goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This book contributes to this important discussion by presenting assessments of the measurement and analysis of global inequality by leading inequality scholars, aligning these to comprehensive reviews of inequality trends in five of the world’s largest developing countries—Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa. Each is a persistently high or newly high inequality context and, with the changing global inequality situation as context, country chapters investigate the main factors shaping their different inequality dynamics. Particular attention is on how broader societal inequalities arising outside of the labour market have intersected with the rapidly changing labour market milieus of the last few decades. Collectively these chapters provide a nuanced discussion of key distributive phenomena like the high concentration of income among the most affluent people, gender inequalities, and social mobility. Substantive tax and social benefit policies that each country implemented to mitigate these inequality dynamics are assessed in detail. The book takes lessons from these contexts back into the global analysis of inequality and social mobility and the policies needed to address inequality.
Few countries have experienced as many political and economic changes as Mozambique. A vast and diverse country, it faced a particularly difficult start after a long period of colonial dominance ...followed by a deadly war that formally ended only in 1992. However, despite impressive growth after multi-party elections, Mozambique's pattern of growth is fragmented, not sustainable and non-inclusive. Investigating the deep factors that undermine economic development, Mozambique at a Fork in the Road offers an insightful analysis of the historical and political context of Mozambique and its institutional constraints to economic development. It examines sectors that are critical for sustainable growth, such as agriculture, that receive low priority, and the frequent shocks in strategic policy that result in the absence of a clear national development vision. Building on a core set of thematic chapters, this compelling diagnostic tool provides a thorough and structured approach to understanding institutional dimensions of development. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Understanding industry agglomeration and its driving forces is critical for the formulation of industrial policy in developing countries. Crucial to this process is the definition and measurement of ...agglomeration. We construct a new coagglomeration index based purely on the location of firms. We examine what this index reveals about the importance of transport costs, labour market pooling and technology transfer for agglomeration processes, controlling for overall industry agglomeration. We compare the results based on our new measure to existing measures in the literature and find very different underlying stories at work. We conclude that in conducting analyses of this kind giving consideration to the source of agglomeration economies, employees or entrepreneurs, and finding an appropriate measure for agglomeration, are both crucial to the process of identifying agglomerative forces.
Using a unique survey data set this paper documents a positive effect of self-employment in farming on subjective well-being. This direct effect is only partly offset by negative, indirect effects ...working through income and other variables. These findings are interpreted as effects of self-employment in farming on perceived autonomy, competence and relatedness. The results suggest that economic transformation is associated with a psychological cost, which may contribute to explaining earnings gaps between sectors and types of employment. We also investigate other determinants of happiness, and for example find strong positive effects of own income and strong negative effects of neighbors’ income, suggesting the importance of relative rather than absolute levels of income.
Detailed analyses of poverty and wellbeing in developing countries, based on household surveys, have been ongoing for more than three decades. The large majority of developing countries now regularly ...conduct a variety of household surveys, and their information base with respect to poverty and wellbeing has improved dramatically. Nevertheless, appropriate measurement of poverty remains complex and controversial. This is particularly true in developing countries where (i) the stakes with respect to poverty reduction are high; (ii) the determinants of living standards are often volatile; and (iii) related information bases, while much improved, are often characterized by significant non-sample error. It also remains, to a surprisingly high degree, an activity undertaken by technical assistance personnel and consultants based in developed countries. This book seeks to enhance the transparency, replicability, and comparability of existing practice. It also aims to significantly lower the barriers to entry to the conduct of rigorous poverty measurement and increase the participation of analysts from developing countries in their own poverty assessments. The book focuses on two domains: the measurement of absolute consumption poverty and a first-order dominance approach to multidimensional welfare analysis. In each domain, it provides a series of computer codes designed to facilitate analysis by allowing the analyst to start from a flexible and known base. The volume covers the theoretical grounding for the code streams provided, a chapter on ‘estimation in practice’, a series of eleven case studies where the code streams are operationalized, a synthesis, an extension to inequality, and a look forward.
Few countries have experienced as many political and economic changes as Mozambique. A vast and diverse country, it faced a particularly difficult start after a long period of colonial dominance ...followed by a deadly war that formally ended only in 1992. However, despite impressive growth after multi-party elections, Mozambique's pattern of growth is fragmented, not sustainable and non-inclusive. Investigating the deep factors that undermine economic development, Mozambique at a Fork in the Road offers an insightful analysis of the historical and political context of Mozambique and its institutional constraints to economic development. It examines sectors that are critical for sustainable growth, such as agriculture, that receive low priority, and the frequent shocks in strategic policy that result in the absence of a clear national development vision. Building on a core set of thematic chapters, this compelling diagnostic tool provides a thorough and structured approach to understanding institutional dimensions of development. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Aid, Environment and Climate Change Arndt, Channing; Tarp, Finn
Review of development economics,
20/May , Volume:
21, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Aid and aid institutions constitute an important element of the global response to interlinked global developmental and environmental challenges. As such, these institutions are now being drawn into ...new arenas beyond the traditional focus on improving the livelihoods of poor people in low‐income countries. Development aid, by itself, cannot “save the planet.” Nevertheless, development aid and development institutions do have the potential to become important catalytic actors in achieving developmental and global environmental objectives. This requires bold reforms and political action. Without appropriate restructuring of the international institutional architecture to confront the new development context combined with the necessary complementary policy frameworks, future aid, including aid for environmental objectives, risks substantially under‐performing.
As research on the empirical link between aid and growth continues to grow, it is time to revisit the accumulated evidence on aid effectiveness. This paper extends previous meta-analyses, noting that ...the availability of more data enables us to conduct a sub-group analysis by disaggregating the sample into different time horizons and assess if there are temporal shifts in aid effectiveness. The new and updated results show that the earlier reported positive evidence of aid’s impact is robust to the inclusion of more recent studies and this holds for different time horizons as well. The authenticity of the observed effect is also confirmed by results from funnel plots, regression-based tests, and a cumulative meta-analysis for publication bias.
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