Since generating sustained economic growth in Africa remains one of the most pressing challenges to development, it is imperative that Africa‐specific determinants of economic growth are ...investigated. At the same time, in spite of recent slight slowdown, China's economic growth and its capacity to move in thirty years from underdevelopment and extreme poverty to an emerging global economic power had attracted the attention of many developing countries, including those in Africa. Some key questions arise: Can China serve as a growth model for Africa? And what lessons can we draw from the Chinese experience of soaring economic growth? We therefore investigate the determinants of economic growth in Africa (North and sub‐Saharan Africa), using an Africa‐only sample with five non‐overlapping three‐year averages of cross‐sectional data between 1996 and 2010. We also do the same for China for the period, 1980 to 2010, while discussing recent trade, investment and aid/debt relations between Africa and China. Our results suggest that domestic investment, net ODA inflows, education, government effectiveness, urban population, and metal prices positively and significantly affect Africa's economic growth. For China, the key factors driving its economic growth are domestic investment, trade openness, initial income, and rural share of the population. Factors driving down China's growth include inflation rate, domestic credit to the private sector, net ODA inflows, population growth, telephone density, and oil and agricultural/raw materials prices. One key finding is that while Africa is almost twice as open as China, openness does not positively and significantly affect Africa's growth, unlike in China. A principal source is that Africa imports (mainly consumer goods) more than it exports while the reverse is true for China. Moreover, the structure of Africa's exports is biased towards traditional primary commodity exports unlike China that has rapidly shifted towards manufactures. In addition, Chinese domestic investment is about double that of Africa. The key lessons for Africa from the soaring Dragon's experience are discussed.
This open access book presents the trends and patterns of demographic and family changes from all eleven countries in the region for the past 50 years. The rich data are coupled with historical, ...cultural and policy background to facilitate an understanding of the changes that families in Southeast Asia have been going through. The book is structured into two parts. Part A includes three segments preceded by a briefing on Southeast Asia. The first segment focuses on marital and partnership status in the region, particularly marriage rates, age at marriage, incidence of singlehood, cohabitation, and divorce. The second segment focuses on fertility indicators such as fertility rates (total, age-specific, adolescent), age at childbearing, and childlessness. The third presents information on household structures in the region by examining household sizes, and incidence of one-person households, single-parent families, as well as extended and composite households. Part B presents indicators of children and youth’s well-being.
Out of Russiais the first scholarly work to focus on a group of writers who, over the past decade, have formed a distinct phenomenon: immigrants with cultural and linguistic roots in Russia who have ...chosen to write in the language of their adopted countries. The best known among these are Andreï Makine, who writes in French, Wladimir Kaminer, who writes in German, and Gary Shteyngart, who writes in English. Wanner also addresses the work of emerging immigrant writers active in North America, Germany, and Israel. He argues that it is in part by writing in a language other than their native Russian that these writers have made something of a commodity of their "Russianness." That many of them also happen to be Jewish adds yet another layer to the questions of identity raised by their work. In situating these writers within broader contexts, Wanner explores such topics as migration, cultural hybrids, and the construction and perception of ethnicity.
The Lehman bankruptcy highlights the potential for interconnectedness to cause negative externalities through counterparty contagion, but the externalities may also arise from information contagion. ...We examine troubled financial firms and find that both channels are significant factors in creating spillover effects. Counterparty contagion is greater in cases of riskier firms and larger and more complex exposures. However, the counterparty exposures are small, especially among banks that face diversification regulations, and do not typically cause a cascade of failures. Information contagion is stronger for rivals in the same markets and has a larger impact in cases of distress than in bankruptcies.
As Japan’s birthrate declines and its society ages, governmental policies need to improve the productivity of regional economies in order to sustain regional growth. This study examines social ...overhead capital and population agglomeration as drivers of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in Japan. The use of stochastic frontier analysis demonstrates that social overhead capital contributes to TFP growth and, especially, influences productive efficiency. Furthermore, the findings reveal that population agglomeration underpins TFP growth in regional economies. Empirical results also indicate that productive efficiency is high in regions where manufacturing is concentrated and that productive efficiency improves when internationally competitive manufacturers concentrate in regional economies. This study endorses the development of social overhead capital to spur Japan’s regional TFP growth. As such, it indicates that providing social infrastructure and enhancing regional productivity are important strategies for the government to consider in its efforts to achieve sustainable regional growth.
Is it always true that decentralization reforms put more power in the hands of governors and mayors? In post-developmental Latin America, the surprising answer to this question is no. In fact, a ...variety of outcomes are possible, depending largely on who initiates the reforms, how they are initiated, and in what order they are introduced. Tulia G. Falleti draws on extensive fieldwork, in-depth interviews, archival records, and quantitative data to explain the trajectories of decentralization processes and their markedly different outcomes in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. In her analysis, she develops a sequential theory and method that are successful in explaining this counterintuitive result. Her research contributes to the literature on path dependence and institutional evolution and will be of interest to scholars of decentralization, federalism, subnational politics, intergovernmental relations, and Latin American politics.
This paper reviews the different concepts of measuring activities of multinational corporations. It aims at working out the economic relationships that theoretically exist between these measures ...under general economic assumptions and then empirically investigates to which extent such relationships exist in the data. As a main conclusion, foreign direct investment (FDI) stock data is indeed a good proxy for measuring most real economic activities of multinational firms. Discrepancies between FDI stock and other data can to a large extent be given a reasonable economic meaning, but observed asset‐to‐employment patterns in multinational production also call for more thorough future research.
This study examines how differences in state bankruptcy laws, specifically the homestead exemption, affect business turnover by studying both new and existing businesses. We focus on areas just near ...state boundaries to control for unobserved local attributes to better isolate the effect of more wealth protection. We find that an increase in the homestead exemption attracts new businesses but also has a positive impact on existing businesses, suggesting that asset protection through bankruptcy law encourages successful entrepreneurs to incur the risks. Our results indicate that the personal bankruptcy law is an important policy tool that governments can use to encourage business growth without causing business turnover. (JEL K30, K36, R11, R1)
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