Over the last 14 months, Africa and the entire world experienced the worst Socioeconomic challenges of alarming proportion. Specifically, on 30 December 2019, an epidemiological alert was issued by ...the Chinese Wuhan local health authority of the emergence of a new strand of coronavirus - severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV - 2) - which causes what has come to be known as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Governments' economic responses included fiscal, expansionary monetary and macro-financial policies, as well as exchange rate/balance of payments adjustments. Following the approval of of some vaccines for emergency use in developed countries, vaccination is gradually progressing in Africa - after what was dubbed "vaccine nationalism" in parts of Europe, preventing the exportation of vaccines to Africa, and thus prompting the intervention of Covax (the GAVI Vaccine Alliance) to help procure vaccines for African countries.
This paper derives a balance-of-payments equilibrium growth rate analogous to Thirlwall's Law from a Pasinettian multi-sector macrodynamic framework. The resulting formula, which we call the ...Multi-Sectoral Thirlwall's Law, asserts that a country's growth rate of per capita income is directly proportional to the growth rate of its exports, with such a proportionality being inversely (directly) related to sectoral income elasticities of demand for imports (exports). These income elasticities are weighted by coefficients that measure the share of each sector in total imports and exports, respectively. It is shown that several theoretical, empirical and policy implications can be drawn from such a structural economic dynamics approach to balance-of-payments-constrained growth.
ABSTRACT Commodity dependence is a long-lasting feature of South American economies, with far reaching effects in economic and social performance. This paper focuses in the interaction between ...commodity prices and real exchange rate and in its effects on productive capabilities. New-Developmentalist approach has labeled that situation as a “Dutch-Disease”. I propose a Balance of Payment Constraint Growth model especially designed to address some specificities of commodity dependence that allow to theoretically analyze this issue. Empirical tests are conducted for the period 1970-2017. It is found that price surges are damaging for productive capabilities only in the context of the dismantling of state intervention.
RESUMO A dependência de commodities é uma característica duradoura das economias sul-americanas, com efeitos de longo alcance no desempenho econômico e social. Este artigo centra-se na interacção entre os preços das matérias-primas e a taxa de câmbio real e nos seus efeitos sobre as capacidades produtivas. A abordagem Novo-Desenvolvimentista rotulou essa situação como uma “Doença Holandesa”. Proponho um modelo de Crescimento com Restrições da Balança de Pagamentos especialmente concebido para abordar algumas especificidades da dependência de commodities que permitem analisar teoricamente esta questão. Os testes empíricos são realizados para o período 1970-2017. Verifica-se que os aumentos de preços são prejudiciais para as capacidades produtivas apenas no contexto do desmantelamento da intervenção estatal.
The paper reports estimates of import and export functions for five technological sectors in 14 developed European countries. These functions have never before been estimated for developed countries ...adopting a technological classification of sectors. The paper compares estimates of income elasticities found using vector error-correction models employing aggregate deflators, with estimates found using cross-product panels employing product-specific quality-adjusted price indexes recently calculated by Feenstra and Romalis. The results indicate that the income elasticities of imports and exports are higher for medium- and high-tech manufactures, which suggests the importance of moving from the production of simple goods to the production of goods with high technological content. The estimates also suggest that the Multi-Sectoral Thirlwall's Law holds for the countries analysed, while comparing the estimates revealed that cross-product panels with quality-adjusted prices generate considerably more robust results. The investigation reveals that using a more recent time period generates estimates of income elasticities of demand for primary products and resource-based manufactures that tend to be higher than the estimates found by studies that have used longer time periods, while the opposite holds for low-, medium-, and high-tech manufactures.
Abstract
Prebisch is responsible for three significant but often ignored contributions to international macroeconomics. First, Prebisch characterised the Gold Standard as an unstable and asymmetric ...system, which worked for peripheral countries only when there was a balance of payments surplus. Second, Prebisch considered that the increasing importance of the US economy was the main reason for the collapse of the Gold Standard and the Great Depression, and rejected explanations based on the inflexibility of wages and prices. Third, and as response to the abovementioned issues, Prebisch implemented several policies in Argentina during the 1930s, lifting the country out of the crisis. These theoretical insights and the policy prescriptions predated significant contributions by eminent scholars and proved to be successful during the last decades.
This paper contributes to the literature on balance-of-paymentsconstrained growth by investigating how structural change, identified with changes in the sectoral composition of exports and imports, ...affects the external constraint. We test both the original and a multisectoral version of Thirlwall's law for a sample of Latin American and Asian countries. The original Thirlwall's law is found to hold for all sample countries except South Korea, whereas the multisectoral analogue holds for all of them. As the sectoral composition of exports and imports is found to matter for growth, we analyze the evolution of each country's weighted trade income elasticities.
This article introduces a novel (environmental) interpretation of a “Keynesian coordination game” and develops four potential scenarios to remaining within a global carbon emissions constraint. With ...inspiration from research on “ecologically unequal exchange” (EUE), we demonstrate the drawbacks of present “green growth” strategies by considering how pollution- and resource-intensive industries are distributed unevenly in the world economy, with large and increasing negative impacts on the periphery. The situation may only be exacerbated if the reduction of emissions in the center is based on shifting heavy industries and extractive enterprises to low-cost producers in the periphery. In this way, existing research likely overemphasizes the capacity of “green” investment policy to achieve sustainable outcomes. Our scenarios show that achieving global sustainability and improving global equity will require an impressive level of coordination between the center and periphery, as well as a significant reduction in the rate of growth (“degrowth”) in the center.
•Green growth advocates likely overestimate the benefits of efficient technology.•Domestic improvements in efficiency can increase global pollution.•Sustainability policies must account for inequalities in the globalized economy.•Improving sustainability and equity will require degrowth in the center.
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