Three Essays On Factors That Boost Development

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Three Essays On Factors That Boost Development

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Author : Adrian Scutaru
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2019

Three Essays On Factors That Boost Development written by Adrian Scutaru and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019 with Economic assistance categories.

Existing literature finds conflicting results in the relationship between economic development and external assistance (aid). This analysis researches if there is any link between these variables by assessing the impact of a major change in aid pattern given to Nigeria. The key motivation is that a significant change in the trend of development assistance in comparison to previous periods and to other countries should have visible effects on development. Using the synthetic control methodology and the estimation techniques commonly found in the literature, this paper finds that a positive relationship. The results from this research support the existing literature advocating for aid continuation. Other estimation techniques lead to inconclusive results, as they capture an average effect across countries. Synthetic control methodology provides a better illustration of the effect of assistance on economic development over time to a specific country. The link between external financing and economic development is highly debated. External financing may provide companies with the necessary financial means needed during an economic downturn. However, it may increase firms' indebtedness and probability of failure. This is especially important in the short-run, during an economic crisis, where the effects of access to finance may be exacerbated. This research assesses this topic in two chapters.Firstly, the paper analyzes the impacts of having a bank loan by using micro data from Moldova and determining if external financing affects the survival rates of firms. The chapter finds that, on average, enterprises that report repaying external loans are less likely to exit. The result is robust, even if self-selection into loans is accounted for. Secondly, this research uses regional-level data and analyzes if regions with higher value-added of the financial sector experienced an increase in net number of job and net employment during the Great Recession. The paper finds positive impact on employment and number of firms, regardless their size. No evidence of negative effects of finance is observed.

Three Essays On The Macroeconomics Of Human Capital And Growth

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Author : Mercy Laita Palamuleni
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2014

Three Essays On The Macroeconomics Of Human Capital And Growth written by Mercy Laita Palamuleni and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014 with categories.

This dissertation encompasses three essays on the macroeconomics of human capital and economic growth. Below are the individual abstracts for each essay. Essay 1: Does Public Education Spending Increase Human Capital? I investigate the effect of public education spending on the quality of human capital as measured by international student test scores in science and mathematics, conditional on the efficiency of a country's governance. Combining World Bank country level data on government efficiency with rich micro data from the OECD PISA-2009, I estimate a human capital production function from student level data. Prior work suggests that public education expenditures are inconsequential for student achievement. I illustrate that public education spending matters for student test scores when one uses student level data instead of aggregate country level data. These results are robust to controlling for governance measures such as corruption control and regulatory quality. An implication is that less efficient government does not preclude improving test scores through education spending. Essay 2: Inequality of Opportunity in Education: International Evidence from PISA. I provide lower-bound estimates of inequality of opportunity in education (IEO) using micro-data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The measure represents variation in student mathematics test scores which can be explained by predetermined circumstances (including parental education, gender, and additional community variables). I explore the heterogeneity of the measure at the top and bottom of the test score distribution, and demonstrate that IEO accounts for 10 percent of the variation in test scores for students at the top and bottom of the test score distribution. Using this inequality measure I establish three main conclusions. (1) IEO decreases overall in response to an increase in preprimary enrollment rates. An implication here is that improvements in early childhood education might mitigate the effects of IEO factors for some students. (2) IEO increases in a manner which relates to overall inequality. This indicates the possibility of a more general persistence to inequality factors. An implication is that equity-based education policies can be a key tool for reducing income inequality. (3) There is evidence of an equity-efficiency tradeoff in education. An implication here is that public education policies aimed at reducing IEO might hinder overall education efficiency, in that it decreases academic achievement for some groups of students. Essay 3: Public Education Spending and Economic Growth: The Role of Governance. Although the theoretical literature often connects public education spending to growth, individual empirical findings sometimes conflict. In this paper I propose that inefficiencies in public education spending might explain these inconsistencies. Using a dataset from both developed and developing countries observed over the period of 1995 to 2010, I demonstrate that the efficiency of public education spending on growth depends on a country's level and quality of governance. I also find evidence that increasing educational spending is associated with higher economic growth only in countries that are less corrupt. These findings have important implications for the formation of effective education policies in developing countries. They illustrate that efficient public education spending augments economic growth in a way that increased spending alone does not match.

Three Essays In Development Economics

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Author : Derek Rice
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2018

Three Essays In Development Economics written by Derek Rice and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018 with categories.

This dissertation contains three essays in the economics of development. The first essay investigates the effects of the decentralization of governance over education to communities in terms of individual education outcomes. The next essay relates to the first by exploring the factors that drive communities to adopt decentralized governance, including forms of decentralized governance over education. The last essay returns to the topic of education by examining a policy aimed at decreasing the costs of post-secondary education for a minority group. Each essay probes these topics within the context of First Nations in Canada. The first essay examines the substantial impacts of education decentralization on high school attendance and completion through the analysis of First Nation education self-government agreements in Canada. These agreements are important institutional arrangements that transfer the authority over education from the federal government to First Nations. I exploit confidential microdata and exogenous variation in the implementation of education self-government agreements to perform the analysis. My results indicate that self-government agreements focused exclusively on education increase high school attendance by 5 to 9 percentage points and high school completion by 3 to 5 percentage points. However, the effects on high school completion rates under multi-sectoral self-government agreements implemented together with comprehensive land claim agreements and for self-government agreements that focus on education alone differ dramatically for women and men. High school completion improves by 8 to 11 percentage points for women, but drops by a staggering 17 to 25 percentage points for men. These results have important policy implications for education decentralization in general, along with implications for the particular case of First Nation education self-governance in Canada. The second essay identifies the determinants of decentralized governance by exploring the First Nation self-government agreement claim and implementation processes. I use a novel dataset on self-government agreements and confidential microdata to perform the analysis. My results support the notion that we can treat self-government treatment variables as exogenous, when controlling for reserve fixed effects. This is not an onerous condition to impose. Specifically, I do not find any factors of economic or statistical significance for claims for my richest and most-preferred specification, which includes controlling for reserve fixed effects. Contrary to the results for claims, I find that education and income are important factors for implementation, but only conditional on a reserve having previously made a claim. However, this significance disappears, once I relax this condition and compare the determinants of implementation against reserves that may or may not have made a claim. The third essay examines the substantial impacts of a targeted policy that provides postsecondary tuition and living expense subsidies for Aboriginal Canadians. To identify the effects of the policy, I exploit a reform of the policy's eligibility requirements in 1985 that lead to a large increase in the number of individuals with access to the subsidies. My results indicate that the reform lead to economically and statistically significant increases in the likelihood of attaining any post-secondary education for a group of women whose eligibility was particularly targeted by the reform and for women generally. These increases range from about 4 to 7 percentage points. The effects for men are positive, but much smaller and not significant.

Three Essays On Economic Growth And Real Exchange Rate

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Author : Sung Jin Kang
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 1998

Three Essays On Economic Growth And Real Exchange Rate written by Sung Jin Kang and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1998 with Developing countries categories.

Three Essays On Economic Structure And Resource Allocation

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Author : Chun Kei Tsang
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2020

Three Essays On Economic Structure And Resource Allocation written by Chun Kei Tsang and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020 with China categories.

This thesis aims at studying the issues of economic structure and resource allocation in development. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to economic development and gives an overview of this thesis. Chapter 2 reviews some theories and models about economic structure and structural change and points out that resource allocation is a critical factor in changing the economic structure. Five characteristics of economic structure and structural change are summarized. Essay 1 in Chapter 3 investigates the relationship between competitiveness and economic growth. Adopting the Global Competitiveness Index to represent competitiveness, we empirically show that there is a two-way causal relationship between competitiveness and economic growth. We further identify that the relationship between competitiveness and economic growth change in different development stages. Specifically, better competitiveness can enhance economic growth but not vice versa in developing countries. We therefore relate such a difference to the ability to transform resources into competitiveness. This is fundamentally a question about resource allocation. Finally, we link structural change with economic growth and show that enhancing competitiveness is equivalent to improving the capacity to change the economic structure. Essay 2 in Chapter 4 studies the impacts of sub-optimal resource allocation on economic growth by applying a new model to the case of the effectiveness of official development assistance (ODA). This new model analyzes economic growth through structural change by the difference between the observed and optimal levels of competitiveness. Regarding the positive and negative impacts of foreign aid on the receiving country in the literature, we show that the net impact of ODA depends on the value of bias caused by inefficient allocation of resources and the adoption of a biased value system. As a result, both positive and negative views of ODA in the literature are somewhat correct. In principle, ODA does work in the sense of helping needy countries providing they can allocate such additional resources efficiently. The cruel truth is that most receivers of ODA are unable to transform these resources to productive uses and even lower their economic growth. The development aid country donors or global institutions may therefore have to review their existing policy for granting aid.Essay 3 in Chapter 5 introduces a new framework to study two important structural issues in China: regional fragmentation and ownership distortion. We extend the output-oriented structural efficiency measure to include subgroups to evaluate potential gains of improving resource allocation within and among subgroups. The new framework is then applied to China’s industrial sector. Applying our new method for policymaking, the empirical results advocate prioritizing ownership reform over regional reform in China. Specifically, by improving resource allocation among different ownerships, outputs of the whole industrial sector can be increased by 21% of the observed level. In contrast, the potential gains of reallocating resources between western and non-western regions are less than 1%. Such a conclusion cannot be drawn from other existing models of efficiency analysis. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes the whole thesis.

Three Essays On Latin American Development Issues

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Author : Pablo Fajnzylber
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 1998

Three Essays On Latin American Development Issues written by Pablo Fajnzylber and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1998 with Homicide categories.

Essays On Capital Accumulation Economic Growth Income Inequality And Unemployment

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Author : Iqtiaruddin Md Mamun
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2014

Essays On Capital Accumulation Economic Growth Income Inequality And Unemployment written by Iqtiaruddin Md Mamun and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014 with categories.

The central theme of this thesis is capital accumulation. The thesis reports that increase in economic growth rate and reduction in income inequality boosts capital accumulation that in turn reduces unemployment. Three essays constitute the thesis. The first essay investigates whether saving has been driven by growth or gowth has been driven by saving using data of Asian Miracle Economies (AME) - India, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan - over the period 1870-2011.The second essay explores the effect of income inequality on capital accumulation using the data of 20 OECD countries - Canada, USA, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and UK - over the period 1870-2011. The effect of capital accumulation on unemployment in 21 OECD countries - Canada, USA, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and UK - has been explored in the third essay. Following the neoclassical revival some economists attribute the amazing productivity growth rate in Asian Miracle Economies (AME) to capital accumulation while assign the backseat to the technological progress - the so called Krugman-Young hypothesis in which saving and schooling are independent of growth. However such assumption is questionable as from the perspective of growth accounting using Cobb-Douglas production function, theories of saving and the scenario that in AMEs prior to WWII living standard was close to subsistence level thus leaving less opportunity of saving and only after WWII with the increase in living standard financial saving and education increase it may be shown that saving and education are not exogenous and independent of growth. The first essay addresses this endogeneity and applying a two-way identification strategy and unique data covering the period 1870-2011 for the AMEs finds that financial saving as well as education comes from productivity growth, financial saving has no significant effect on growth but growth is positively related to the change in educational attainment. These results are robust to choice of instrument set, productivity measurement, the choice of growth model, measurement of saving, inclusion of covariates, and to the choice of estimation period. The essay contributes to the literature explaining that productivity growth drives fixed and human capital accumulation as in the growth controversy it has never been asked and the factor accumulation hypothesis never explains from where the savings come and very little work, if any, has investigated whether growth influences education. The findings of the existing empirical literature suggest that the effect of income inequality on savings is either positive or insignificant. The reason for such findings of the existing empirical literature may be that in estimating the coefficient of income inequality on savings the positive feed-back effect from savings to income inequality has not been dealt with adequately. The second essay takes this endogeneity arising from positive feed-back effect of savings to income inequality in to consideration and applies a two-way identification strategy and unique data covering the period 1870-2011 for 20 OECD countries andfinds that income inequality affects savings negatively. The finding is robust to variation in estimation periods, different measures of saving and inequality and the inclusion of important confounding variables such as financial development, growth and education. Following the seminal work of Layard, Nickell, and Jackman (2005) that propounds no linkage between capital accumulation and unemployment based on the assumption of elasticity of substitution between capital and labour equals unity the role of capital accumulation has been deemphasized for long in explaining unemployment. And the emphasis was on labour market deregulation for reducing unemployment as labour market rigidities arising from trade union power; labour taxes, generous welfare benefits, strict employment protection, and other institutional factors were considered to be the main determinants of unemployment. The third essay using the data for the largest number of countries over the longest period of time - 21 OECD countries over the period 1870-2011- with wage push and aggregate demand factors being taken in to account finds that capital accumulation is important in reducing OECD unemployment.

Three Essays On Economic Growth And Human Welfare

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Author : Prodyumna Goutam
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2018

Three Essays On Economic Growth And Human Welfare written by Prodyumna Goutam and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018 with Bangladesh categories.

There is increasing recognition of the influence of macroeconomic factors on individual welfare. This represents a shift in the traditional focus of policy analysis, which has largely focused on evaluating the impact of micro level interventions. This dissertation examines this link through three papers. The first paper examines the impact of export growth in Bangladesh on the health of children. Using information on the production network of industries in the country, coupled with district-level employment characteristics, the analysis constructs a gender disaggregated, district-level measure of export exposure. Using variation in this measure across districts and over time, the study analyzes the impact of female-specific export exposure on the incidence of childhood health ailments like diarrhea, acute respiratory infection, and fever. The results indicate that export exposure causes a reduction in the incidence of childhood illness. In addition, export exposure leads to an increase in autonomous decision-making as it relates to healthcare decisions, presenting a possible mechanism underlying the observed health results. Informal employment accounts for the majority of employment in many developing countries, yet its relevance to growth, and its links to the formal sector, remain poorly understood. The second paper of the dissertation examines the link between export growth and informality, also in Bangladesh. In particular, it examines the impact of export-induced demand on four types employment: formal, casual, unpaid, and self. The results suggest that trade triggers an immediate increase in both formal and casual employment, as well as a longer-run increase in self employment. Thus, response to growth opportunities such as trade is not limited to formal employment, and a more nuanced understanding of informality in the growth process is needed. A large literature in economics and epidemiology points to the importance of economic conditions in childhood on health later in life. The final paper of the dissertation analyzes the impact of macroeconomic conditions prevailing around the time of birth (measured using the growth rate of state-wise per capita income) on health in adulthood using the Health and Retirement Study. Health is measured using a variety of biomarker indicators of cardiovascular, metabolic, and inflammation risk. Overall, the analysis finds no impact of economic conditions at birth on health in adulthood.

Three Essays In Development And Health Economics

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Author : Shamma Adeeb Alam
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2014

Three Essays In Development And Health Economics written by Shamma Adeeb Alam and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014 with categories.

This dissertation is on three essays on issues in development and health economics. In these essays, I try to examine how different health issues affect economic outcomes and vice versa. I examine individual and household responses to different economic and health issues in Bangladesh and Tanzania. In the first two chapters, I examine how different shocks affect family's fertility decisions and decision to make investments on their children in Tanzania. In the third chapter, I examine how information regarding dangers of pesticide affects the likelihood of pesticide exposure for farmers in Bangladesh. In the first chapter, I examine how parental illness affects child labor and schooling outcomes using panel data from Tanzania. Prior literature provides limited empirical evidence on the impact of parental illness on child labor and schooling outcomes. I examine if parental illness causes households to reallocate children's time from school to work. I find that a father's illness hinders child schooling by decreasing attendance and hours spent in school. These effects on schooling are substantially greater for severe illnesses. There is also evidence that a father's illness has long-term impact on child education, as it decreases their likelihood of completing primary school and leads to fewer total years of schooling. However, a father's illness has no effect on child labor. In contrast, a mother's illness does not affect child education, but does cause a small increase in children's work. Surprisingly, parental illness does not have a differential impact by children's gender. Additionally, illness of other household members, such as grandparents, adult siblings, and child siblings, has no effect on children's schooling. Thus, overall, there is no evidence that parental illness or illness of other household members affects children's schooling through increased child labor. Instead, the results suggest that only illness of fathers, who are typically the primary income earners in Tanzanian households, reduces household income and severely decreases the family's ability to afford child education. In the second chapter, which is a joint work with Claus Portner, we examine the relationship between household income shocks and fertility decisions. Using panel data from Tanzania, we estimate the impact of agricultural shocks on contraception use, pregnancy, and the likelihood of childbirth. To account for unobserved household characteristics that potentially affect both shocks and fertility decisions we employ a fixed effects model. Households significantly increase their contraception use in response to income shocks from crop loss. Furthermore, pregnancies and childbirth are significantly delayed for households experiencing a crop shock. We argue that these changes in behavior are the result of deliberate decisions of the households rather than income shocks' effects on other factors that in influence fertility, such as women's health status, the absence or migration of spouse, and dissolution of partnerships. In the third chapter, which is a joint work with Hendrik Wolff, we examine how different information sources influence precautionary behavior when using pesticide and likelihood of pesticide exposure. Modern agriculture heavily depends on the use of pesticides and has successfully increased productivity, but also led to increasing concerns regarding farmers' health. Mishandling of pesticides continues to pose a serious health problem for farmers especially in developing countries. This chapter describes supply side and demand side regulations for pesticide handling, health outcomes and adoption of health technologies using a detailed household level dataset from Bangladesh. The dataset is unique as it spans the chain from: `where do farmers obtain information from', `which precautionary tools (i.e. masks, gloves) are used' and `what are subsequent health outcomes after spraying'. Previous studies hypothesized that pesticide sellers in developing countries misguide farmers regarding pesticide use. On the other hand, government field extension workers reduce pesticide exposure by training farmers in Integrated Pest Management (IPM) techniques. In our dataset we cannot confirm these hypotheses. In contrast, we find that those famers that use information from pesticide sellers increase the adoption of precautionary tools. These same farmers also enjoy subsequently improved health outcomes. Further, our results show that the agricultural extension program does not significantly impact technology adoption or health. We find instead evidence of social learning as peer farmers, especially those trained in handling pesticides, have a substantial influence. We conclude with policy recommendations.

Three Essays In Economic Development

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Author : Paul Conal Winters
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 1996

Three Essays In Economic Development written by Paul Conal Winters and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1996 with Agriculture categories.