Economics Archives - Page 8 of 16

The impact of trade opening on developing Asia: Evidence and policy implications

Devashish Mitra / February 26, 2019

Even though in aggregate, trade leads to economic gains, it almost always creates winners and losers. To design appropriate social protection policies, it is important to know the identities of these winners and losers. These policies need to be in place for equity reasons as well as to build and sustain support for free trade.

Economics, Industry and trade, Information and Communications Technology

What can services trade policy do for sustainable development?

Matteo Fiorini / January 9, 2019

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has many services dimensions; improved access to and provision of services are necessary for attaining many of the Sustainable Development Goals. Because of their effects on competition in services markets and the ability of foreign providers to supply services to consumers and firms in developing countries, services trade policies should be considered in the arsenal of policy instruments that can be used in efforts to realize sustainable development objectives.

Economics

Sectoral labor income share dynamics: Cross-country evidence from a new dataset

Yoko Oishi / December 13, 2018

The study of the labor income share plays an important role in understanding the relationship between national income and personal income. However, most of the empirical studies on the labor income share are conducted at the country level, while the limited number of industry-level analyses focus primarily on advanced countries due to limited data availability.

Economics, Information and Communications Technology

Productive services with the help of internet technologies

Erik van der Marel / December 12, 2018

One long-standing concern in the economic field has been that services contribute little to economic development. Services would suffer from a so-called Baumol’s cost disease (Baumol 1967), meaning factors such as labor cannot be easily substituted for more productive factors using existing technologies, as it happens in manufacturing. Over time, this would lead services to become a drag on the economy relative to other more productive industries.

Economics, Industry and trade

Productivity spillovers from services firms in low- and middle-income countries: What is the role of firm characteristics and services liberalization?

Deborah Winkler / November 14, 2018

It has been widely acknowledged that services play an important role for other industries, in particular manufacturing. A study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) finds that services represent at least 30% of the value added in manufacturing exports (OECD 2014). Another study by the World Bank suggests that countries with a higher services content in their downstream economies are also those producing more complex goods (Saez et al. 2015).

Economics

Does skilled emigration matter for real exchange rate volatility?

Alice Ouyang / November 13, 2018

While more than two-thirds of skilled migrants are directed to the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, they come from more than 100 countries. Skilled emigration opens many indirect general equilibrium questions in the source country. Does skilled emigration matter for volatility in real exchange rates?

Economics

Kuznets beyond Kuznets: Structural transformation and income distribution in the era of globalization in Asia

Saumik Paul / November 12, 2018

Inequality persists and so does the global concern over it. Kuznets’ views about the inverted-U relationship between inequality and development and the subsequent transformation process have been under the lenses of researchers for a long time. Kuznets’ theory proposed the inverted-U relationship through (i) a declining share of agriculture in total output and (ii) migration from the low-income agricultural sector to the high-income industrial sector (Kuznets 1955).

Economics, Poverty

Structural transformation, growth, and inequality: Evidence from Viet Nam

Saumik Paul / October 9, 2018

Economic development and growth entail large-scale structural transformation of economies. Many Asian and African economies are now undergoing such structural transformation—typically from agriculture to manufacturing and service sectors. This transformation inevitably involves reallocation of workers from the primary sector to the manufacturing and service sectors. One of the important questions arising is whether such growth led by structural transformation helps the poor. On the one hand, growth may lift people out of poverty and therefore improve living standards for everyone. On the other hand, growth may increase income inequality by benefiting the rich more than the poor.

Economics, Environment, Industry and trade

How does trade openness affect the environmental Kuznets curve?

Zheng Fang / October 4, 2018

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has reformed and opened up its economy for 4 decades. However, accompanying the country’s fast-growing gross domestic product (GDP) and trade sector, environmental degradation, such as deteriorating water quality, land deforestation, pollution, and frequent haze plagues, has attracted a great deal of attention.

High-speed rail investment: A butterfly effect for urban chaos

Economics, Finance sector development, Transport

Spillover and straw effects of high-speed rail

Shreyas P. Bharule / September 20, 2018

On a typical ride on the Tokaido Shinkansen traveling from Shin-Osaka to Tokyo, it does not take a childlike imagination to notice the view from the bullet train of scattered cars, small houses, and baseball fields, gradually changing as the train approaches its destination to packed apartment buildings and tall office towers. This is an important phenomenon of high-speed rail (HSR) implementation, which can be described by the terms “spillover effect” and “straw effect.”