Suchergebnisse

Coordenadas : O11 48'-E2 01'/N43 40'-N36 00'. Meridiano de París ; Escala gráfica además en leguas españolas, portuguesas

Coordenadas : O11 40'-E0 25'/N44 20'-N35 50'. Meridiano de París ; Relieve : sombreado ; Inserta mapa 'Lignes de Torres - Védras 1810. - Escala 1:588235

Coordenadas : O11 48'-E2 01'/N43 40'-N36 00'. Meridiano de París ; Escala gráfica además en leguas españolas, portuguesas ; Copia digital . España : Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Subdirección General de Coordinación Bibliotecaria, 2018

The last 20 years were a period of major political, economic, social, and institutional reform in Brazil. In the first half of the 1990s, reformers opened the economy to foreign trade and both direct and portfolio investment, sold off a number of large and traditional state-owned enterprises, discontinued myriad price and output regulations, and gradually erected a new regulatory framework. Except for trade liberalization, which was largely completed by the mid-1990s, reforms accelerated after the Real Plan. The consolidation of price stability and market-oriented reforms, in turn, required a number of institutional changes including the strengthening and/or creation of competition and regulatory agencies, and the enactment of new legislation to promote fiscal discipline, improve regulation of financial markets, and protect consumers. This paper focuses on this gradual, piecemeal, loosely coordinated process of partial state retrenchment. The analysis focuses especially on the relative roles of ideology, policy packaging, and pragmatism in advancing reforms; how well reform implementation went; to what extent their results were as expected; and whether state retrenchment is here to stay. We argue that pragmatism - understood as a conduct that emphasizes practicality and stresses practical consequences as constituting the essential criterion in determining action - has been the main driving force behind reforms. In contrast to other Latin American countries, ideology and politics have played a lesser role in fostering market reforms in Brazil. In particular, although reforms were often bundled together with other urgent or popular policies, to facilitate their approval, they were not enacted as a coherent, overall change in development strategy, and more as a piecemeal, flexible, mostly disconnected reform process. Pragmatism led to market reforms that, as a rule, were gradual, usually incomplete and only loosely coordinated with one another. Although these characteristics sometimes facilitated reform politics - opening windows of opportunity and reducing political opposition - they also reduced the efficacy of reforms. In particular, pragmatism was insufficient to generate complementary, second-generation reforms. The overall impact of reforms has not been significant in Brazil, with only a marginal acceleration in GDP growth, due entirely to higher productivity growth. To the extent that pragmatism reflects an approach in which the end results are the main justification for reform, the failure to spur growth after over a decade of reforms puts their sustainability at risk.

Coordenadas : O11 40'-E0 25'/N44 20'-N35 50'. Meridiano de París ; Relieve : sombreado ; Inserta mapa 'Lignes de Torres - Védras 1810. - Escala 1:588235 ; Copia digital . España : Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Subdirección General de Coordinación Bibliotecaria, 2010

Using a panel fixed effects model for a large sample of countries, we examine how financial development, financial liberalization and banking crises are related to income inequality. Our results suggest that all finance variables increase income inequality. In addition, the impact of financial liberalization on inequality seems to be conditioned by the level of financial development. There is evidence that the quality of political institutions conditions the impact of finance on income inequality, in contrast to the quality of economic institutions. Our main finding is robust for using random effects, cross-country regressions and legal origin as instrument for financial development.

Civil conflicts undergo cycles of escalation. Beginning with riots, purges, and other violent acts of aggression, they escalate further and often culminate in outright civil war. This paper studies the effects of foreign aid on the escalation and de-escalation of conflict. We make three major contributions. First, we combine data on civil wars with data on low level conflicts in a new ordinal measure that captures the two-sided nature of conflict. Second, we study the effect of development aid on escalation and de-escalation. This allows us to give a rich description of how conflicts evolve dynamically, and to highlight the different roles played by bilateral aid in these transitions. We stress that low level conflicts matter since they are a violent expression of discontent over the distribution of rents (including aid) or of repression by the state. Third, we employ a new instrumental variable, which we then use to predict bilateral aid of DAC donor countries to 125 recipient countries over the period of 1975 to 2010. This solves the endogeneity concerns which have so far plagued the aid-conflict relationship. Our results show that the effect of foreign aid on the various transition probabilities is heterogeneous and sometimes very large. For example, receiving bilateral aid raises the chances of escalating from peace to small conflict, and from small conflict to armed conflict, but does not affect the transition from peace to civil war. Our main findings are robust to different estimation methods, controls and measures of conflict or foreign aid.

We present a novel approach for measuring democracy based on Support Vector Machines, a mathematical algorithm for pattern recognition. The Support Vector Machines Democracy Index (SVMDI) is continuous on the 0-1-interval and enables very detailed and sensitive measurement of democracy for 185 countries in the period between 1981 and 2011. Application of the SVMDI highlights a robust positive relationship between democracy and economic growth. We argue that the ambiguity in recent studies mainly originates from the lack of sensitivity of traditional democracy indicators. Analyzing transmission channels through which democracy exerts its influence on growth, we conclude that democratic countries have better educated populations, higher investment shares, and lower fertility rates, but not necessarily higher levels of redistribution.

Debt relief has been an instrument of development cooperation for almost 50 years. Its track record is mixed at best, and its drivers were mainly political during its practice. However, in the early 2000s, the HIPC Initiative increased the economic rationality remarkably, because LDCs had to deliver before they were relieved from their debt. Since then, debt as well as its relief has fallen significantly. In addition, the recipient countries have changed, more fragile countries are among the top recipients. We discuss the hypothesis that debt relief has changed another time; it nowadays seems to be – at least partly – a diplomatic instrument. We find that there is no significant improvement of governance quality within our sample of developing countries. Our regression results show that improvements in governance quality lead to higher level of debt forgiveness in 2000-2004 but not in the subsequent periods. Instead, we find that debt relief is determined by governmental spending behavior of the creditor country, which in turn can be explained by the fractionalization of the government. The analysis uses data from 1995 to 2013 and applies a 2-Step-Heckman filter model and a panel model with fixed country and year effects.

We use an excludable instrument to test the effect of foreign aid on economic growth, in a sample of 73 countries over the 1966-2009 period. We interact donors legislature fractionalization with a recipient country s probability to receive aid. The results show fractionalization to increase donors aid budgets, representing the over-time variation of our instrument, while the probability to receive aid introduces variation across recipient countries. Controlling for country- and period-specific effects that absorb the levels of the interacted variables, the interaction provides a powerful and excludable instrument. Making use of this instrument, our results show that aid increases growth.

We investigate the effects of short-term political motivations on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Donor countries political motives might reduce the effectiveness of conditionality, channel aid to inferior projects, reduce the aid bureaucracy s effort, and change the power structure in the recipient country. We investigate whether geopolitical motives matter by testing whether the effect of aid on economic growth is reduced by the share of years a country has served on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in the period the aid has been committed, which provides quasi-random variation in commitments. Our results show that the effect of aid on growth is significantly lower when aid has been granted for political reasons. We derive two conclusions from this. First, short-term political favoritism reduces growth. Second, political interest variables are invalid instruments for aid, raising doubts about a large number of results in the aid effectiveness literature.

The main goal of the paper is to show the application of the projection method as a tool for the analysis of transitional dynamics of endogenous growth models, the analysis which is very often omitted in common literature on the topic. The application of the method is demonstrated on an endogenous growth model with human capital accumulation and government sector. We analyze the long-run (steady states) and the short-run effects (transitional dynamics) of different fiscal policies. The transitional dynamics of the competitive equilibrium and the social optimum economies are compared. It is shown that when the economy starts with relatively abundant physical capital it is optimal to decrease its level very rapidly even at the cost of a big decline of consumption for a period of time. The introduction of education subsidies can bring the economy closer to the optimum and, therefore, improve the welfare of the society. ; Im Mittelpunkt des Papiers steht eine Anwendung der projection method am Beispiel eines endogenen Wachstumsmodelles mit Staatssektor und Humankapitalakkumulation. Bei der projection method handelt es sich um ein Instrument zur Analyse der Anpassungsdynamik in endogenen Wachstumsmodellen. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden sowohl die Eigenschaften der langfristigen Gleichgewichtsbeziehungen als auch die kurzfristige Anpassungsdynamik unter Wettbewerbsbedingungen und unter Einbeziehung externer Effekte studiert. Es zeigt sich, daß die Einführung von Ausbildungssubventionen im Falle einer an physischem Kapital reichen Volkswirtschaft die Wohlfahrt derselben unter bestimmten Bedingungen erhöht.