Economics of Transition and Institutional Change最新文献

China's Province-managing-county (PMC) reform policy aims to mitigate fiscal stress and augment expenditure autonomy for county governments by eradicating the subordinate fiscal relationship between prefectures and counties. The research augments the time-varying difference-in-difference technique, utilizing a longitudinal dataset at the county level to examine the incentive effects of this reform on economic performance and local government policy decision. The empirical investigation divulges that the local fiscal incentives introduced by this reform through alleviating fiscal stress and providing expenditure autonomy significantly impact economic performance and influence local government policy decisions. The outcomes become more noticeable in economically developed regions and those characterized by enhanced institutional quality and reduced migration barriers. Additionally, the reform encourages counties to adopt a more proactive fiscal policy characterized by increased capital expenditure to promote economic performance while reducing expenditures on social security subsidies and administrative costs affirming that economic performance targets of county governments garbles the composition of public expenditure. These results support positing that a flattened hierarchical structure ameliorates delays in fiscal matters and facilitates communication across various levels of government in the context of improved institutional quality and reduced migration barriers however at the expense of reduced public expenditures. The findings additionally signifies that PMC policy reform become more incentivized in the political competition for economic performance.

The global economy, dominated by the consequences of a disastrous health crisis and international tensions, needs policy support to regain its growth dynamic. To regain an inclusive and sustainable growth dynamic, structural policies of governments are needed to allow a reallocation of resources and to stimulate productivity. International cooperation seems to be necessary and the IMF's contribution could play an important role in promoting reforms. Indeed, in IMF-supported programmes, the conditions for developing countries' transition to liberalization and open markets are often common. We address the question of whether periods of International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality contribute to the promotion of structural reforms in developing countries. Through the entropy balancing method and alternative identification strategies, we show that IMF conditionality programmes promote structural reforms in developing countries. We show that the effect of IMF conditionality can vary depending on the type of conditionality, the type of reform, the time frame and the initial level of structural reforms and can depend on some structural factors including the business cycle, the quality of fiscal and monetary policy, the level of development and the quality of institutions. Furthermore, we show that IMF conditionality can have spillover effects on trading partners and that IMF conditionality programmes that are met tend to have a greater impact on structural reforms. Finally, the effects of adopting reforms under IMF conditionality depend on domestic partisan politics.

This study attempts to answer the question of how strongly the situation in local and neighbouring labour markets affects the level of wages in the local labour market. To answer it we use the wage curve concept. We estimate the wage curve that includes spatial effects and check the stability of the relationships over time. We concentrate on 380 local labour markets in Poland. The research period covers 2005–2021, and spatial panel models are used. Our estimates confirm the existence of the statistically significant and negative relationship between average wages and the situation in the local labour market in Poland with an estimated elasticity of −0.06. Moreover, we confirm the existence of the spatial wage curve in Poland in the 2005–2021 period. Both direct (local) and indirect (spatial) effects are statistically significant and negative on average in the analysed period. The total effects of unemployment rate wages vary from −0.06 to −0.08 depending on the spatial matrix used. Additionally, our research indicates several macroeconomic and institutional factors which are important in shaping wages. Lastly, we find that the elasticity of wages with respect to the unemployment rate is not stable over time. The relationship between unemployment and average wages has strongly weakened.

It's commonly accepted that policymakers should promote women's inclusion for a more inclusive society. Drawing from the literature on democratic and non-democratic routes of elite turnover, this study analyses the effects of elite turnover on women's political empowerment (WPE) by comparing two main routes: political alternation and internal conflict. We measure WPE by using women's political empowerment index (WPEI) from the varieties of democracy database. Based on a large sample of 128 developing countries over the period 1980–2021, the ordinary least square fixed effect and Driscoll-Kraay fixed effects estimations show that elite turnover has a positive and statistically significant impact on WPE. Similar evidence is found when decomposing the WPEI in its sub-indices notably women's political participation, civil society participation, and women's civil liberties sub-indices. This result is also supported by the view that elite turnover increases education, as well as the institutional environment which therefore enables WPE. These results are robust to alternative estimation techniques including the system generalized method of moments and two-stage least squares (GMM and IV 2SLS). Furthermore, the results remain unchanged when considering the majority of the geographical locations of our sample (it is insignificant for the MENA region) and the role of decentraliszation.

The study examines the relationship between regional convergence, economic growth and government hierarchies, with a specific focus on the province managing county (PMC) reform policy in China. The motivation for this research stems from the observation that a substantial portion of the increased inequality in China is attributable to disparities at the county level. This underscores the necessity for policies that address regional inequalities at the county level while simultaneously promoting sustained economic growth. We employ a time-varying quasi-natural experiment to explore how this reform has influenced regional convergence and economic growth within the sample period. The outcomes reveal that the PMC reform had a detrimental impact on regional convergence, hindering it by an average of 2.6%, while economic growth received a modest increase of 0.36%. The study also reveals notable heterogeneity in the effects of the reform, contracted disparities in western region, alongside exhibiting widened disparities and higher growth in eastern & central region. The study also investigates the underlying mechanisms, finding that expenditures on basic provisions reduced, while county revenue and investment expenditures increased following the policy change. It proposes that the increased investment in capital expenditures stimulated economic growth but came at the cost of hindering regional convergence.

Perception-based survey questions have been widely employed to evaluate the business environment. In the World Bank Enterprise Surveys, such questions involve rating an element of the business environment at the end of each section of the survey instrument. They often elicit responses inconsistent with similar questions based on the firm's experience over a specific timeframe. In this study, an experiment is analysed that randomizes the placement order of the perception-based questions either at the end of a section or at the beginning of the survey. Significant question-order effects are uncovered for perceptions of corruption (9%–13% point) and business licencing and permits (7%–8% point) but not the other elements after accounting for a variety of factors; there are no questions-order effects for experience-based questions. The study recommends that analyses in these two areas validate perception-based questions with corresponding experience-based questions. This adds to a larger literature that emphasizes the importance of data quality and its far-reaching economic benefits especially in guiding policy.

We empirically examine the effects of basic research on the technological capabilities of Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms. Using manually collected corporate publication data to measure basic research activities, our findings reveal that firms with higher quantities and quality of basic research tend to engage in innovation activities within their existing knowledge base. These firms explore a broader range of technological fields and demonstrate enhanced capabilities in utilizing and creating knowledge. They also exhibit higher levels of both quantity and quality in their innovation output, which remains stable over time. Moreover, firms with basic research maintain their technological advancement even after facing external sanctions from the U.S. Heterogeneous analysis reveals that the impacts of basic research are more pronounced in mature and larger firms. This study highlights the significance of basic research for corporate technological catch-up efforts in transitioning middle-income countries during the later stages of catch-up.

Most long-term GDP projections in developed countries expect a substantial decline in GDP growth rates over time. The main factor behind it is demographic changes, especially the decreasing working-age population. We argue that these projections do not consider improvements in the quality of the human capital, which may, at least to some extent, mitigate the effects of the negative demographic shock. We start with a simple observation—the skills of younger age cohorts are higher than of older cohorts. Assuming that the current level of skills will be obtained also by the generations which will enter the labour market in the future, the average level of skills among the working-age population will increase. Trying to catch this effect, we use the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies standardised test results to create an aggregate human capital measure, the average skill level of the work force, for 18 European Union countries and project it until 2040. We show that on average at least one sixth of the negative impact of the shrinking of the working-age population can be offset by the increase in the quality of human capital and that this number can increase to three quarters in a less conservative scenario.

This paper utilises the staggered county-level rollout of China's E-commerce entering villages policy to examine the effect of policy-driven platform economy development on local entrepreneurship. Exploiting county-level variations in yearly new business registration with a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that policy-driven platform economy development decreased the number of new business registrations and business entry rates by approximately 4.6% and 0.6%, respectively. The reduction effect is more prominent in business registration in micro-small scale, tertiary industries, eastern regions, and rural areas. Microfinance plays a positive role in this association. Mechanism analysis shows that the platform-driven supply chain transformation could rule out entrepreneurial opportunities, and the platform-enabled gig work opportunities could weaken entrepreneurial motivation. Loss of entrepreneurial opportunities and motivation leads to less entrepreneurship.

This study tries to identify the impact of recent economic turmoil including the COVID-19 pandemic and global financial crisis on a corporation's banking relationships. Using a wide range of unique data from 2008 to 2020 in the Korean loan market, this study compares the two crises periods to the ordinary periods. It is found that the effects of firm-specific factors on banking relationships are strengthened (for loan amount) or weakened (for corporate size and credit rating) during the two crises. However, for the industrial sector a firm belongs to, the interaction effects of the crises show opposite signs.