Economics of Transition and Institutional Change最新文献

In this research, we aim to identify the main factors that explain the occurrence and intensity of armed conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. We extend the conventional linear Bayesian Model Averaging procedure by incorporating conflict intensity, which is measured across a spectrum of violence levels, departing from the typical binary classification of war or peace. We provide strong evidence that not only demographical, institutional, and socio-economic but also environmental factors must be considered when analysing conflict onset and intensity. Notably, institutional variables become more significant when accounting for neighbouring effects. Furthermore, institutional, economic, and historical factors are essential for understanding the role of environmental factors in shaping conflict dynamics. Finally, we show that model averaging predictions for ordered categorical outcomes improve upon the existing out-of-sample conflict prediction techniques.

The dual role of foreign debt as both a stimulus for growth and a driver of fiscal fragility remains a critical challenge for developing economies. Although existing literature emphasises static debt-to-GDP thresholds, this study contributes to a paradigm shift by examining how institutional quality (IQ) and financial development (FD) dynamically moderate the debt–growth nexus across 32 developing Asian countries (1997–2022). Employing advanced second-generation econometric techniques, system GMM, dynamic common correlated effects (DCCE) and dynamic panel threshold models (DPTM), we address the issues of endogeneity, cross-sectional dependence and heterogeneity that have been pervasive in prior studies. Results reveal that foreign debt exerts a baseline adverse effect on economic growth, consistent with the debt overhang hypothesis. However, strong institutional structures and developed financial systems reduce these adverse effects, enabling debt to act as an impetus for growth beyond the identified thresholds. For the full sample, institutional quality and financial development thresholds are 0.93 (on a −2.5 to +2.5 scale) and 38.35% (on a 0 to 100 scale) of GDP, respectively. Disaggregated analyses show that lower-middle-income countries (LMICs) benefit at thresholds of 0.91 (IQ) and 37.33% (FD), whereas upper-middle-income countries (UMICs) require stricter thresholds of 0.85 (IQ) and 55.94% (FD) to leverage debt for innovation-driven growth. These findings challenge the universality of debt-to-GDP ‘danger zones’, emphasising context-dependent thresholds shaped by governance and financial maturity. This study underscores that institutional reforms—such as enhancing transparency, strengthening the rule of law, improving fiscal accountability, deepening financial systems and advancing credit allocation and risk intermediation—are essential prerequisites for the sustainable utilisation of external debt. By bridging institutional economics and debt sustainability frameworks, this work offers policymakers actionable benchmarks to navigate debt's dual role as a developmental tool and fiscal liability in emerging Asia.

This paper examines the impact of rural land reform on rural entrepreneurship, focusing on China's pilot programme for rural land mortgage loans (RLML), which enables rural households to use their land management rights as collateral for financing. Using a unique dataset of newly registered rural businesses from 2011 to 2018, we employ a difference-in-differences approach refined with a ‘selection on observables’ framework. Results show that the RLML pilot significantly increased rural business creation, with a 10% higher growth in pilot counties compared to nonpilot counties. These findings are robust to various checks. Mechanism analysis suggests that the pilot promotes entrepreneurship mainly by easing financial constraints and improving rural infrastructure. However, the effects are localised, with no spillovers to urban areas or migration destinations. The pilot mainly encourages small-scale service businesses rather than large enterprises, reflecting land fragmentation constraints. Stronger rural financial systems, supportive policies and a more developed service sector further enhance the pilot's impact on rural entrepreneurship.

For a long time, selective industrial policy has been widely used by governments around the world as a key tool for economic intervention. But how do these policies affect corporate innovation efficiency? This paper examines the Ten Industry Revitalisation Plan (TIRP), an emergency policy response by the Chinese government to the global economic downturn of 2008, treating it as an exogenous shock. The empirical analysis shows that the TIRP significantly reduced innovation efficiency, with this effect proving persistent even after the policy period ended. Mechanism analysis reveals that the policy decreased treated firm innovation efficiency by increasing government subsidies, impairing investment efficiency and exacerbating capital misallocation. Further investigation indicates that the TIRP has a stronger pushing-up effect on the innovative capital input of firms state-owned and firms with low productivity and diverts innovation resources to less productive or innovative firms, yielding nonachievement of the expected innovation outcomes. This study concludes that selective industrial policy poses a significant barrier to improving innovation efficiency, offering valuable insights for enhancing economic innovation performance.

Developing economies are frequently caught in low-growth traps. This paper attempts to test whether a significant growth up-break, known popularly in the literature as growth accelerations, can enable them to break out of such traps. A three-step process is adopted to test this hypothesis. The first step involves identifying economies caught in low-growth traps using the convergence club framework. The second step identifies all growth transitions, that is, growth accelerations and slowdowns, exhibited by these economies. The third step investigates whether having a growth acceleration is positively correlated with converging to a higher-performing growth club, controlling for initial conditions and growth slowdowns. Using this three-step process and using data from subnational regions of India, we next test our hypothesis. Our results show that growth accelerations have indeed played a significant role in club formation in India, enabling subnational regions with such accelerations to break into higher-growth convergence clubs. Finally, drawing on the growth transition literature, our analysis suggests policy strategies for low-growth economies that can help them to ignite growth accelerations and escape to higher-performing clubs.

Studies of the impact of access to microfinance almost exclusively focus on assessing the microeconomic effects of the entry of microfinance institutions. We measure the effect of the 2011 closure of the entire nonbank microfinance sector in Uzbekistan. Using two waves of a unique household survey, we estimate the impact on four business (size of business, log of business profit, business ownership of respondent and log of business assets) and four household consumption (log of monthly household expenditures per capita, log of monthly household income per capita, log of household assets per capita, log of spending on housing per capita) outcomes using a modified difference-in-difference approach. We find that it is mostly the borrowers who are in the middle of the wealth distribution that were affected by the closure, in contrast to prevailing claims in the literature pointing to ultra-poor borrowers. We also document the heterogeneity of the impact affecting mainly borrowers with vocational and higher education, households with medium-level wealth and the self-employed. Some of our key results are in contrast with existing literature. Given that access to finance is vital for low-income households and that microfinance crises adversely affect both borrowers and nonborrowers, we argue it is important to focus on the diagnostics and prevention of potential future crises in the sector.

Existing studies argue that China's dual-track approach to economic reforms offers lessons for other transition economies. Ignoring the piecemeal nature of the track-merging process, the literature has not supported this theory empirically. We identify the impacts of China's piecemeal unification of the dual-track job-assignment system on entrepreneurship, arriving at three conclusions. First, the partial unification of the system has played as important a role as full unification in relaxing constraints on college graduates' entrepreneurship incentives. Second, the system encourages college graduates to take planned-track jobs first and then traps them on the planned track through career-path dependence, explaining the mechanism. Third, with respect to the three types of planned-track jobs, the piecemeal merging completely eliminates bias towards college graduates associated with jobs in state-owned enterprises and weakens their career-path dependence while only partially correcting for bias associated with government and institute jobs without affecting career-path dependence in those cases.