ECONOMIC AFFAIRS最新文献

This article explores how the cypherpunk movement – advocating privacy, digital sovereignty, and digital decentralisation – shaped modern economic paradigms, particularly cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance. Originating in the late twentieth century, its principles laid the groundwork for blockchain technologies and challenged state-centric monetary systems. The analysis connects cypherpunk ideology to historical debates on money and governance, evaluating its implications for the contemporary institutional framework. By tracing the evolution of these ideas, the study underscores their enduring influence on twenty-first century economic practices, illustrating how decentralised systems redefine agency and accountability in economic interactions.

We introduce a novel state-level measure of lockdown regulatory freedom to study the severity of lockdowns for Brazilian states and its determinants. Our main results show that lockdown policies were not consistently determined by any health-related variable, such as the number of doctors, hospital beds, the share of the population with private health insurance, or the share of the population 65 years of age and older or Covid-19 cases and deaths. Indeed, the only variable consistently related to lockdown policies in all specifications and robustness checks was the state's share of votes for the right-wing candidate. A one standard deviation increase in the share of votes for the right-wing candidate is associated with a 0.6–0.87 standard deviation increase in lockdown stringency. Our results highlight the importance of political economy considerations in explaining the incentives of policymakers when designing health policies.

This article analyses the factors underlying the recent depreciation of the yen. Using an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, I find that approximately half of the decline in the yen's exchange rate against the dollar from the end of 2020 to mid-2024 can be attributed to portfolio balance effects. Income disparity and interest rate differentials between the US and Japan have also contributed to the yen's weakening. This suggests the need for a shift in Japan's economic policy, which should focus on expanding domestic demand and easing pressure on the yen's depreciation.

This article surveys the literature on the relationship between banking development and economic growth, with particular attention given to the role of the efficiency (quality) dimension of banking development. Overlooking banking efficiency in explaining economic growth may lead to serious omitted variable bias. However, incorporating banking efficiency into growth models has proved to be a challenging task. There is no agreement in the literature on how to define, measure, and evaluate banking efficiency. In addition, most studies focus on transformation efficiency inside banks and overlook efficiency in the process of credit allocation.

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was first published on the cusp of the American Revolution in the turbulent spring of 1776. In his discussion of the current relationship between Great Britain and her American colonies, Smith expresses optimism regarding the future success of America despite the fact she had not yet declared independence. The root of this optimism can be traced to the concurrence between the ‘new form of government’ that Smith saw the colonists to be ‘employed in contriving’ and Smith's own notions regarding good governance. The American colonies had already governed themselves according to principles shared by Smith and were now on the verge of constructing a new government based on those principles, giving Smith reason to be optimistic about their future as an independent nation.