Economic Papers最新文献

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic brought economic recession that affected nations, businesses, and households globally. The severity of this global economic crisis is large and the impact has been asymmetric across socioeconomic groups. We examine the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic across household types using a specially-designed model that combines macro (computable general equilibrium) and micro (heterogenous households) approaches. Computable general equilibrium models are able to capture behavioural changes in macroeconomic and sectoral variables but they often lack the rich distributional detail found in microsimulation models. In this paper, we address this limitation by incorporating 10,046 actual households into a computable general equilibrium model to capture the heterogeneity through which the pandemic may influence household behaviour. We find that the income effects are asymmetric across income groups leading to a slight increase in income inequality. The distributional effects are more progressive for non-wage income sources and uniform for wage income. For younger cohorts, income changes are dominated by employment effects whereas income changes for older cohorts are dominated by changes in capital rentals and government transfers. Spatially, the income effects follow a similar pattern for city and non-city dwellers.

This study examines how Australian public universities have a presence in the various discipline areas recognised by the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Using the prism of public value, we interpret how universities articulate the legitimacy of teaching humanities. Through a careful audit of available secondary data, we advance a typology of humanities education. Our principal finding is that Australia's humanities presence is surprisingly homogenous, with only a few universities proposing a specialised offering. We contend that this creates an environment where universities may be forced to consider abandoning their humanities offerings unless a higher degree of differentiation takes place.

For most of the past decade, unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) have affected the wealth of savers, renters and younger generations. These policies, which enlarge central bank balance sheets – supporting credit expansion in the economy – but have no reliable mechanism for reversal, raise the simultaneous risk of higher inflation and deflation. In this paper, we critique UMPs by drawing on extant literature and empirical data that elucidate the undesired economic effects they cultivate. In particular, we focus on the implications of UMPs on efficient portfolio holdings by proposing an intuitive ex-ante measure of dynamic efficiency loss that has applications for future research.

First Nation community well-being is examined with a lens on the role of geographic location and financial indicators as potential determinants of well-being. Regression analysis makes use of data from the 2016 Canadian Census and First Nation government financial statements to examine six well-being indices for 446 First Nation communities. The results suggest that geographic location is the most critical factor explaining well-being with more remote and northern communities experiencing relatively lower levels of measures of well-being, with the exception of Indigenous language. Numerous well-being distinctions are also identified among the Canadian provinces and regions. The financial indicators assessing transfer revenue from First Nation entities and Nation-owned business activity are found to be positively associated with community well-being. These insights are valuable to public policy-makers and Indigenous leaders, in Canada and other countries, as they shape policy for the benefit of First Nation people.

Australian living standards, relative to the rest of the world, have been highest in eras of economic openness. Openness can also increase equality. Tariffs tend to be regressive, so poor households benefit most from trade liberalisation. In the case of immigration, skilled permanent migrants tend to earn considerably more than the Australian-born population, so any wage pressures are felt at the upper end of the distribution. Foreign investment can also have an equalising effect, by raising wages and lowering the rate of return on domestic capital. An approach of engaged egalitarianism – ensuring that the gains from globalisation are broadly shared – will benefit the most disadvantaged Australians.

Health at birth is an important indicator of human capital development over the life course. This paper uses longitudinal data from the Young Lives survey and employs instrumental variable regression models to estimate the effect of birth weight on cognitive development during childhood in India. We find that a 10 per cent increase in birth weight increases cognitive test scores by 0.11 standard deviations at 5–8 years of age. Low birth weight infants experience a lower test score compared with normal birth weight infants. The positive effect of birth weight on a cognitive test score is larger for girls, children from rural households and those with less educated mothers. Our findings suggest that health policies designed to improve birth weight could improve human capital in resource-poor settings.

Spatial remoteness in the sense of great distances between population centres and limited access to public services is an on-going problem in Australian local government, where there exist large, sparsely populated regions dominated by the 'tyranny of distance'. From a public policy perspective, it is important to understand the impact of remoteness on local authorities. Accordingly, in this paper, we estimate the relationship between remoteness and financial sustainability using a 2014–2018 sample of Australian local governments. In general, we find only limited empirical evidence for a relationship between geographical remoteness and financial sustainability as we have proxied it.

This paper investigates the impact of services FDI inflows on services exports in Newly Industrialised countries (NICs) by employing panel data techniques. FDI inflows in Services are a good tool to connect local services producers to the global value chain and boost services exports. The findings in the paper suggest that FDI inflows in services sector significantly contribute to services exports in NICs. Recently, many NICs countries wanted to strategically shift their reliance from manufacturing export to services export and our findings support this policy shift. Beside FDI inflows in services, increase in global demand for services and improvement of local infrastructure in NICs positively contribute to services exports in NICs.

This study examines the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) and globalisation on economic growth in the (Association of South-East Asian) ASEAN economies from 1999 to 2019 using dynamic panel estimators. Previous literature has shown that ICT and globalisation can impact growth through the role of knowledge dissemination and information. Subsequently, this study examines the moderating impact of globalisation on the relationship between ICT and economic growth. Our results show that both ICT and globalisation are positive to growth. Interestingly, the marginal impact of ICT and globalisation suggests that the marginal impact of ICT is insignificant at low levels of globalisation. Policy implications are discussed.