International Advances in Economic Research最新文献

This paper examines the impact of foreign capital formation on economic growth in a simple modified model of endogenous growth. The model explicitly develops how proportional taxes on income can be used to finance government expenditures to attract foreign capital to the host nation. Another contribution of the model stems from showing how conditional convergence can be retained in the endogenous case via a hybrid model that includes foreign capital. The paper motivates the presentation of the model by discussing the potential positive (and negative) effects of inward foreign direct investment to developing economies and develops the supply and demand sides of the simple modified growth model. Also, the paper presents the transition dynamics towards the steady-state level of income under exogenous and endogenous growth and shows how conditional convergence can be retained in the hybrid model via a modified production function that converges asymptotically to the linear AK form, where A is a positive constant and K is physical capital. The paper suggests how the modified model can be used to motivate future empirical research, provided appropriate proxies are found for the variables and parameters of interest.

This paper uses fractional integration and cointegration methods to analyze the long-run relationship between loans to non-financial corporations, real gross domestic product, real gross fixed capital formation, the cost of borrowing differential between long- and short-term rates, and a proxy for the cost of debt, securities, and equity issuance. The analysis includes four Eurozone countries, namely Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, and spans the most recent decades. More precisely, fractional integration and cointegration models are estimated to investigate the persistence of the series as well as their long-run relationships and short-run dynamics using both unrestricted and restricted specifications. The univariate results are heterogeneous, the highest degrees of integration being found in the case of loans to non-financial corporations, whilst the multivariate ones provide evidence of a single fractional cointegration vector as well as of a lower adjustment speed to the long-run equilibrium compared to previous studies in all four countries. Moreover, both the short- and long-run response of loans to exogenous shocks to real gross domestic product and the cost of borrowing differentials differs across countries because of country-specific factors.

The empirical literature on Kaldor’s laws includes very few studies applied to the Middle East and North Africa. Those that examine the role of manufacturing in the growth process in the context of the region are almost nonexistent. This paper fills the gap and investigates the role of manufacturing growth in selected Middle Eastern and North African countries using panel data analysis from 2007 to 2019. The study tests Kaldor’s three laws to identify the role of manufacturing in economic growth. The first law of Kaldor indicates that the growth rate of the manufacturing sector is strongly and positively related to the growth rate of the economy. The second law of Kaldor, also known as the Kaldor-Verdoorn law, shows the relationship between productivity in manufacturing and manufacturing output. The third law states that a rise in overall productivity in an economy has a positive effect on output in manufacturing. Using data from the World Development Indicators, an empirical analysis using the system generalized method of moments is performed in a sample of 13 Middle Eastern and North African countries. The results provide strong support for the three laws in the Middle East and North Africa, demonstrating that output growth in the manufacturing sector is critical for generating economic growth and increasing productivity.

This study applies multilevel modelling to the analysis of trade flows. This methodology can complement the use of the standard gravity equation in addressing the influence of geographical distance on the impact of trade agreements on bilateral trade (the natural-partner hypothesis). The analysis suggests that the simplest, most obvious, and best way to nest country pairs with international trade data is by distance. To this end, a sample of 69 countries with data on domestic flows over the period 1986–2016 was used. This sample accounts for around 85% of world trade data. The estimations suggest that the pro-trade effects of preferential trade agreements decrease with distance to trade partners, while this does not occur with the multilateral trading system. What is more interesting is that the former result only holds for the preferential trade agreements involving goods, which supports the natural-trading partner hypothesis, but not for those that include services. In the latter case, the impact increases with distance. This suggests that deeper preferential trade agreements reduce the cost of distance as a barrier to trade, which probably reflects cultural (regulation) distance.

There is a consensus that stock markets are procyclical. However, answers to some important questions remain unclear. Do stock markets lead or lag business cycles? More interestingly, what is the duration with which they lead or lag them? This study uses different time-series filters and time-difference analysis to answer these questions by examining the dynamic interactions between three major stock indices and key macroeconomic indicators in the United States. The findings show that stock markets have been strongly procyclical, lagging industrial production by one to three months in recent decades. There have been noteworthy changes in the relationship between inflation and stock market cycles. The correlations changed from negative in the 1980s and 1990s to positive in the 2000s and 2010s. The results also reveal close associations between the stock indices, offering new insights into the interplay between financial markets and economic cycles.

This study analyzes the determinants of life satisfaction in two social identity profiles according to whether the individual favors or is against state intervention for reducing income inequality. The data originated from field research conducted in the Greek society during the years 2019, 2020, and 2022. Our findings suggest that individuals who are against state intervention to reduce income inequality are closer to the utilitarian view of life assessment. Their life satisfaction is shaped by happiness, the ability to borrow money, and the negative impact of social distrust. Alternatively, individuals favoring state intervention to reduce income inequality have a sophisticated background of traits, social values, and exogenous characteristics influencing their life satisfaction, such as happiness, religiosity, equitability, cultural change, the ability to borrow money, and state of health. Thus, microeconomic attitudes decisively establish macroeconomic policies through financial decisions and expectations about a resilient state’s obligations to its citizens. In this context, policy remarks suggest that state intervention promotes life satisfaction when it does not restrict individual freedom and well-being. The study’s novelty lies in providing a concise behavioral framework, without abandoning economic analysis, for the assessment of social preferences for economic organization and life satisfaction, which is at the center of efficient policymaking aimed to improve social welfare.

Housing taxation is considered the most obvious tax system inequity. Therefore, this type of taxation should be in line with the benefit principle. This article examines the attitudes of citizens towards residential building taxation in the Czech Republic. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the perception of residential building tax burden by taxpayers who own a house or apartment for housing based on primary research. The research was conducted in the Czech Republic using a questionnaire in 2021 and 2022. Differences in the tax burden perception in relation to improvements in quality of life in a municipality and use of compensation by providing financial benefit in favor of resident citizens are investigated in the context of municipality size. It was found that the majority of respondents in all municipality size categories perceived the tax burden as reasonable. Citizens' positive attitudes towards the taxation of their residential buildings were influenced not only by the quality-of-life improvement in the municipality, but also by the transparency of the municipality's financial management. By compensating for the tax on residential buildings through providing a financial benefit, some municipalities reduced the tax burden for their resident citizens and shifted the tax burden, within the limits of the law, to buildings for business and recreation. The most common forms of financial benefits included reducing or eliminating municipal waste fees.

This study uses a simple dynamic general equilibrium model to demonstrate that the tax deductions affect the three elasticities: that of the Laffer curve (the Laffer elasticity, hereafter), taxable income, and the tax revenue. This study first decomposes the Laffer elasticity, which consists of the elasticity of taxable income and the tax revenue elasticity. The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, to quantitatively evaluate the importance of tax deductions, this study calculates the analytical solutions of these elasticities with respect to labor and capital income under the steady state in the general equilibrium model with exogenous deduction and a social security tax. Second, using Japanese data, this study conducts a numerical simulation with plausible parameter values. Furthermore, this study finds that the simulation results are consistent with the empirical literature on public finance: an unstable peak of the Laffer curve, a wide range of estimates for the elasticity of taxable income, and tax revenue elasticity greater than 1. The policy implication of these results is that tax rates that maximize tax revenues are unstable, depending on parameters and deductions.

Could the introduction of central bank digital currencies lead to the disappearance of physical cash from the payments system? This extinction would be fraught with several insidious risks, as most of the benefits of the other payments instruments hinge on the continued possibility to use cash for retail transactions. This paper investigates how the use of different payments instruments may evolve over time in a two-sided market where different types of agents can choose which instrument(s) they would use. It shows that while more instruments can continue to be used indefinitely in equilibrium, there are also cases where one instrument becomes extinct and this new equilibrium can be stable, hence, irreversible. The paper also shows that very different outcomes can be reached from very similar initial conditions, and that a minor perturbation, such as the introduction, even on a small scale, of a new instrument can lead to the eventual extinction of one instrument. These results call for caution with the introduction of digital currencies and, more generally, with the digitalization of the financial system.

Effective endowments and virtual endowments are insightful ideas to incorporate different technologies with the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek framework. This study shows that trade patterns are localized when countries have different technologies, while factor prices are non-equalized (or localized). The Leontief paradox is a localized trade phenomenon or pattern conceptually. It demonstrates that both effective endowments and virtual endowments can explain and present the trade pattern observed in the Leontief test. The core idea of the effective endowment (and the virtual endowment) is that a country exports its effective-abundant factor referred to by its productivity. This paper illustrates that the Leontief paradox arises naturally if a country’s actual factor abundance is inconsistent with its effective factor abundance. The study presents the price-trade equilibrium with non-equalized factor prices to help view trade patterns as trade consequences. The study shows that the Leontief paradox phenomenon may occur even in the absence of factor intensity reversal. The study proposes the factor price definition of trade patterns that mirrors trade patterns defined by factor abundances.