Comparative Economic Studies最新文献

This study empirically investigates the effects of fiscal devaluation—i.e., a tax shift from employers’ social security contributions to value added tax—on real labor costs on a sample of 23 countries, members of the European Union, over the period between 2001 and 2018. Our results show that fiscal devaluation indeed reduces real labor costs, as suggested in the literature on fiscal devaluations. The effects turn out to be the strongest, and mostly statistically significant, for countries with intermediate and low degrees of wage bargaining coordination, stressing the importance of labor market institutions. For these countries, we find that both value added tax hikes and cuts in employers’ social security contributions help to reduce real labor costs. Countries with a high degree of wage bargaining coordination, where the impact of fiscal devaluation is weaker, should be able to influence real labor costs via coordinated incomes policy, so that the potentially needed labor costs adjustments can be managed even without the implementation of fiscal devaluations.

This paper surveys the "Dutch disease" literature in developing and emerging countries. It describes the original model of Dutch disease and some main extensions proposed in the theoretical literature, focusing on the ones that match developing countries' conditions. It then reviews various empirical studies that have been conducted and provides evidence that the Dutch disease is still an issue for many developing countries. Finally, it discusses the gaps in the theoretical and empirical literature for understanding the suitable policy instruments to cope with Dutch disease.

Following the present scale of fiscal imbalances, governments often implement fiscal consolidation programs to restore macroeconomic stability. This paper empirically explores the connections between social expenditure, current account and fiscal consolidations using the system-GMM estimator, on a panel of 23 emerging and middle-income countries for the 2009-2018 period. Our results confirm that government social expenditure decreases once fiscal austerity measures are implemented, practically when they are spending-driven. Fiscal consolidation may hurt important social expenditure allocation mainly on education and health components. Furthermore, we find that fiscal consolidation improves the current account deficit, providing support for the twin deficits hypothesis. These findings indicate that fiscal consolidation will eventually contribute to medium- and long-term external debt stability through the current account improvement. However, the exclusion of key growth determinants such as human capital can lead to many inefficiencies such as weak competition in the provision of social services (Jafarov and Gunnarsson in Government spending on health care and education in Croatia: Efficiency and reform options, working paper 136, International Monetary Fund, 2008). We suggest rationalizing social spending and devoting the country's revenue to necessary and economically productive projects. The efficient use of resources will thus ensure better quality of education and health care services. This calls for good governance, an adequate administration and effective delivery structures.

This paper analyzes patterns of long-term economic performance in all five Central Asian countries. We first look at sources of economic growth based on a simple growth accounting exercise. Our findings show that under the period of study total factor productivity growth rates were modest ranging from 1.7% for Kazakhstan, 1.4% for Uzbekistan, and 0.8% for Tajikistan and Turkmenistan to-0.4% for the Kyrgyz Republic. The second part of the paper is connected with exploring productivity level analysis across all Central Asian countries by decomposing differences in output per worker into differences in capital intensity and productivity. Results reflect different levels of productivity performance in the region compared with Japan and South Korea as frontier economies for the analysis.

Using a new and original database, our paper contributes to the growth accounting literature with three original aspects: First, it covers a long period from the early 60's to 2019, just before the COVID-19 crisis; second, it analyzes a large set of economies (30 plus the Euro Area) at the country level; finally, it singles out the growth contribution of information and communications technologies (ICTs) capital as well as robots. Our findings show that the main drivers of labor productivity growth over the whole 1960-2019 period appear to have been education, total factor productivity (TFP), non-ICT and non-robot capital deepening. The relative contribution of ICT capital is found to be declining from the mid-2000s, although our country-level economy dataset does not make it possible to estimate the TFP contribution of ICTs. The contribution of robots to productivity growth through capital deepening and TFP appears to be significant in Germany and Japan in the sub-period 1975-1995, in France and Italy in 1995-2005, and in several Eastern European countries in 2005-2019. Our findings also confirm the slowdown in TFP in most countries from at least 1995 onwards. This slowdown is mainly accounted for by a decrease in the contributions of non-ICT non-robot capital deepening and TFP.

The paper explores the utility of real exchange rate misalignments from their equilibrium for identification of currency crises in the former Soviet Union countries. We estimate equilibrium exchange rates for 10 former Soviet Republics employing behavioural equilibrium exchange rate (BEER) and natural real exchange rate (NATREX) concepts and pooled mean group estimator. Subsequently, we compare the estimated misalignments before, during and after the currency crisis episodes and regress the misalignments on crisis-related variables. The results indicate that the misalignments tended to increase before the crises and visibly reduced after, thus serving as potentially viable predictors of such events.

The European Semester (ES) and the country-specific recommendations (CSRs) have been introduced with the purpose to promote flexibility and adaptation to national circumstances in the governance of fiscal policies. To assess whether the ES has contributed to reconcile economic and social objectives, we measured, through the distance to frontier (DTF) score methodology, the distance of each member country from a benchmark based on EU aims and values defined in the EU treaties. Results show that EU member countries are far from the benchmark and CSRs have not prevented a progressive deterioration of stability and cohesion from an economic, political and social perspective. A content analysis of the CSRs issued from 2011 to 2018 and a comparison with the DTF scores reveal a weak connection between member countries' performance and CSRs. Despite the social content of many CSRs, we actually observe a "commodification" of their goals. CSRs promote a society functional to flexible and competitive markets, and compatible with the requirements of fiscal discipline and sustainability. This neoliberal approach apparently played a role in the EU deterioration and makes the "socialization" of the ES a process with ambiguous implications for European citizens.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41294-021-00171-2.