Growth and Change最新文献

Shift-share analysis (SSA) is a widely used tool for studying economic changes, particularly in employment, due to its simplicity and minimal data requirements. However, its reliance on crude growth rates and issues associated with aggregation can lead to biases, such as Simpson's Paradox, that may hide regional and industry-specific insights. Multifactor Partitioning (MFP) addresses these limitations by standardizing growth rates in a way that disentangles industry and regional effects. This paper compares SSA and MFP using employment data from 10 U.S. states between 2005 and 2019. The analysis incorporates three levels of disaggregation: (1) aggregate employment and time, (2) disaggregated employment with aggregated time, and (3) both sectoral and temporal disaggregation. Results show that while SSA and MFP yield similar conclusions at an aggregate level, discrepancies emerge in disaggregated analyses, particularly in high-growth regions. These findings highlight the importance of data disaggregation and MFP's capacity to provide nuanced insights for policymakers and researchers.

This paper contributes to the literature on the effects of institutions on economic growth by addressing a topic that has been little explored. Specifically, it uses Colombia's capital cities as a case study for the period 2007–2020 to examine the impact of business formality on local economic performance. To do so, an ad hoc variable is constructed to be incorporated into a beta convergence growth approach. The model, estimated using GLS and GMM techniques, yields quite robust results, indicating that increased formality has significantly raised per capita income. Additionally, the findings show a reduction in disparities among urban centers in Colombia, with a convergence speed that is by no means negligible. Finally, a spatial GMM framework is proposed to capture the potential influence of neighboring cities. This new approach confirms, on one hand, the role of formalization in stimulating productive activity, and on the other hand, underscores that the convergence process is driven not only by city-specific factors but also by inter-city relationships, particularly spillover effects from wealthier urban areas.

This paper aims to examine the Foreign direct investment (FDI) effect on household income equality in Vietnam. The authors applied the panel data regressions including fixed effect model and quantile model for all provinces of Vietnam from 2010 to 2022. The empirical results show that foreign direct investment can have both positive and negative effects on income inequality. Foreign direct investment may not have a direct impact on each specific income group, but it can alleviate income inequality between groups in the short term. Moreover, foreign direct investment reduces income inequality in high-income groups, but increases income inequality between groups. The authors find that ensuring social equity in general and reducing income inequality in particular play an important role in stabilizing society, leading to sustainable development, especially for developing countries like Vietnam. Therefore, this paper suggests that foreign direct investment attraction and utilization policies need to be linked to social security policies that reduce income inequality.

Regional diversification has been positioned as a topic of great interest among researchers of economic geography, however, there remain some research gaps that must be attended to. Through the use of complex networks analysis from this literature in a period from 1975 to 2022, we identify some methodological and theoretical issues related to its measurement methods, the lack of an integrative framework and ontology, a social structure few integrated and mostly constituted by researchers of the global north, and scarce attention to the relationship between diversification and its long-term consequences for regional development.

Indiscriminate waste disposal practices—such as dumping waste in public spaces and burning waste at home—pose severe environmental threats. Yet, they are prevalent in Africa. In this paper, we study factors affecting household waste disposal in Nigeria using national survey data, focusing on the administrative mechanism, through which specific waste management authorities (rather than general environmental agencies) effectively promote the use of waste bins for sustainable disposal practices. This paper's statistical analysis presents four major conclusions: First, baseline estimates show correlational evidence that state-level specific waste management authorities are positively associated with sustainable waste disposal practices, conditional on household socioeconomic status. Second, this positive association between waste management authorities and sustainable waste disposal is largely absorbed after controlling for regional GDP or GDP per capita. Third, conditional on GDP (or GDP per capita), waste management authorities play a significant role in influencing waste disposal practices only in states with relatively low levels of GDP (or GDP per capita). Fourth, one important function of these specific waste management authorities is to lower the waste collection fee, so that households in some, although not all, states would be more able and willing to dispose of waste sustainably.

This paper delves into the phenomenon of catch-up innovation in China, examining it through the institutional framework of local government innovation competition. Our theoretical modeling indicates that in order to perform well in performance appraisals and obtain a greater probability of promotion, local governments tend to implement excessive policy incentives, ultimately sparking an intense competition for innovation among regions in China. Empirical analyses corroborate the effectiveness of supportive policies in fostering local innovation. Nonetheless, excessive policy intervention has exhibited a propensity to stifle local innovation performance. In the spatial dimension, regional innovation competition demonstrates notable positive spatial effects, while the potential negative spatial effects of excessive competition have yet to emerge. By scrutinizing the influence of regional innovation competition on patent knowledge width and patent types, we conclude that regional innovation competition is unlikely to alleviate the issue of low-quality innovation in China. Consequently, this paper advocates for the urgent enhancement of the official evaluation system by incorporating indicators pertaining to innovation quality, thereby amplifying the positive impact of regional innovation competition on patent quality. Simultaneously, the official evaluation system should remain vigilant against the detrimental effects of excessive competition and facilitate the transition from regional innovation competition to regional innovation cooperation through the optimization of local government behavior.