Journal of Policy Modeling最新文献

This study examined the threshold effect of debt on economic growth in Nigeria, with a view to investigating debt sustainability levels in the country. The analysis included yearly data from 1981 to 2021. To achieve its objectives, the study used two-regime threshold ARDL regression approaches. Findings reveal that the optimal thresholds for total debt as a ratio of GDP (TDB/GDP), GNI (TDB/GNI), total revenue (TDB/REV), and exports of goods and services (TDB/EXP) are 46.1%, 54.5%, 355.3%, and 24.9%, respectively. Findings also indicate that debt ratios below the threshold levels have a significant positive impact on economic growth. This is true for all the debt ratios, except debt-to-export ratio. However, debt ratios above the threshold levels have a negative and significant effect on Nigeria’s economic growth. Furthermore, findings reveal that only the level of domestic debt is sustainable over the long and short run, whereas external debt and total debt are only sustainable over the long run. When expressed as ratios of GDP and GNI, evidence indicates that Nigeria’s debt is not sustainable by all the five measures of debt adopted in the study, both in the short run and in the long run while total debt to revenue ratio is only sustainable only in the long run. The paper adequately explores the implications of these findings and offers relevant policy recommendations.

This study systematically analyses the nonlinear relationship between China's outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) and reverse green technological progress (RGTP) using fixed effects (FE) model based on panel data for 31 Chinese provinces from 2001 to 2020. We find that the link between China's OFDI and RGTP is an inverted U-shaped curve. In addition, environmental regulation and technology gaps all reduce the height of the inverted U-shaped inflection point. Environmental regulation prolongs the "climb" stage while technology gaps compress the "climb" stage of the inverted U-curve relationship significantly. This result is verified in further robustness tests. The four transmission mechanisms of China's OFDI on RGTP play a positive role: these findings may help policymakers to design more flexible and effective OFDI policies.

We study the impact of public subsidies on the efficiency of performing arts through an empirical analysis of Italian theatres (including opera houses, permanent theatres, and theatre production companies), using an output-oriented approach. Firstly, we discuss the previous works on efficiency and its determinants in the presence of public subsidies. Secondly, the stochastic frontier analysis true random-effects model and the IV GMM second stage regressions are used together with a procedure to measure the marginal effects of subsidies. Our findings suggest that the impact of public funds on technical efficiency of the Italian theatrical firms is positive and significant. The elasticity of public subsidy on efficiency is smaller than one. However, the return on subsidies amounts to 87 on average. These returns vary between Italian performing arts sub-sectors, and are very high for theatre production companies, low for permanent theatres, and very low for opera houses. We also find that the technological progress is negative for the theatrical Italian sector and it leads to the decline in total factor productivity over time, providing empirical support to the presence of Baumol’s disease in the sector. Overall, since Italian theatres technical efficiency could be increased at least by 25–27%, policy makers could work on public incentives in such a way as to avoid that, due to asymmetric information between government and theatrical firms, subsidies are provided (and criticised) indiscriminately.

We contribute theoretically and empirically to the policy debate on the domestic impact of offshore outsourcing. First, within a simple Ricardian structure, we put forward a growth model where sourcing of foreign inputs by itself, without any transplanted channels, leads to higher growth of domestic industries. Second, by combining country-sector level panel data on production with data on sector level use of imported inputs and input tariffs, we estimate the impact of foreign outsourcing on productivity and output growth. In line with our theoretical model, our analysis confirms that foreign sourcing of inputs exerts a positive effect on growth whereas imported final goods turn out to be insignificant. This has important policy ramifications: removal of trade barriers on intermediate inputs is necessary to boost growth.

The literature on public social expenditure envisages a role for the composition of public social expenditure in the design of policies to reduce inequality and promote economic growth. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on which to ground social policy decisions. This study contributes to filling this gap by investigating the dynamic interdependencies between nine different categories of social spending, inequality and growth in 36 OECD countries over the period 1995–2017. According to the results of our work, based on a PVAR model, achieving a decrease in inequality without decreasing output growth is possible, requiring a change in the composition of social policy that gives more weight to spending on old age and survivors’ pensions, incapacity and family benefits, and active labour market policies, the latter having also a positive impact on growth. On the contrary, social expenditure on housing, as it has been conducted, appears to harm growth and enhance inequality.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) undertook a policy mix approach to maintain financial stability in the Indian banking system. RBI recapitalized the banks and infused liquidity through accommodative monetary policies combined with temporary forbearance policies of restructuring loans to boost credit growth and support economic expansion. With a focus on zombie lending, we examine the effectiveness of this policy mix in bank lending channels during the pandemic. We find banks have extended credit growth to the non-financial listed firms. Broadly, we obtain little evidence of credit misallocation to these firms through zombie lending. Subsequently, we observe a decline in zombie lending to manufacturing and small and medium enterprises. However, our result shows a significant increase in zombie lending towards high rent-seeking industries. We witness that zombie lending does not crowd out healthy lending through the bank and industry congestion channels. The results of our study have significant implications for policymakers. Specifically, our findings suggest that accommodative monetary policy reduces credit misallocation concerns of forbearance. In the absence of monetary policy support, forbearance alone may exacerbate adverse effects.

This study examines the threshold effect of institutional quality on the sovereign debt-macroeconomic stability nexus using panel data from 133 countries covering the period from 2002 to 2020. We measure macroeconomic stability using principal component analysis of budget deficit, annual inflation rate, official exchange rate, real interest rate, and unemployment rate. The dynamic GMM result shows that institutional quality has a positive effect on macroeconomic stability, while government debt has a negative effect. However, the interaction between institutional quality and government debt changes the direction of the effect of debt on macroeconomic stability. Moreover, in dynamic panel threshold regression, we document the evidence of the threshold effect of institutional quality on sovereign debt-macroeconomic stability nexus and suggest that before (after) the threshold level of institutional quality, there is a negative (positive) impact of debt on macroeconomic stability. Our result suggest that better institutions can use debt more efficiently and productively to enhance economic performance. The findings of this study have significant implications for policymakers in formulating policies to promote macroeconomic stability.

This paper aims to examine the effects of fiscal policy on economic growth in Brazil between 1999 and 2017. For this purpose, a novel methodology is applied, using a Vector Autoregressive with Mixed Frequency (MIDAS-VAR) model, proposed by Ghysels (2016), which allows for the estimation of the spending multiplier by measuring the impact of high-frequency data at low-frequency and vice versa. The impact of various types of spending on the gross domestic product (GDP) is analyzed, including primary expenditure, personnel, social benefits, subsidies, investment, and costing, while the central government’s primary revenue is used as the revenue variable. The expenditure and tax revenue are the high-frequency variables (monthly observations), whereas GDP is a low-frequency series (quarterly). The estimated fiscal multipliers for primary spending are less than one, suggesting no significant Keynesian effect on output, with particular attention given to the investment multiplier, which is estimated to be close to zero. Our results suggest that the frequency of data matters, and government expenditure has no significant impact on real GDP growth in Brazil. Therefore, the ability of Brazilian fiscal policy to influence economic growth may be limited.

In a river basin across regions, is environmental improvement in downstream areas based on actions that negatively impact economic development and social welfare in upstream areas? This paper takes the pilot of Transverse Eco-compensation Mechanism (TECM) in Xin'an River of China as a quasi-natural experiment and uses the difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the impact of TECM on environmental inequality. We find that the government’s environmental policy may lead to more environmental inequality，which is often overlooked. Our results show that the pilot of TECM depresses the upstream economy, reduces upstream resident income, especially rural residents, and widens the regional income gap between the upstream and downstream. Heterogeneous tests confirm our findings. Our mechanism test shows that the industries’ shutting down and relocation are the main driving forces for the regional environmental inequality in the short term. Therefore, in implementing future TECM, the upstream government needs to pay attention to the economic slowdown and the subsequent unemployment and resident welfare loss. The central and downstream governments should help the upstream regions upgrade the industrial structure, rather than just pay compensation funds, thereby reducing the resulting environmental inequality. Our findings have important policy implications for the treatment of trans-regional river pollution.

The Prebisch-Singer hypothesis implies divergence in the terms of trade between developing and developed countries but does not eliminate the possibility of convergence if productivity in developing countries’ exports sufficiently improves. This study constructs a new and unique export sophistication dataset for the productivity of high-technology export products to examine convergence behavior of developed and emerging market countries. Relative and weak σ-convergence tests reveal overall productivity divergence in international trade. However, there are convergence clubs whereby income, R&D expenditures, foreign direct investment, and educational expenditures yield similar effects on the convergence club formation in both developed and emerging market countries.