Economic Systems最新文献

This paper looks at the gender wage gap throughout the transition from communism to capitalism and a time of rapid economic convergence. The case of Estonia is used, and micro data from the Labour Force Survey from 1989 to 2020 are employed. The communist regime had highly regulated wage setting and high levels of educational attainment and labour market participation for women. Although the regime was formally egalitarian, the gender attitudes were conservative and the raw gender wage gap was as large as 41% at the end of the communist period in Estonia. The large gender wage gap under communist rule narrowed quickly during the first years of economic transition, but a further decline in the gap has been slow. The paper has two main messages. The first is that there is strong inertia in the gender wage gap persisting through the communist period and economic convergence. None of the known long-run cultural drivers of gender attitudes can explain this. The second is that the decline in the gap is related to the overall decline in wage inequality, the rise in minimum wages, and more egalitarian gender attitudes. The gender attitudes are responsible for a smaller effect compared to wage inequality.

This study examines firm-, country-, and regional-level determinants of inward foreign direct investment (IFDI) in a three-level logit framework using data on 134 countries. Countries are divided into eight distinct global regions based on their geographic proximity and similarity in macroeconomic settings. The intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) at both the country and regional levels are significant, supporting the efficacy of a three-level model. After controlling for the endogeneity of some firm-level variables, several of the obstacles faced by firms are found to significantly (and negatively) affect IFDI: communication, finance, and institutional quality. Surprisingly, however, obstacles related to physical infrastructure seem to attract foreign investment in some regions, and those relating to administration uniformly encourage foreign investment. This suggests that foreign participation is likely a means of bypassing administrative obstacles (likely because foreign-invested firms are more likely to elicit exceptional treatment). The relative consistency in the effects of firm-level attributes is not reproduced for country-level attributes such as capital account openness, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, inflation, and the tax rate on profits. These variables are shown to have varying impacts across regions—positive in some, negative in others, and statistically irrelevant in others. The regional-level variable, intraregional trade relative to regional GDP, is found to be positively associated with foreign participation in the aggregate model. However, that relationship is reproduced at the regional level for only two regions (Latin America and the Caribbean and South Asia) and is contradicted at that level for Central Asia.

Domestic institutions are recognized as important factors in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), and spurring economic development in host countries. There is increasing evidence, however, that FDI may in turn affect and shape domestic institutions, and it is generally difficult to disentangle these two effects. The present paper aims to shed light on this issue using extensive data on the quality of institutions and on inward FDI in 102 countries over a period of 25 years. We distinguish between different types of institution, FDI, and country, and we adopt a panel vector autoregression (VAR) approach to identify the direction of causality between the two variables. Our findings suggest that the quality of institutions matters for attracting FDI, but also that higher inflows of FDI have a significant short-term impact on the institutional quality of recipient economies. We also find that such a relationship varies with the type of FDI considered, and differs between transition and developing economies.

In this paper, we investigate the macroeconomic effects of the 2007–2013 cohesion policy investments in the EU. First, we present a detailed overview of the EU budget and the contributions of the Member States for the specific policy under scrutiny. Then, we use a dynamic spatial general equilibrium model to assess the overall impact of the policy both in the short and the long run. Finally, we focus on the spatial spillovers generated by the policy programmes and highlight a number of policy-relevant findings with regard to the debate over the financing of the policy and the divide between its net contributors and net beneficiaries. Our main findings suggest that cohesion policy programmes have had a positive and significant impact on the economies of EU Member States and regions, particularly in the poorest regions of the EU. Spatial spillovers imply that the programmes implemented in the main beneficiaries of the policy also benefit its main contributors. For some of these Member States, spillovers constitute the main source of benefits from cohesion policy.

Although locating a company in a tax haven is not illegal per se, it is likely to be part of a scheme purported to erode the tax base or to shift profits to less-taxed jurisdictions. For this reason, this type of location decision is usually targeted by anti-avoidance laws, that can take the form either of specific rules or general standards that, ex-post, sanction or limit the location decision. However, rules entail higher drafting costs and are easy to circumvent whereas standards entail more uncertainty costs. The goal of this paper is to illustrate that the risk of aggressive location decisions can be predicted ex-ante using publicly available data and that this prediction can be used by tax authorities. In the paper, we do two things. First, we use publicly available accounting data for the period 2015–2019 on 4031 group ultimate owners (GUO) of active listed companies resident in one of the 27 European Union countries to predict the probability that these companies would have at least a subsidiary in a tax haven, by spring 2021, as well as the intensity in the use of tax havens. Second, we discuss how this prediction can be used by tax authorities in the context of a new administrative preventive approach that complements the traditional legal approach. This approach can increase welfare by reducing uncertainty, thus increasing investments and economic growth.

This study assesses the effect of a transfer pricing reform on tax payments at the firm level. Given the critical role that the consulting firms play in tax avoidance schemes, we include the effect of expenditure on tax advisory. Exploiting the reform’s particular features, we use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of the tax reform. We find that firms affected by the intervention on average paid more taxes in 2017. Although we do not find effects for 2018, we find no conclusive evidence that spending on tax advisory drove such an effect.

We focus on the rise of female entrepreneurship in Serbia and collect an extensive biographical dataset of women, who took part in privatization during 2002–2019. Although women enjoyed the same de jure rights as men, they faced a number of informal restrictions such as patriarchal values and tradition-related occupations in low-wage sectors. Nevertheless, using controls for firm and personal characteristics, we find that own entrepreneurial success of new female owners was decisive for firm survival and that female ownership during the privatization was not solely a facade for the activities of their powerful husbands or parents.

This paper draws on ecology to advance insights on the relationships between formal and informal institutions. We are interested in observing change in such relationships in different cultural contexts. Extending the research traditions of institutional complementarities and of institutional analysis inspired by biology, we focus on symbiotic relationships to understand interdependence patterns between formal and informal institutions. We compare five Brazilian macroregions, which have experienced different historical processes. We treat each region as a different “cultural ecosystem” within which institutional symbiotic relationships unfold. Building on correlation network analysis, we compute networks of multiple and contemporaneous symbiotic relationships for each macroregion. Our results suggest that formal institutions tend to be “symbionts,” which are more “dependent” on informal institutions acting as “hosts” within asymmetric symbiotic relationships. Our comparison shows that asymmetry between formal and informal institutions is more evident in cultural ecosystems in which institutions have traditionally been more extractive, such as in the northern Brazilian macroregions. In cultural ecosystems with historically more inclusive processes, formal institutions have greater tendency to become a nurturing ground for other institutions, confirming Pritchett’s (2013) argument that successful formal institutions are consolidations/formalizations of a successful societal struggle.

This paper evaluates which structural characteristics matter for macroeconomic resilience, in particular regarding the capacity to absorb and recover from common shocks across euro area Member States over the period from 1998 to 2018. Applying a panel regression analysis and Bayesian model averaging, the paper aims to identify a set of factors as diverse and specific as possible in order to guide future policy actions. These country-specific factors relate to the macroeconomic conditions, the functioning of product, labour and financial markets, institutional quality and to deeply entrenched structural factors. The empirical analysis suggests that the factors conditioning the shock absorption across euro area Member States largely differ from those facilitating recovery in the face of a common shock. More specifically, labour market features play an important role in shock absorption with higher levels of labour market rigidity dampening the shock absorption capacity most. The recovery capacity is affected by a broader set of factors, especially those that hinder the reallocation of labour as well as of the production of goods and services. While high public debt seems to hinder shock absorption capacity, high private debt weakens the recovery capacity. Some factors such as high economic openness have a negative impact on the absorption capacity in case of a common shock as it also affects trading partners, while having a positive impact on the recovery capacity. The results also suggest that degrees of macroeconomic resilience differ across the euro area and well-calibrated reforms are needed to address the nexus of country-specific challenges.

This paper contributes to the empirical literature that investigates the predictive power of different theories on the tax compliance of individuals. Data stem from a detailed survey of Estonian residents collected in three rounds from 2018 to 2020. Principal component analysis reveals that the survey replies are mutually consistent and form distinct clusters that align with the key theories on tax evasion. Logit estimations of the probability of full tax compliance use the principal components and various control variables as covariates. Theories of individual rational choice do not gain support. Factors associated with personal norms and with social norms and customs are important predictors of tax compliance. Noticeably, theories of reciprocity that prescribe a positive relation between approval of the government and its tax policies and tax compliance do not receive support, possibly reflecting the limited role of the government and individualist attitudes in post-transition Estonia.