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on South East Asia |
| By: | Luke Willard; Tarhan Feyzioglu |
| Keywords: | Inflation , China , United States , Japan , Deflation , Trade , Economic models , |
| Date: | 2006–02–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:06/36&r=sea |
| By: | Christine C.P. Wong; Richard M. Bird (Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto) |
| Abstract: | We argue in this paper that unless China begins to tackle more systematically the serious problems that have emerged in the finances of its various levels of sub-national government the problems to which the present unsatisfactory system give rise will over time increasingly distort resource allocation, increase distributional tensions, and slow down the impressive recent growth of the Chinese economy. Despite the lack of solid and reliable information on the size and nature of China?s real fiscal system, we show that the evidence available is generally consistent with this pessimistic reading. China?s fiscal and ? in time ? economic future thus rests to some extent on reforms to key aspects of its fiscal system, especially its intergovernmental finances. Moreover, a more consistent and purposive framework to this complex of problems seems needed. Given the scale and scope of China?s underlying public finance problems, the ?reactive gradualism? evidenced in recent ad hoc reforms to this or that piece of the fiscal system has, we suggest, run its course. |
| Keywords: | China;intergovernmental finance;taxation;budget |
| JEL: | H11 H70 O53 P21 |
| Date: | 2005–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ttp:itpwps:0515&r=sea |
| By: | Steven Vincent Dunaway; Xiangming Li |
| Date: | 2005–11–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:05/202&r=sea |
| By: | Li L. Ong; Jason D. Mitchell |
| Date: | 2006–01–19 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:06/04&r=sea |
| By: | Charles Ka Yui Leung; Peiling Wei; Siu Kei Wong |
| Abstract: | Due to the relocation of manufacturing facilities from Hong Kong to Mainland China, it is widely believed that some vacant private factories have been used as offices in Hong Kong. Yet there is no direct and systematic evidence to support this speculation. In fact, according to MacGregor and Schwann (2003), industrial and commercial real estate shares some common features. Our research attempts to investigate empirically the price and volume relationship between industrial and commercial real estate, using both aggregate and disaggregate data from the industrial and commercial property markets in Hong Kong. The study was built on the observation that economic restructuring and geographical distance will affect the substitutability (and thus the correlation) of different types of property, and utilizes commonly used time series techniques for analysis. Policy implications are discussed. |
| Keywords: | aggregation bias, geographical distance, industrial real estate, substitutability |
| JEL: | G12 L80 R30 |
| Date: | 2006–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chk:cuhked:_179&r=sea |
| By: | Nicoletta Batini; Papa M'B. P. N'Diaye; Alessandro Rebucci |
| Keywords: | Economic Growth , Japan , Economic policy , External debt , Fiscal management , Productivity , Economic models , |
| Date: | 2005–11–16 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:05/209&r=sea |
| By: | Peter Murrell (Department of Economics, University of Maryland) |
| Abstract: | Prepared for The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition, this essay examines the evolution of both institutions and economists' thinking on institutions during transition. Early in transition, institutions were virtually ignored in the majority of normative prescriptions, but were central in the evolutionary-institutional approach. Later, after events influenced intellectual developments, institutions were at the center of analysis. Growth is strongly related to institutional construction. Transition countries built institutions speedily but with marked variation across countries. Legal systems and independent governmental agencies were sources of institutional growth, while government bureaucracies and informal mechanisms detracted from institutional growth. In China, reforms addressed problems that institutions usually do, but in unusual ways. |
| Keywords: | Institutions, transition, evolutionary-institutional, shock therapy, gradualism, China, law |
| JEL: | P2 P3 N4 O17 K0 |
| Date: | 2006–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:umd:umdeco:murrell_newpalgrave&r=sea |
| By: | Toni Gravelle; Jorge A. Chan-Lau |
| Keywords: | Risk premium , Korea, Republic of , Malaysia , Thailand , Credit , Financial sector , |
| Date: | 2005–12–22 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:05/231&r=sea |
| By: | Ioannis Lazopoulos (Keele University) |
| Date: | 2005–09–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mmf:mmfc05:15&r=sea |
| By: | Alan Blinder |
| Abstract: | Among the most notable, but least discussed, hallmarks of what I have called the "quiet revolution" in central banking practice (Blinder, 2004a) has been the movement toward making monetary policy decisions by committee. Until about a decade ago, most central banks had a single governor, who might or might not have been independent of the rest of the government. But since then, the United Kingdom, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, and Brazil, to name just a few, have opted to establish monetary policy committees (MPCs). In addition, the committee-based ECB replaced 12 central banks, most of which had previously been run by individual governors. Thus the existence of a pronounced worldwide trend is clear. In this paper, I discuss two questions. The first question is why. Why have so many central banks switched from individual to group decisionmaking? The second question is how. How should central banks make decisions and how should they communicate with the public, the government, and the markets? |
| Keywords: | central banks; committees; voting; communication. |
| JEL: | E58 D71 D78 |
| Date: | 2006–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dnb:dnbwpp:092&r=sea |
| By: | Sean Turnell (Department of Economics, Macquarie University) |
| Abstract: | In the history of Burma's political economy, few groups have been so roundly vilified as the Chettiars. A community of moneylenders indigenous to Chettinad, Tamil Nadu, the Chettiars operated throughout the Southeast Asian territories of the British Empire. They played a particularly prominent role in Burma where, alas, they were typically demonised as rapacious usurers, responsible for all manner of vices concomitant with the colonial economy. Not least of these was the chronic land alienation of the Burmese cultivator. The purpose of this paper is to reappraise the role of the Chettiars in Burma. Finding that their role was crucial in the dramatic growth in Burma's agricultural output during the colonial era, the paper disputes the moneylender stereotype so often used against them. Employing modern economic theory to the issue, the paper finds that the success of the Chettiars in Burma lay less in the high interest rates they charged, than it did to patterns of internal organisation that provided solutions to the inherent problems faced by financial intermediaries. A proper functioning financial system could have provided better solutions perhaps for Burma's long-term development, but Burma did not have such a system, then or now. Easy scapegoats for what went wrong, the Chettiars merit history's better judgement. |
| JEL: | Q14 O16 O17 N25 |
| Date: | 2005–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mac:wpaper:0512&r=sea |
| By: | Sean Turnell (Department of Economics, Macquarie University) |
| Abstract: | The purpose of this paper is to bring to light the efforts to fashion a central bank in Burma during the years in which the country was a province of British India. Throughout this period, which lasted from 1886 to 1937, questions of money and finance in Burma were mostly the preserve of the Raj in Calcutta and New Delhi. And, yet, it is a little-known fact that plans to establish a central bank for Burma were promoted throughout the colonial years by a succession of imperial officials. These plans, which reached their apogee in the 'monetary reform' advocacy that followed the Great Depression, were never realised in the colonial era. They were, however, indicative of a political economy discourse in colonial Burma that was more vigorous, and theoretically sophisticated, than is commonly supposed. |
| Keywords: | Monetary institutions, British Empire, Burma, Indian monetary reform |
| JEL: | N25 E42 E58 |
| Date: | 2005–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mac:wpaper:0511&r=sea |
| By: | Mandana, Hajj; Panizza, Ugo |
| Abstract: | This paper uses individual-level data and a differences in differences estimation strategy to test whether the education gender gap of Muslims is different from that of Christians. In particular, the paper uses data for young Lebanese and shows that, other things equal, girls (both Muslim and Christian) tend to receive more education than boys and that there is no difference between the education gender gap of Muslims and Christians. Therefore, the paper finds no support for the hypothesis that Muslims discriminate against female education. |
| Keywords: | Religion, Islam, Education, Gender Gap |
| JEL: | Z12 I20 O53 |
| Date: | 2006–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uca:ucapdv:64&r=sea |
| By: | Pokar Khemani; Jack Diamond |
| Keywords: | Financial systems , Developing countries , Government expenditures , |
| Date: | 2005–10–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:05/196&r=sea |
| By: | Sean Turnell (Department of Economics, Macquarie University) |
| Abstract: | Cooperative credit was the British Empire's all-purpose answer to problems of rural poverty and indebtedness, usury, and land alienation. Originating in the idealism of the 'Rochedale Pioneers' and in schemes from rural Germany, cooperative credit was imported into India with an evangelical zeal to solve all manner of perceived economic and social ills. With only slightly less moral fervour it was transplanted from India into Burma in the first decade of the Twentieth Century, and by 1920 several thousand cooperative credit societies had mushroomed across the country. The purpose of this paper is to trace the development of cooperative credit in Burma from these promising beginnings, until the near collapse of the movement on the eve of the Great Depression. The paper explores the way in which cooperative credit was seen by the imperial authorities as a device to limit the role of Indian money-lenders in Burma, and as the basis for the establishment of formal rural credit markets. The paper concludes that poor implementation, on top of official myopia as to the cultural, historical and economic differences between India, Burma and Europe, brought about the demise of a movement that promised much. |
| JEL: | Q14 Q13 O16 N25 |
| Date: | 2005–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mac:wpaper:0509&r=sea |