Home About us Contact
|
Home About us Contact | ||
|
|
||
Distributional Effects (distributional + effects)
Selected AbstractsDistributional Effects of FDI: How the Interaction of FDI and Economic Policy Affects Poor Households in BoliviaDEVELOPMENT POLICY REVIEW, Issue 4 2007Peter Nunnenkamp This article provides a CGE analysis of the medium to long-run impact of FDI inflows on poverty and income distribution in Bolivia. The simulation results suggest that FDI inflows enhance economic growth and reduce poverty. However, the income distribution typically becomes more unequal. In particular, FDI widens disparities between urban and rural areas. The Bolivian government may promote the growth-enhancing and poverty-alleviating effects by overcoming labour-market segmentation and providing complementary public investment in infrastructure. But simulated policy reforms or alternative productivity scenarios are hardly effective in reducing the economic divide. [source] Measuring Housing Subsidies: Distortionary and Distributional Effects in the NetherlandsFISCAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2003Harry Ter Rele Abstract This paper measures the distortionary and distributional effects of housing subsidies in the Netherlands. Its broad scope allows us to discuss the results in the light of the main justifications for subsidising housing, i.e. the merit,good argument, external effects and the distribution motive. Our measurements reveal some patterns of subsidisation that seem difficult to justify on these grounds. This applies especially to the differences between subsidisation of rental and owneroccupied housing and between mortgage, and equity,financed ownership. Moreover, the inelastic supply of housing in the Netherlands entails that subsidisation has only a limited effect on promoting housing quality. [source] Distributional effects of WTO agricultural reforms in rich and poor countriesECONOMIC POLICY, Issue 50 2007Thomas W. Hertel SUMMARY WTO agricultural reforms Rich countries' agricultural trade policies are the battleground on which the future of the WTO's troubled Doha Round will be determined. Subject to widespread criticism, they nonetheless appear to be almost immune to serious reform, and one of their most common defences is that they protect poor farmers. Our findings reject this claim. The analysis conducted here uses detailed data on farm incomes to show that major commodity programmes are highly regressive in the US, and that the only serious losses under trade reform are among large, wealthy farmers in a few heavily protected sub-sectors. In contrast, analysis using household data from 15 developing countries indicates that reforming rich countries' agricultural trade policies would lift large numbers of developing country farm households out of poverty. In the majority of cases these gains are not outweighed by the poverty-increasing effects of higher food prices among other households. Agricultural reforms that appear feasible, even under an ambitious Doha Round, achieve only a fraction of the benefits for developing countries that full liberalization promises, but protect the wealthiest US farms from most of the rigors of adjustment. Finally, the analysis conducted here indicates that maximal trade-led poverty reductions occur when developing countries participate more fully in agricultural trade liberalization. , Thomas W. Hertel, Roman Keeney, Maros Ivanic and L. Alan Winters [source] ,Whatever is, is right'?ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 4 2007Economic institutions in pre-industrial Europe Institutions,the structures of rules and norms governing economic transactions,are widely assigned a central role in economic development. Yet economic history is still dominated by the belief that institutions arise and survive because they are economically efficient. This article shows that alternative explanations of institutions, particularly those incorporating distributional effects, are consistent with economic theory and supported by empirical findings. Distributional conflicts provide a better explanation than efficiency for the core economic institutions of pre-industrial Europe: serfdom, the community, the craft guild, and the merchant guild. The article concludes by proposing four desiderata for any economic theory of institutions. [source] On the Political Economy of Temporary Stabilization ProgramsECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 2 2002Laura Alfaro This paper provides a political economy explanation for temporary exchange-rate-based stabilization programs by focusing on the distributional effects of real exchange-rate appreciation. I propose an economy in which agents are endowed with either tradable or non-tradable goods. Under a cash-in-advance assumption, a temporary reduction in the devaluation rate induces a consumption boom accompanied by real appreciation, which hurts the owners of tradable goods. The owners of non-tradables have to weigh two opposing effects: an increase in the present value of non-tradable goods wealth and a negative intertemporal substitution effect. For reasonable parameter values, owners of non-tradables are better off. [source] Long-Term Effects of Fiscal Policy on the Size and Distribution of the Pie in the UK,FISCAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2008Xavier Ramos C5; E6; H3 Abstract. This paper provides a joint analysis of the output and distributional long-term effects of various fiscal policies in the UK, using a vector autoregression (VAR) approach. Our findings suggest that the long-term impact on GDP of increasing public spending and taxes is negative, and especially strong in the case of current expenditure. We also find significant distributional effects associated with fiscal policies, indicating that an increase in public spending reduces inequality while a rise in indirect taxes increases income inequality. [source] Distributional Implications of Tax Relief on Voluntary Private Pensions in Spain,FISCAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2007José-Ignacio Antón Using taxation statistics, this paper explores the distributional implications of tax relief on private pensions in Spain in 2002. For this purpose, the author suggests a decomposition of the Kakwani index and its generalisations that allows us to distinguish between the regressivity caused by targeting and that due to benefits allocation among recipients. This paper finds that these tax incentives are regressive - mainly for the latter reason - and have negative although small distributional effects. Finally, this work presents several proposals for reform of the current system and simulates their implications for equity. [source] Measuring Housing Subsidies: Distortionary and Distributional Effects in the NetherlandsFISCAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2003Harry Ter Rele Abstract This paper measures the distortionary and distributional effects of housing subsidies in the Netherlands. Its broad scope allows us to discuss the results in the light of the main justifications for subsidising housing, i.e. the merit,good argument, external effects and the distribution motive. Our measurements reveal some patterns of subsidisation that seem difficult to justify on these grounds. This applies especially to the differences between subsidisation of rental and owneroccupied housing and between mortgage, and equity,financed ownership. Moreover, the inelastic supply of housing in the Netherlands entails that subsidisation has only a limited effect on promoting housing quality. [source] Estimating Olympic-related investment and expenditureINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM RESEARCH, Issue 4 2009ShiNa Li Abstract The analysis of the impact of mega events has included frameworks that evaluate different impacts under different criteria, for example, separating impacts according to whether they occur before, during or after the event itself. Analysis of the economic impacts of such events has shown that the distributional effects between the host city and the rest of an economy can be important, and can have opposite signs. This paper introduces frameworks to show the origin of the economic scale, that is, Olympic-related investment and expenditure, and shows how the frameworks can be used with reference to the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Tourism and income distribution in East AfricaINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM RESEARCH, Issue 6 2008Adam Blake Professor Abstract Research has highlighted the possibility that tourism expenditure in developing countries not only provides income for poor households, but also leads to contraction of other exporting industries. By highlighting the linkages between tourism-related industries and the rest of the economy, and through the distributional effects of their income flows, this paper examines the effects of tourism-related industries and other export industries on households in East Africa. Tourism-related industries are found to provide substantially less income for poorer households than other export activities, leading to concern that tourism expansion may be detrimental for poverty alleviation in these countries. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Reforming pensions: Principles, analytical errors and policy directionsINTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SECURITY REVIEW, Issue 2 2009Nicholas Barr Abstract This article, sets out a series of principles for pension design rooted in economic theory: pension systems have multiple objectives, analysis should consider the pension system as a whole, analysis should be framed in a second-best context, different systems share risks differently, and systems have different effects by generation and by gender. That discussion is reinforced by identification of a series of widespread analytical errors , errors that appear in World Bank work, but by no means only in World Bank work: tunnel vision, improper use of first-best analysis, improper use of steady-state analysis, incomplete analysis of implicit pension debt, incomplete analysis of the impact of funding (including excessive focus on financial flows, failure to consider how funding is generated, and improper focus on the type of asset in trust funds), and ignoring distributional effects. The second part of the article considers implications for policy: there is no single best pension design, earlier retirement does little or nothing to reduce unemployment, unsustainable pension promises need to be addressed directly, a move from pay-as-you-go towards funding in a mandatory system may or may not be welfare improving, and implementation matters , policy design that exceeds a country's capacity to implement it is bad policy design. We illustrate the ranges of designs of pension systems that fit the fiscal and institutional capacity constraints typical at different levels of economic development. The potential gains from simplicity imply that a country capable of implementing an administratively demanding plan does not necessarily gain from doing so. New Zealand has a simple pension system through choice, not constraint. [source] Microsimulation of Business PerformanceINTERNATIONAL STATISTICAL REVIEW, Issue 3 2000Philip Kokic Summary Microsimulation of business performance based on sample survey data is a relatively underdeveloped field, but its application in government economic policy formulation is potentially great since it can be used to measure the distributional effects of change rather than just average change. Techniques which account for the dynamic response of businesses to macro level price expectations have recently been developed (Kokic et al., 1993). These allow individual level business performance to be forecast from sample survey data. In this paper we outline a general methodology for combining these forecasting techniques with Monte Carlo simulation in order to produce a microsimulation of business performance that accurately captures the true distributional characteristics of the underling survey data. Applying this methodology to Australian farm survey data, we show that these methods may be used to forecast the distribution of farm business production and performance within arbitrary subdomains of the surveyed population conditional on a given set of expected commodity price outcomes. The microsimulations reflect both the uncertainty due to climatic variation from one year to the next, which in the Australian context depends largely on geographic location, as well as the uncertainty of commodity prices. [source] Carbon Taxes and Carbon Emissions TradingJOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 3 2001Paul Elkins This paper surveys the literature on, and examples of current implementation of, carbon taxes and carbon emission permits. It sets out the theoretical basis for these instruments, with special reference to the revenue-recycling and tax interaction effects. This theoretical work concludes that instruments which raise revenue which can be recycled so as to reduce pre-existing distortionary taxes are significantly less costly than those which do not. The paper then reviews the sizable literature on the distributional effects of these instruments, especially with regard to industrial competitiveness and regressive effects on low-income groups, evaluating attempts to mitigate these where they are perceived as unacceptable. The paper concludes that such efforts at mitigation, while possible, can substantially reduce the efficiency benefits of the instruments. The projected costs of carbon taxes depend on a wide range of assumptions. This is still a contested area, but the paper concludes that, on a range of plausible assumptions, these costs need not be high. Finally the paper notes that early evaluations of the environmental effectiveness of carbon taxes have been generally positive. This suggests that, if concern about anthropogenic climate change continues to increase, more countries will introduce carbon taxes and emission permits, with the latter increasingly auctioned. [source] The Distributional Effects of Public ExpenditureJOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 3 2000Gerd Schwartz It is commonly agreed that economic policies, including budgetary policies, can have potentially strong distributional effects. Traditional economic analysis held that economic policies affected the income distribution primarily through their impact on the rate of growth. More recently, it has come to be recognised that qualitative aspects of economic growth are probably more important than the rate of growth itself. While recent research has confirmed the potential role of expenditure policies as a redistributive tool, it has also shown that redistribution does not necessarily have to come at the expense of economic growth and efficiency. Although there are substantial analytical and technical problems to be faced in the design of equitable and cost-effective public expenditure programmes, unfavourable distributional outcomes of these programmes can usually be traced more to political and institutional pressures than to purely technical factors. JEL Classification number: H5 [source] Status versus growth: The distributional effects of school accountability policiesJOURNAL OF POLICY ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2010Helen F. Ladd Although the federal No Child Left Behind program judges the effectiveness of schools based on their students' achievement status, many policy analysts argue that schools should be measured, instead, by their students' achievement growth. Using a 10-year student-level panel data set from North Carolina, we examine how school-specific pressure associated with status and growth approaches to school accountability affect student achievement at different points in the prior-year achievement distribution. Achievement gains for students below the proficiency cut point emerge in schools failing either type of accountability standard, with the effects clearer for math than for reading. In contrast to prior research highlighting the possibility of educational triage, we find little or no evidence that failing schools in North Carolina ignore the students far below proficiency under either approach. Importantly, we find that the status, but not the growth, approach reduces the reading achievement of higher performing students. Our analysis suggests that the distributional effects of accountability pressure depend not only on the type of pressure for which schools are held accountable (status or growth), but also the tested subject. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. [source] Redistribution and Insurance: Mandatory Annuitization With Mortality HeterogeneityJOURNAL OF RISK AND INSURANCE, Issue 1 2003Jeffrey R. Brown This article examines the distributional implications of mandatory longevity insurance when mortality heterogeneity exists in the population. Previous research has demonstrated the significant financial redistribution that occurs under alternative annuity programs in the presence of differential mortality across groups. This article embeds that analysis into a life-cycle framework that allows for an examination of distributional effects on a utility-adjusted basis. It finds that the degree of redistribution that occurs from the introduction of a mandatory annuity program is substantially lower on a utility-adjusted basis than when evaluated on a purely financial basis. In a simple life-cycle model with no bequests, complete annuitization is welfare enhancing even for those with higher-than-average expected mortality rates, so long as administrative costs are sufficiently low. These findings have implications for policy toward annuitization, particularly as part of a reformed Social Security system. [source] Born unto Brothels,Toward a Legal Ethnography of Sex Work in an Indian Red-Light AreaLAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 3 2008Prabha Kotiswaran The global sex panic around sex work and trafficking has fostered prostitution law reform worldwide. While the normative status of sex work remains deeply contested, abolitionists and sex work advocates alike display an unwavering faith in the power of criminal law; for abolitionists, strictly enforced criminal laws can eliminate sex markets, whereas for sex work advocates, decriminalization can empower sex workers. I problematize both narratives by delineating the political economy and legal ethnography of Sonagachi, one of India's largest red-light areas. I show how within Sonagachi there exist highly internally differentiated groups of stakeholders, including sex workers, who, variously endowed by a plural rule network,consisting of formal legal rules, informal social norms, and market structures,routinely enter into bargains in the shadow of the criminal law whose outcomes cannot be determined a priori. I highlight the complex relationship between criminal law and sex markets by analyzing the distributional effects of criminalizing customers on Sonagachi's sex industry. [source] Private tax collection,remnant of the past or a way forward?PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION & DEVELOPMENT, Issue 4 2006Evidence from rural Uganda Abstract This article examines the growing role and impacts of private tax collection under fiscal decentralisation in Uganda. Based on evidence from six rural councils, three aspects of privatised tax collection are examined: (i) the impact on the nature of fiscal corruption; (ii) the problem of overzealous collection; and (iii) the challenge of assessing revenue potentials. While possibly meeting short-term demands for local revenue growth and stability, the present form of private tax collection appears to transform the nature of fiscal corruption by reducing corruption at collection point and transferring the problem into the district administration. Moreover, while the charge of overzealousness permeates historical and theoretical work on privatised tax collection, the Ugandan experience casts doubt on its general validity. Instead, perverse distributional effects are the most likely cause of deteriorating state-citizen relations in rural Uganda. Finally, the article considers the merit of the prediction of private collection as a preferred contractual choice for certain indirect taxes, suggesting that problems of asymmetric information in assessing the revenue yields of most rural markets are exaggerated. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] The Good, the Poor and the Wealthy: who Responds Most to College Financial Aid?BULLETIN OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, Issue 4 2002Larry D. Singell Jnr. Financial aid programmes for students in the United States focus increasingly on academic merit, rather than financial need. There is little empirical evidence, however, on the distributional effects of merit,based aid , who benefits or responds most. We develop a bivariate probit model of the enrolment process estimated using data for a large public university over several years. Results show that merit,based aid increases enrolment for all students, but that financially,able students respond disproportionately, even with academic merit held constant. Thus, increased emphasis on merit in financial aid may exacerbate the trend toward greater income inequality in the US, even among students of equal academic merit. [source] | ||||||||||||||||