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Economic Transition (economic + transition)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	58%
Humanities and Social Sciences	33%
2 Other Domains	9%

Selected Abstracts

STOCK MARKET VALUATIONS OF R&D AND ELECTRONICS FIRMS DURING TAIWAN'S RECENT ECONOMIC TRANSITION

THE DEVELOPING ECONOMIES, Issue 1 2006
CHAOSHIN CHIAO
G12; O33 The objective of the present study is to investigate the market valuation of Research and Development (R&D) investments in the Taiwanese stock market from July 1988 to June 2002. The motivation stems from Taiwan's recent economic transition from a labor-intensive, then to a capital-intensive, and currently to a technology-based economy. The results support not only the existence, but also the persistence of R&D-associated mispricing. More importantly, it has become stronger as the electronics industry gradually dominates the economy. First, R&D-intensive stocks tend to outperform stocks with little or no R&D. Second, the R&D-intensity effect cannot fully be attributed to firm size. Third, the R&D-intensity effect is more pronounced for firms in the electronics industry after 1996. [source]

China's Second Economic Transition: Building National Markets

MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION REVIEW, Issue 1 2008
Marshall W. Meyer
[source]

The Puzzle of China's Township,Village Enterprises: The Paradox of Local Corporatism in a Dual-Track Economic Transition

MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION REVIEW, Issue 2 2005
Peter Ping LiArticle first published online: 6 JUL 200
abstract This paper seeks to reconcile and synthesize the diverse views about the township,village enterprises (TVEs) and local corporatism in the context of ongoing institutional changes in China as a transition economy. Specifically, I attempt to integrate the economic, political, cultural, and social explanations for TVEs, especially the two competing views of market competition and political corruption. I focus on the puzzle of TVE efficiency as well as the paradox of local corporatism as a government,business partnership with both a positive function of public alliance for wealth creation and a negative function of private collusion for wealth transfer. I argue that the key to both the puzzle of TVEs and the paradox of local corporatism lies in China's dual-track reform paradigm (i.e. a market-for-mass track and a state-for-élite track). Lastly, I discuss the critical implications for theory building and policymaking regarding economic transition in general. [source]

MIND THE GAP: UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE NEW EU REGIONS

JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 1 2008
Anna Maria Ferragina
Abstract The paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on regional unemployment during transition in Central and Eastern Europe. The focus is on optimal speed of transition (OST) models and on comparison of them with the neo-classical tradition. In the typical neo-classical models, spatial differences essentially arise as a consequence of supply side constraints and institutional rigidities. Slow-growth, high-unemployment regions are those with backward economic structures and constraints on factors mobility contribute to making differences persistent. However, such explanations leave the question unanswered of how unemployment differences arise in the first place. Economic transition provides an excellent testing ground to answer this question. Pre-figuring an empirical law, the OST literature finds that the high degree of labour turnover of high unemployment regions is associated with a high rate of industrial restructuring and, consequently, that low unemployment may be achieved by implementing transition more gradually. Moreover, international trade, foreign direct investment and various agglomeration factors help explain the success of capital cities compared to peripheral towns and rural areas in achieving low unemployment. The evidence of the empirical literature on supply side factors suggests that wage flexibility in Central and Eastern Europe is not lower than in other EU countries, while labour mobility seems to reinforce rather than change the spatial pattern of unemployment. [source]

Economic transition and the decline of agricultural production in Estonia

JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, Issue 4 2005
Shujie Yao
Agricultural production in Estonia has declined rapidly under economic transition since 1992, causing a number of undesirable social and economic problems. Rural unemployment has increased, so has the incidence of poverty. The country has changed from being a net exporter to a net importer of many major agricultural products over a short period of time. To understand the causes of agricultural decline, this paper uses a policy analysis matrix (PAM) to study the competitiveness and profitability of various agricultural, fishery and forest products for the period 1994,95. The results suggest that much of the loss of production may have been explained by economic reforms that were intended to eradicate market distortions created by the former Soviet system, but government's ,non-interventionist' policy and the rigidity of foreign exchange rate may have aggravated the situation. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Economic transition, gender bias, and the distribution of earnings in China*

THE ECONOMICS OF TRANSITION, Issue 2 2005
John A. Bishop
P3; J3; J7 Abstract Market-oriented economic reform, which accelerated after 1992, has brought substantial changes to the Chinese economy. This dramatic economic transition was raised two important questions: ,How are women faring in the transition from a planned economy to a market economy?' and ,Are some women faring relatively better than other women'? We use data from the Chinese Household Income Projects for the years 1988 and 1995, a standard earnings equation, and quantile regressions to estimate and decompose the earnings gap. Our findings suggest that while the earnings gap has increased, the fraction of the gap ,unexplained' by differences in human capital variables such as education and experience has declined over time. This result is particularly pronounced for low earning women. [source]

Economic transition and elections in Poland1

THE ECONOMICS OF TRANSITION, Issue 1 2003
John E. Jackson
Abstract Poland's economic and political transition, one of the most successful, has depended very heavily on job creation in new firms to replace the jobs lost in the formerly state-owned enterprises. This paper uses survey and aggregate data from three Polish elections to suggest that these de novo firms, the individuals they employ, and the residents in the local areas where they exist become an important constituency supporting pro-reform political parties and constraining the actions of parties less sympathetic to the reforms. The creation of this political constituency helps explain how countries can successfully pursue both economic and political reforms. JEL classification: D72, P26. [source]

Fragments of Economic Accountability and Trade Policy

FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 2 2007
RYAN KENNEDY
While there has been a prodigious amount of literature on trade policy written in the past two decades, very little of that literature has dealt with countries in economic transition or nondemocratic regimes. There has also been a lack of work dealing with state interests in trade policy beyond realpolitik discussions of national security. This article seeks to fill some of these gaps through a study of two samples: one of liberalization in 25 post-Communist countries between the years 1991 and 1999 and the other of 124 countries from around the world in 1997. The study concludes that a key element in the choice between free trade and protectionism is the level of "fragmentation of economic accountability." Such fragmentation consists of two major components: (1) the existence of a strong capitalist class that is independent of the government; and (2) the dispersion of political power among actors both inside and outside the government. Where the government is more accountable to a wide range of interests, policies are more likely to be aligned with market mechanisms, encouraging the adoption of reforms, including the liberalization of trade policy. This article builds on the conclusions of Frye and Mansfield in several ways: (1) it embeds political fragmentation into a larger theoretical framework of economic accountability of government institutions; (2) it introduces the importance of state ownership in shaping government interests; (3) it introduces an idea of social, not just institutional, accountability; and (4) it proposes a statist view of trade policy that is lacking in the present literature. [source]

Anthropological Perspectives on the Trafficking of Women for Sexual Exploitation

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 1 2004
Lynellyn D. Long
Contemporary trafficking operations transform traditional bride wealth and marriage exchanges (prestations) by treating women's sexuality and bodies as commodities to be bought and sold (and exchanged again) in various Western capitals and Internet spaces. Such operations are also global with respect to scale, range, speed, diversity, and flexibility. Propelling many trafficking exchanges are political economic processes, which increase the trafficking of women in times of stress, such as famine, unemployment, economic transition, and so forth. However, the disparity between the global market operations, which organize trafficking, and the late nineteenth century social/public welfare system of counter-trafficking suggests why the latter do not effectively address women's risks and may even expose them to increased levels of violence and stress. Drawing on historical accounts, anthropological theory, and ethnographic work in Viet Nam and Bosnia and Herzegovina, this essay examines how specific cultural practices embedded in family and kinship relations encourage and rationalize sexual trafficking of girls and young women in times of stress and dislocation. The essay also analyses how technologies of power inform both trafficking and counter-trafficking operations in terms of controlling women's bodies, sexuality, health, labour, and migration. By analysing sexual trafficking as a cultural phenomenon in its own right, such an analysis seeks to inform and address the specific situations of girls and young women, who suffer greatly from the current migration regimes. [source]

External Liberalization and Foreign Presence: Cross-Industry Evidence From Poland and Hungary

JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY, Issue 3 2000
Robert E. Kennedy
External liberalization,the relaxation of restrictions on cross-border trade and inbound direct investment,has played an important role in the programs of economic transition in central Europe. While liberalization is widely heralded, there has been little empirical analysis of the links between liberalization and industry structure. This analysis examines changes in foreign presence following external liberalization in Poland and Hungary. I show that the presence of proprietary and intangible assets explains much of the cross-industry variation in patterns of foreign presence and, for a given level of foreign presence, whether this will occur via trade or inbound direct investment. [source]

External Liberalization and Foreign Presence: Cross-Industry Evidence from Poland and Hungary

JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY, Issue 2 2000
Robert E. Kennedy
External liberalization,the relaxation of restrictions on cross-border trade and inbound direct investment,has played an important role in the programs of economic transition in central Europe. While liberalization is widely heralded, there has been little empirical analysis of the links between liberalization and industry structure. This analysis examines changes in foreign presence following external liberalization in Poland and Hungary. I show that the presence of proprietary and intangible assets explains much of the cross-industry variation in patterns of foreign presence and, for a given level of foreign presence, whether this will occur via trade or inbound direct investment. [source]

Lithuania's food demand during economic transition

AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2000
Ferdaus Hossain
Abstract The linear approximate version of the almost ideal demand system (LA-AIDS) model is estimated using data from the Lithuanian household budget survey (HBS) covering the period from July 1992 to December 1994. Price and real expenditure elasticities for 12 food groups were estimated based on the estimated coefficients of the model. Very little or nothing is known about the demand parameters of Lithuania and other former socialist countries, so the results are of intrinsic interest. Estimated expenditure elasticities were positive and statistically significant for all food groups, while all own-price elasticities were negative and statistically significant, except for that of eggs which was insignificant. Results suggest that Lithuanian household consumption did respond to price and real income changes during their transition to a market-oriented economy. [source]

Economic transition and the decline of agricultural production in Estonia

Upland development policy, livelihood change and land degradation: interactions from a Laotian village

LAND DEGRADATION AND DEVELOPMENT, Issue 1 2007
G. Lestrelin
Abstract This study uses a local political ecology approach that examines the physical and social dimensions of land use and soil erosion and their broader political and socioeconomic environment in Ban Lak Sip, a village located in the uplands of the Luang Prabang Province in Laos. The study indicates that, despite an explicit government policy aimed at improving both socioeconomic and environmental conditions, the resulting livelihood change has in part led to a deterioration in working conditions with mixed impacts on the environment. While land degradation and economic transition appear to have driven villagers to rework the role and importance of the land in their livelihoods, this paper argues that the Laotian rural development policy has constrained the adaptation process and led to a significant intensification in labour and land use. In fact, Ban Lak Sip villagers have had to adapt both to actual land degradation processes and to a discourse on upland environmental degradation constructed by the Laotian State and international development actors. The results of this study have significant implications for the formulation of environmental policy and for land degradation research more widely. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

The Puzzle of China's Township,Village Enterprises: The Paradox of Local Corporatism in a Dual-Track Economic Transition

Social inequality in premature mortality among polish urban adults during economic transition

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY, Issue 6 2007
Halina Ko, odziej
Rates of premature mortality among adults are important measures of the economic and psychosocial well-being of human populations. In many countries, such rates are, as a rule, inversely related to the level of attained education. We examined changes in educational group-specific mortality rates among urban adults in Poland during the country's rapid transition in the 1990s from a socialist command economy to a free market system. Two census-based analyses of individual death records of urban dwellers aged 35,64 years were compared. We utilized all records of death, which occurred during the 2-year periods 1988,89 and 2001,02. Population denominators were taken from the censuses of 1988 and 2002. The age-specific mortality rates were used to evaluate absolute differences in mortality. To assess relative differences between educational levels, mortality rate ratios (MRRs) with 95% CI (confidence interval) were calculated using Poisson regression. A regular educational gradient in mortality persisted in each 10-year age group throughout the period covered by our data. Moreover, age-specific mortality rates declined steadily in all educational groups, and this decline was most marked in the two oldest age groups (45,54 and 55,64 years). The trend was accompanied by widening of educational differences in mortality as expressed by MRRs. Systemic political transformation in Poland has brought a mixture of beneficial and detrimental effects on the well-being of society. With regard to the changes in rates of premature mortality among adults, the benefits have prevailed, although individuals with the lowest educational level benefited less than those with the highest education. Am. J. Hum. Biol., 2007. © 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]

Outsourcing in China: an exploratory assessment

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION & DEVELOPMENT, Issue 2 2008
Yijia Jing
Abstract The increasing demands for public services, growing resource externalisation and decentralisation have driven Chinese governments to seek alternative means of service delivery. This article addresses the largely ignored outsourcing practice in China. Lack of awareness of and research on the widespread outsourcing was a result of the conceptual barriers created by China's economic transition and its choice of incremental reform path. By decomposing national fiscal expenditures, the article finds that from 2002 to 2004, outsourcing accounted for about one-third of the total governmental services expenditures and demonstrated a trend of continuous growth. Such developments effectively transformed the basic landscape of public service delivery and created significant external dependence. Within just three decades, China has quickly shifted from an omnipotent state to an ,incomplete' state. The capacity of the administrative hierarchy has become severely constrained. Nonetheless, the political risks of the macro-level transformation are largely mitigated at the micro-level by mechanisms of public,private cooperation. These developments are embedded in informal arrangements that, remarkably, maintain the survival of the current power structure. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

STOCK MARKET VALUATIONS OF R&D AND ELECTRONICS FIRMS DURING TAIWAN'S RECENT ECONOMIC TRANSITION

Wages, participation and unemployment in the economic transition of urban China,

THE ECONOMICS OF TRANSITION, Issue 3 2010
Jun Han
Wages; participation rates; unemployment rates; economic transition Abstract Wages, participation and unemployment are major topics for researchers of the labour market. How have these measures evolved in the economic transition of urban China? Have they evolved in accordance with those in the Statistical Yearbook of China (produced by the National Bureau of Statistics, China) and previous studies? We find that the estimated wage level based on Urban Household Survey (UHS) data was higher than that in the Statistical Yearbook in earlier years, but the relationship has reversed since 1999. Our estimated participation rate is lower than that of Giles et al. (2006) but higher than Dong et al. (2007) and Maurer-Fazio et al. (2007). The analysis shows that the unemployment rate is lower than that estimated with the China Urban Labor Survey data in Giles et al. (2005). Our estimation results on unemployment rates turn out to be more similar to those in Dong et al. (2007) but are different from those in Hu and Sheng (2007). This analysis provides the first systematic comparison of the wage level from different sources, and supplements the existing estimates on participation and unemployment using a more representative dataset for urban China. [source]

Constitutionalism and credibility in reforming economies1

THE ECONOMICS OF TRANSITION, Issue 3 2006
Raj M. Desai
D72; D73; P20; P26 Abstract There has been relatively little investigation of the effect of constitutional transformations on the economic transition in post-communist countries. We develop a simple signalling model in which constitutionalism , a commitment to limit political power and provide judicial defence of basic rights , reinforces the credibility of pro-market candidates' electoral promises and boosts public support for economic reforms. These findings are tested using opinion poll data on public support for reform in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the former Soviet Union, in the 1990s. In a two-stage procedure we show that public support for market reforms is higher in countries where incumbents have taken deliberate steps to increase political accountability and judicial independence. Public support also spurs actual economic reform. [source]

Economic transition, gender bias, and the distribution of earnings in China*

Education and Earnings in Transition: The Case of Lao*

ASIAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL, Issue 4 2007
Phanhpakit Onphanhdala
I28; J24; P27 This paper is a study on the returns to education in Lao, a country that has been largely neglected by the published literature. The authors found that the private rates of returns to education have risen significantly with economic transition. In particular, returns for young workers are considerably higher than for older workers. Although large earnings premiums are generally received by workers with high levels of education, the most profitable investment in education for a large number of paid employees is still the primary level. Moreover, there are the significant public,private sector wage differentials. The research findings have important implications for public sector salaries and the financing of education in Lao. [source]

Constituting Interests and Identities in a Two-Level Game: Understanding the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros Dam Conflict,

FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 1 2009
Stephen Deets
This paper uses the conflict between Hungary and Slovakia over the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros Dam to examine two foreign policy issues. The first is how states determine their interests and how perception of gains and losses arise and change. The second is the reality that international norms are rarely clear and often conflict, making answering questions of whether states have "internalized" or are abiding by norms problematic. This case is a good vehicle for addressing these questions as the dam dispute began during the communist period and has continued through the political and economic transitions to European Union membership. It also was the focus of a groundbreaking International Court of Justice case on the application of ecological necessity to treaty obligations. Fleshing out the model of a two-level game with insights from other theoretical perspectives, this article argues the key to this stalemate is the interrelated process through which state identity and understandings of vital interests change, creating frames in each state around different international norms. [source]