Economy

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Kinds of Economy

  • advanced economy
  • african economy
  • agglomeration economy
  • agrarian economy
  • agricultural economy
  • american economy
  • area economy
  • asian economy
  • australian economy
  • british economy
  • capitalist economy
  • carbon economy
  • china economy
  • chinese economy
  • colonial economy
  • command economy
  • competitive economy
  • country economy
  • cultural economy
  • developed economy
  • developing economy
  • diverse economy
  • domestic economy
  • east asian economy
  • emerge economy
  • emerging economy
  • emerging market economy
  • ethnic economy
  • euro area economy
  • european economy
  • exchange economy
  • external economy
  • formal economy
  • fuel economy
  • german economy
  • global economy
  • global political economy
  • growing economy
  • health economy
  • household economy
  • human economy
  • indian economy
  • industrial economy
  • industrialized economy
  • informal economy
  • information economy
  • international economy
  • international political economy
  • italian economy
  • japanese economy
  • knowledge economy
  • korean economy
  • large economy
  • learning economy
  • liberal market economy
  • local economy
  • major economy
  • market economy
  • mixed economy
  • modern economy
  • monetary economy
  • moral economy
  • national economy
  • new economy
  • new political economy
  • oecd economy
  • open economy
  • planned economy
  • political economy
  • real economy
  • regional economy
  • rural economy
  • scale economy
  • scope economy
  • service economy
  • singapore economy
  • small open economy
  • social economy
  • south african economy
  • spatial economy
  • state economy
  • tourist economy
  • transition economy
  • transitional economy
  • u.s. economy
  • uk economy
  • urban economy
  • us economy
  • western economy
  • whole economy
  • world economy

  • Terms modified by Economy

  • economy approach
  • economy literature
  • economy model
  • economy models
  • economy perspective

  • Selected Abstracts


    INFLATION TARGETING AND THE ECONOMY: LESSONS FROM CANADA'S FIRST DECADE

    CONTEMPORARY ECONOMIC POLICY, Issue 1 2001
    C Freedman
    Inflation targeting has become the centerpiece of the monetary policy framework in a number of industrial countries and emerging economies. The first part of this article examines the Canadian experience with inflation targeting since its introduction in early 1991 and various issues that require resolution in establishing such a framework. It also examines the way inflation targets deal with demand, price, and productivity shocks. The second part focuses on Canada's economic performance during the 1990s. Factors other than monetary policy - most notably private sector restructuring and the fiscal situation in the first half of the decade - played an important role in the sluggishness of the recovery from the recession of 1990,91. Trend growth in Canada during the 1990s was lower than in earlier periods and than U.S. trend growth over the same period. The article examines the role of such factors as productivity growth and participation rates in explaining the differences. I conclude that a good monetary policy is necessary but not sufficient for good economic outcomes. [source]


    THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF OVERLAPPING JURISDICTIONS AND THE FRENCH/DUTCH REJECTION OF THE EU CONSTITUTION

    ECONOMIC AFFAIRS, Issue 1 2006
    Jean-Luc Migué
    In seeking to protect their failed social model by rejecting the EU constitution, French and Dutch voters ironically contributed to promoting the very ,liberal' order they misunderstand and despise. When, as in federalist politics, functions overlap, two levels of government compete for the same votes in the same territory in the supply of similar services. Not unlike the tragedy of the commons in oil extraction, it is in the interest of both political authorities to seek to gain votes in implementing the programme first. The overall equilibrium supply of public services is excessive and both levels of government have a tendency to invade every field. Short of effective constitutional limits on the powers of the central government, a more decentralised EU offers an opportunity to overcome the common-pool problem of multi-level government. [source]


    ETHICS AND THE MARKET ECONOMY: INSIGHTS FROM CATHOLIC MORAL THEOLOGY

    ECONOMIC AFFAIRS, Issue 2 2004
    Samuel Gregg
    The ethical dimension of market solutions to problems is often neglected by their proponents. This article examines the market from the standpoint of orthodox Roman Catholic moral theology. It illustrates how Catholic theologians have contributed to thinking about the market, draws attention to Catholicism's positive assessment of entrepreneurship, and outlines paths for future Catholic reflection on the market. [source]


    AUSTRALIA-CHINA FREE TRADE AGREEMENT: CAUSAL EMPIRICS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

    ECONOMIC PAPERS: A JOURNAL OF APPLIED ECONOMICS AND POLICY, Issue 1 2008
    TRAN VAN HOA
    The launch of negotiations for an Australia-China free trade agreement (ACFTA) started on 18 April 2005, following completion of the joint feasibility study that showed substantial economic and trade benefits for the two countries. The paper reassesses these benefits by means of an empirical analysis with a view to providing improved inputs for informed debate on the benefits and costs of an ACFTA from the perspective of Australia and China. The implications of the findings for policy uses are also discussed. [source]


    IS INEQUALITY HARMFUL FOR THE ENVIRONMENT IN A GROWING ECONOMY?

    ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 1 2007
    HUBERT KEMPF
    In this paper, we investigate the relationship between inequality and the environment in a growing economy from a political-economy perspective. We consider an endogenous growth economy, where growth generates pollution and a deterioration of the environment. Public expenditures may either be devoted to supporting growth or abating pollution. The decision over the public programs is made in a direct democracy, with simple majority rule. We prove that the median voter is decisive and show that inequality is harmful for the environment: the poorer the median voter relative to the average individual, the less she will tax and devote resources to the environment, preferring to support growth. [source]


    [Commentary] FINANCIAL STRESS AND SMOKING CESSATION,A SILVER LINING TO THE DARK CLOUDS OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY?

    ADDICTION, Issue 8 2009
    FRANK J. CHALOUPKA
    No abstract is available for this article. [source]


    CULTURAL ECONOMY AND THE CREATIVE FIELD OF THE CITY

    GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 2 2010
    Allen J. Scott
    ABSTRACT. I begin with a rough sketch of the incidence of the cultural economy in US cities today. I then offer a brief review of some theoretical approaches to the question of creativity, with special reference to issues of social and geographic context. The city is a powerful fountainhead of creativity, and an attempt is made to show how this can be understood in terms of a series of localized field effects. The creative field of the city is broken down (relative to the cultural economy) into four major components, namely, (a) intra-urban webs of specialized and complementary producers, (b) the local labour market and the social networks that bind workers together in urban space, (c) the wider urban environment, including various sites of memory, leisure, and social reproduction, and (d) institutions of governance and collective action. I also briefly describe some of the path-dependent dynamics of the creative field. The article ends with a reference to some issues of geographic scale. Here, I argue that the urban is but one (albeit important) spatial articulation of an overall creative field whose extent is ultimately nothing less than global. [source]


    THIS IS NOT AMERICA: EMBEDDING THE COGNITIVE-CULTURAL URBAN ECONOMY

    GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 2 2010
    Robert C. Kloosterman
    ABSTRACT. The aim of this article is to broaden the epistemological basis for investigating the current shift to cognitive-cultural economies and the resurgence of cities and its socio-spatial articulation. The point of departure here is that the drivers of the structural changes are indeed more or less ubiquitous, but are played out in different national institutional and urban contexts resulting in potentially diverging cognitive-cultural economies. Four main drivers of change after 1980 are distinguished. The first is the rise of a new technological paradigm based on digital technology. The second is the thrust towards deregulation and privatization as planks of the neo-liberal political programme. The third is the intensification of all kinds of linkages between regions across the globe. The fourth driver constitutes the processes of individualization and increasing reflexivity that have fragmented consumer markets. By identifying distinct filters which might shape and mould the impact of these more general drivers on concrete urban areas, a comprehensive framework is presented that can be used to analyse and compare the trajectories of cities while linking them to a larger narrative of societal change. A central line of reasoning is that agglomeration economies , pivotal in Allen Scott's analysis of the emergence of a cognitive-cultural economy , are themselves embedded in concrete social and institutional contexts which impact on how they are played out. To make this point, we build upon Richard Whitley's business systems. Given this institutional diversity, we expect that various institutional contexts will generate different cognitive-cultural economies. [source]


    LABOUR AND LANDSCAPES: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LANDESQUE CAPITAL IN NINETEENTH CENTURY TANGANYIKA

    GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 3 2007
    N. Thomas Håkansson
    ABSTRACT. In a long-term and global perspective irrigated and terraced landscapes, landesque capital, have often been assumed to be closely associated with hierarchical political systems. However, research is accumulating that shows how kinship-based societies (including small chiefdoms) have also been responsible for constructing landesque capital without population pressure. We examine the political economy of landesque capital through the intersections of decentralized politics and regional economies. A crucial question guiding our research is why some kinship-based societies chose to invest their labour in landesque capital while others did not. Our analysis is based on a detailed examination of four relatively densely populated communities in late pre-colonial and early colonial Tanzania. By analysing labour processes as contingent and separate from political types of generalized economic systems over time we can identify the causal factors that direct labour and thus landscape formation as a process. The general conclusion of our investigation is that landesque investments occurred in cases where agriculture was the main source of long-term wealth flow irrespective of whether or not hierarchical political systems were present. However, while this factor may be a necessary condition it is not a sufficient cause. In the cases we examined, the configurations of world-systems connections and local social and economic circumstances combined to either produce investments in landesque capital or to pursue short-term strategies of extraction. [source]


    MONEY AS A MECHANISM IN A BEWLEY ECONOMY*

    INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 2 2005
    Edward J. Green
    We investigate the efficiency property of a monetary economy with spot trade. We prove a conjecture that is essentially due to Bewley (Models of Monetary Economics (1980); Econometrica 51 (1983), 1485,504). The gist is that monetary spot trading is nearly efficient ex ante in an environment where very patient agents can accumulate large enough money stocks to be completely self-insured. We also study examples where a nonmonetary mechanism is preferred ex ante to any monetary mechanism in a stationary environment, and where an inflationary monetary mechanism is preferred ex ante to a laissez-faire or deflationary monetary mechanism in an environment with impatient agents. [source]


    BANK OF AMERICA ROUNDTABLE ON THE REAL OPTIONS APPROACH TO CREATING VALUE IN THE NEW ECONOMY

    JOURNAL OF APPLIED CORPORATE FINANCE, Issue 2 2000
    Article first published online: 6 APR 200
    [source]


    PRIVATIZATION AND EFFICIENCY: FROM PRINCIPALS AND AGENTS TO POLITICAL ECONOMY

    JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 4 2008
    Alberto Cavaliere
    Abstract We survey the theoretical literature on privatization and efficiency by tracing its evolution from the applications of agency theory to recent contributions in the field of political economy. The former extend the theory of regulation with incomplete information to address privatization issues, comparing state-owned enterprises with private regulated firms. The benefits of privatization may derive either from the constraints it places on malevolent agents or from the impossibility of commitment by a benevolent government because of incomplete contracts. Contributions dealing with political economy issues separate privatization from restructuring decisions. They either explore bargaining between managers and politicians or analyse the impact of privatization shaped by political preferences on efficiency. The theoretical results regarding the relation between privatization and efficiency do not lead to any definitive conclusion. Privatization may increase productive efficiency when restructuring takes place whereas its effects on allocative efficiency still remain uncertain. [source]


    A REGIONAL ECONOMY, LAND USE, AND TRANSPORTATION MODEL (RELU-TRAN©): FORMULATION, ALGORITHM DESIGN, AND TESTING,

    JOURNAL OF REGIONAL SCIENCE, Issue 3 2007
    Alex Anas
    ABSTRACT RELU is a dynamic general equilibrium model of a metropolitan economy and its land use, derived by unifying in a theoretically valid way, models developed by one of the authors [Anas (1982), Anas,Arnott (1991, 1997), Anas,Kim (1996), Anas,Xu (1999)]. RELU equilibrates floor space, land and labor markets, and the market for the products of industries, treating development (construction and demolition), spatial interindustry linkages, commuting, and discretionary travel. Mode choices and equilibrium congestion on the highway network are treated by unifying RELU with the TRAN algorithm of stochastic user equilibrium [Anas,Kim (1990)]. The RELU-TRAN algorithm's performance for a stationary state is demonstrated for a prototype consisting of 4-building, 4-industry, 4-labor-type, 15-land-use-zone, 68-link-highway-network version of the Chicago MSA. The algorithm solves 656 equations in a special block-recursive convergent procedure by iterations nested within loops and loops within cycles. Runs show excellent and smooth convergence from different starting points, so that the number of loops within successive cycles continually decreases. The tests also imply a numerically ascertained unique stationary equilibrium solution of the unified model for the calibrated parameters. [source]


    THE EMERGENCE OF CENTRALITY IN A TRANSITION ECONOMY: COMPARING LAND MARKET DYNAMICS MEASURED UNDER MONOCENTRIC AND SEMIPARAMETRIC MODELS,

    JOURNAL OF REGIONAL SCIENCE, Issue 5 2006
    Christian L. Redfearn
    ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the emergence of Krakow's historic core as the city's economic center after Poland's economic reforms of 1989,reforms that introduced market forces into land markets. Using a semiparametric approach to identify pricing centers, an evolving and polycentric price surface is revealed. While the traditional city center emerges as the dominant node, the evolution of the price surface is far more complex than that found using alternative approaches. Accordingly, it yields superior explanatory power compared to simpler monocentric models and should caution against their use in metropolitan areas in transition or those that are polycentric. [source]


    EFFECTS OF INCREASED DELTA EXPORTS ON SACRAMENTO VALLEY'S ECONOMY AND WATER MANAGEMENT,

    JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN WATER RESOURCES ASSOCIATION, Issue 6 2003
    Stacy K. Tanaka
    ABSTRACT: Exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are an important source of water for Central Valley and Southern California users. The purpose of this paper is to estimate and analyze the effects increased exports to south of Delta users would have on the Sacramento Valley economy and water management if water were managed and reallocated for purely economic benefits, as if there were an ideal Sacramento Valley water market. Current Delta exports of 6,190 thousand acre-feet per year were increased incrementally to maximum export pumping plant capacities. Initial increases in Delta exports did not increase regional water scarcity, but decreased surplus Delta flows. Further export increases raised agricultural scarcity. Urban users suffer increased scarcity only for exports exceeding 10,393 taf/yr. Expanding exports raises the economic value of expanding key facilities (such as Engle bright Lake and South Folsom Canal) and the opportunity costs of environmental requirements. The study illustrates the physical and economic capacity of the Sacramento Valley to further increase exports of water to drier parts of the state, even within significant environmental flow restrictions. More generally, the results illustrate the physical capacity for greater economic benefits and flexibility in water management within environmental constraints, given institutional capability to reoperate or reallocate water resources, as implied by water markets. [source]


    ECONOMY OF THE GIFT: RETHINKING THE ROLE OF LAND ENCLOSURE IN POLITICAL ECONOMY*

    MODERN THEOLOGY, Issue 3 2009
    TODD S. MEI
    The theological revivification of the concept of gift and gift exchange in the last two decades has provoked questions on how notions of divine superabundance can be translated into economics. In this article, I relate the thinking of Paul Ricoeur, John Milbank, Philip Goodchild and Albino Barrera to a specific economic reform that entails seeing land enclosure as inimical to the stability and fairness of an economy. I refer to the political economy of Henry George (1839,97) which takes land value taxation to be its centrally defining principle for a just economy. [source]


    HOW TO RECTIFY UNFAIR TRADE PRACTICES AND TO ESTABLISH APPROPRIATE SUPPLY CHAINS AND BETTER BUSINESS CULTURE UNDER THE GLOBAL MARKET ECONOMY

    PACIFIC ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 5 2009
    Tsugio Ide
    Banning unfair trade practices stands alongside private monopolization and the unjust restraint of trade as a key theme in competition policy. However, it poses much greater difficulties to deal with the matter than either private monopolization or unjust restraint of trade. In recent years, ongoing economic globalization, advances in information communication technology and other factors have wrought major changes in the traditional supply chain: for example, in subcontracting structure. Given the role of small and medium enterprises in underpinning economic growth, lifting the basic quality and performance level of these firms and improving business conditions for them have emerged as key policy themes. New efforts are needed to establish fair trade as a business practice and to create a new business culture in corporation with competition policy, small and medium enterprise policy and business ethics, such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices. [source]


    ESTIMATED DYNAMIC STOCHASTIC GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM MODEL OF THE TAIWANESE ECONOMY

    PACIFIC ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 2 2009
    Wing Leong Teo
    Several versions of the model with different representations of Taiwanese monetary policy are estimated using Bayesian techniques. The major findings are that: (i) monetary policy in Taiwan is best described by a money supply growth rate rule; (ii) the Taiwanese economy is more flexible than the Euro area economy; and (iii) export price mark-up and investment-specific technology shocks are the main driving forces of output growth fluctuations in Taiwan. [source]


    TRANSFORMATIONS OF CHINA'S POST-1949 POLITICAL ECONOMY IN AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

    PACIFIC ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 3 2008
    R. Bin Wong
    This article lays out three different historical perspectives on China's post-1978 economic reform era. It argues that historical perspectives allow us to apprehend features of the Chinese economy as they are formed in particular moments and contexts at the same time as we can appreciate the ways in which the possibilities conceived and achieved both affirm certain past practices and reject others. Without such vantage points it is more difficult to explain the manner in which China's economy has changed in the past 30 years. [source]


    POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE DISAPPOINTING DOHA ROUND OF TRADE NEGOTIATIONS

    PACIFIC ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 3 2007
    Robert E. Baldwin
    In particular, it is argued that economic factors of the type traditionally emphasized by economists in their classrooms are by themselves inadequate for analysing the negotiating process. A variety of political economy factors are discussed as explanations for the disappointing results of the Doha Round. [source]


    INSTITUTIONALIZED CORRUPTION AND PRIVILEGE IN CHINA'S SOCIALIST MARKET ECONOMY: A GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM ANALYSIS

    PACIFIC ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 3 2005
    Ke Li
    First a Walrasian equilibrium in a market economy is computed; then we consider the effects on welfare when a privileged group is chosen to work as high-level administrators. Finally, we allow for explicit collusion between administrators by introducing an administrator's agent who acts in the interests of all the administrators. The model shows that in equilibrium (fixed point) the degree of corruption, the degree of division of labour and productivity are interdependent. [source]


    CHALLENGES POSED TO OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT BY THE "NEW ECONOMY"

    PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT, Issue 1 2002
    ROBERT H. HAYES
    A growing number of sophisticated observers are coming to believe that the forces driving the so-called New Economy are fundamentally reshaping world industry. Moreover, the combination of fast growth and the excitement associated with leading edge technologies has made New Economy companies magnets for management talent,and particularly for the ambitious young people who attend our management programs. Are we providing these potential managers with a good foundation for managing operations in such companies? Are the principles that we traditionally have taught in operations management (om) courses sufficiently robust that they can still be applied to New Economy operations? In this paper we argue that, although some of our familiar concepts and techniques continue to be applicable to information-intensive operations, many are not. We sketch out a way to think conceptually about the important differences between the Old and the New Economies, and their implications for operations management teaching and research. [source]


    MONETARY POLICY IN A SMALL OPEN ECONOMY: THE CASE OF MALAYSIA

    THE DEVELOPING ECONOMIES, Issue 4 2007
    So UMEZAKI
    E42; E58; F41 This paper provides a case study to characterize the monetary policy regime in Malaysia, from a medium- and long-term perspective. Specifically, we ask how the Central Bank of Malaysia, Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), has structured its monetary policy regime, and how it has conducted monetary and exchange rate policy under the regime. By conducting three empirical analyses, we characterize the monetary and exchange rate policy regime in Malaysia by three intermediate solutions on three vectors: the degree of autonomy in monetary policy, the degree of variability of the exchange rate, and the degree of capital mobility. [source]


    DEMOCRATIZATION AND FINANCIAL REFORM IN TAIWAN: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BAD-LOAN CREATION

    THE DEVELOPING ECONOMIES, Issue 3 2002
    Yukihito SAT
    This study shows that many bad loans now burdening Taiwan's financial institutions are interrelated with the society's democratization which started in the late 1980s. Democratization made the local factions and business groups more independent from the Kuomintang government. They acquired more political influence than under the authoritarian regime. These changes induced them to manage their owned financial institutions more arbitrarily and to intervene more frequently in the state-affiliated financial institutions. Moreover they interfered in financial reform and compelled the government to allow many more new banks than it had originally planned. As a result the financial system became more competitive and the qualities of loans deteriorated. Some local factions and business groups exacerbated the situation by establishing banks in order to funnel funds to themselves, sometimes illegally. Thus many bad loans were created as the side effect of democratization. [source]


    MARKETIZATION OF THE CHINESE ECONOMY AND REFORM OF THE GRAIN DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM

    THE DEVELOPING ECONOMIES, Issue 1 2000
    Hiromi YAMAMOTO
    First page of article [source]


    POLITICAL ECONOMY OF GOVERNMENT SPENDING FOR TRADE LIBERALIZATION: POLITICS OF AGRICULTURE RELATED GOVERNMENT SPENDING FOR THE URUGUAY ROUND IN JAPAN

    THE JAPANESE ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 2 2010
    KOZO HARIMAYA
    This paper investigates the effect of political factors on the interregional allocation of the budget to assist farmers in coping with agricultural trade liberalization in Japan. We present a simple model to show the relationship between political factors and interregional budget allocation and empirically examine whether political factors played a key role in the interregional allocation of Japanese government spending for the Uruguay Round agricultural trade liberalization. Our findings show that this allocation was distorted due to political reasons, which was problematic from the standpoints of fairness and social efficiency. [source]


    EMPIRICAL IMPACT OF PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE ON THE JAPANESE ECONOMY,

    THE JAPANESE ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 4 2008
    CHRISTOPHER N. ANNALA
    We study the impact of public capital investment on individual sectors of the Japanese economy using time-series data for the period of 1970,1998. We employ a production function approach and also estimate a dynamic VAR/ECM model. We find significant differences in the employment effects, output effects and private investment effects across sectors. Public capital investment has a positive effect on employment in the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE), manufacturing, construction and utilities sectors; on private investment in the FIRE, agriculture, transportation, trade and services sectors; and on output in the mining, FIRE, trade and manufacturing sectors. [source]


    SUSTAINABLE CONSTANT CONSUMPTION IN A SEMI-OPEN ECONOMY WITH EXHAUSTIBLE RESOURCES,

    THE JAPANESE ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 2 2007
    RYUHEI OKUMURA
    To sustain constant consumption, Hartwick's rule prescribes reinvesting all resource rents in reproducible capital. However, Hartwick's rule is not necessarily the result of optimization. In this paper, we address this insufficiency by deriving a constant consumption path endogenously in a semi-open economy with an exhaustible resource, which has full access to world goods and capital markets, while the resource flows are not internationally tradable. Our findings show that, due to the essentiality of both capital and resource to the production process, the economy transforms its domestic assets into foreign ones, consuming a constant interest flow from the latter. [source]


    MACRO-FINANCE MODELS OF INTEREST RATES AND THE ECONOMY

    THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL, Issue 2010
    GLENN D. RUDEBUSCH
    During the past decade, much new research has combined elements of finance, monetary economics and macroeconomics in order to study the relationship between the term structure of interest rates and the economy. In this survey, I describe three different strands of such interdisciplinary macro-finance term structure research. The first adds macroeconomic variables and structure to a canonical arbitrage-free finance representation of the yield curve. The second examines bond pricing and bond risk premiums in a canonical macroeconomic dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. The third develops a new class of arbitrage-free term structure models that are empirically tractable and well suited to macro-finance investigations. [source]


    EARNINGS AND LINGUISTIC PROFICIENCY IN A BILINGUAL ECONOMY*

    THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL, Issue 3 2005
    ANDREW HENLEY
    Bilingualism is a widespread phenomenon, yet its economic effects are under researched. Typically studies find that bilingual workers are disadvantaged. Governments often protect minority languages through official promotion of bilingualism, with potential economic consequences. This paper addresses the impact of bilingualism on earnings, using the example of Wales. Results show a positive raw differential of 8 to 10 per cent depending on definition of linguistic proficiency. This differential persists in earnings function estimates, which control for human capital and demographic characteristics as well as local area effects. The potential endogeneity of language choice and earnings is addressed through the use of appropriate instrumental variables. Results suggest that bilingualism may be exogenous to the determination of earnings. [source]