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Author: Kaveh Majlesi Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 250
Book Description
This dissertation contains three chapters on international trade and investment in children's human capital in developing countries. The first chapter examines the effects of changes in labor market opportunities for women on the bargaining power of women within households and, ultimately, on investment in children's human capital. I show that a positive demand shock for female labor in a woman's age category increases her bargaining power, and this raises investment in the health of girls relative to that of boys within the household. To identify this effect, I exploit the geographic heterogeneity in demand for younger versus older female labor within the Mexican export manufacturing sector and its differential changes across municipalities between 2002 and 2005. I find that a 1 percent increase in labor demand for older (mostly married) women, caused by a demand shock to the export manufacturing sector, raises the share of decisions made by the wife in a household by 1.3 percent and the chance of a daughter being in good health by 1.1 percent. Previous research has shown that school enrollment in developing countries responds to a change in the return to education generated by a change in demand in the export sector, that pays higher wages for a given skill level. In the second chapter of my dissertation, using data from Mexico, I show that the negative effects of a lower return to education are not limited to lower rates of school enrollment. Parents also respond to a decrease in the return to education for children, as a result of an increase in labor market opportunities for very young, unskilled labor in the export sector, by reducing spending on children's education even while they are enrolled at school. This suggests that parents respond along the intensive margin as well as on the extensive margin. Firm level studies offer mixed results on the effect of ex-ante liquidity constraints on firms' export status. The third chapter of my dissertation explores the same matter using a new methodology. I predict that, controlling for the firms' productivity level and given that firms were not exporters in the previous period, a larger appreciation of the real exchange rate should have a larger positive effect on the probability of less-liquidity-constrained firms becoming exporters. I test this prediction using a panel of Mexican manufacturing firms and find robust evidence in its support.
Author: Kaveh Majlesi Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 250
Book Description
This dissertation contains three chapters on international trade and investment in children's human capital in developing countries. The first chapter examines the effects of changes in labor market opportunities for women on the bargaining power of women within households and, ultimately, on investment in children's human capital. I show that a positive demand shock for female labor in a woman's age category increases her bargaining power, and this raises investment in the health of girls relative to that of boys within the household. To identify this effect, I exploit the geographic heterogeneity in demand for younger versus older female labor within the Mexican export manufacturing sector and its differential changes across municipalities between 2002 and 2005. I find that a 1 percent increase in labor demand for older (mostly married) women, caused by a demand shock to the export manufacturing sector, raises the share of decisions made by the wife in a household by 1.3 percent and the chance of a daughter being in good health by 1.1 percent. Previous research has shown that school enrollment in developing countries responds to a change in the return to education generated by a change in demand in the export sector, that pays higher wages for a given skill level. In the second chapter of my dissertation, using data from Mexico, I show that the negative effects of a lower return to education are not limited to lower rates of school enrollment. Parents also respond to a decrease in the return to education for children, as a result of an increase in labor market opportunities for very young, unskilled labor in the export sector, by reducing spending on children's education even while they are enrolled at school. This suggests that parents respond along the intensive margin as well as on the extensive margin. Firm level studies offer mixed results on the effect of ex-ante liquidity constraints on firms' export status. The third chapter of my dissertation explores the same matter using a new methodology. I predict that, controlling for the firms' productivity level and given that firms were not exporters in the previous period, a larger appreciation of the real exchange rate should have a larger positive effect on the probability of less-liquidity-constrained firms becoming exporters. I test this prediction using a panel of Mexican manufacturing firms and find robust evidence in its support.
Author: Jessica Ellen Leight Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 141
Book Description
This thesis seeks to analyze two questions central to the economic welfare of rural households in developing countries: the trade-offs between equity and efficiency induced by hybrid forms of property rights, and the decisions made by households in the process of human capital accumulation, particularly in early childhood. The first two chapters examine the impact of periodic land reallocations and tenancy reforms in China and India, respectively, on intravillage land inequality and the investment decisions made by rural households. The final chapter turns the focus to inequality within the household, analyzing how intrahousehold allocation of educational resources in rural China responds to inequities in endowment between children. In the first chapter, I evaluate the impact of village-level land reallocations in China on household economic outcomes. Since land was decollectivized in China in 1983, village leaders have implemented regular forced reallocations of land designed to enhance intravillage equity and attain other policy goals. I estimate the impact of insecure tenure using the past history of land shifts as an instrument for current tenure insecurity, and find that an increase in the probability of losing the current plot yields a decrease in agricultural inputs and production of around one standard deviation. Though the costs of insecure tenure are high, structural estimates of the varying cost of reallocation across different villages suggest the choice to reallocate does reflect an optimizing process on the part of village officials, who reallocate where the net benefit is larger. However, the observed pattern of reallocations would be optimal only given an objective function for the village leader that places an extremely high weight on equity, and even given this objective function, there is evidence that village leaders may be making some costly mistakes. In the second chapter, coauthored with Timothy Besley, Rohini Pande and Vijayendra Rao, we seek to analyze the long-run impact of land reform in southern India. Though land reform policies have been widely enacted across the developing world, evidence about the long-run impact of these policies remains quite limited. In this paper, we provide evidence about these long-run effects by combining the quasi-random assignment of linguistically similar areas to South Indian states that subsequently pursued different tenancy regulation policies with cross-caste variation in landownership. Roughly thirty years after the bulk of land reform occurred, land inequality is lower in more regulated areas, but the impact differs by caste group. Tenancy reforms increase own-cultivation among middle caste households, but render low caste households more likely to work as daily agricultural laborers. At the same time, an increase in agricultural wages is observed. These results are consistent with credit markets playing a central role in determining the long-run impact of land reform: tenancy regulations increased land sales to the relatively richer and more productive middle caste tenants but reduced land access for poorer low caste tenants. In the final chapter, I analyze the strategies employed by households in rural China to allocate educational expenditure to children of different initial endowments, examining whether parents use educational funding to reinforce or compensate for these differences. Empirical results obtained employing early-childhood climatic shocks as an instrument for endowment, measured as height-for-age, indicate that parental expenditure is preferentially directed to the relatively weaker child. In response to the mean difference in endowment between siblings, parents redirect between 10 and 20% of discretionary educational spending to the child with lower endowment, and this effect is robust across multiple measures of endowment and multiple measures of climatic shocks. This analysis is consistent with the hypothesis that parents use the intrahousehold allocation of resources to compensate for differences in endowment and thus in expected welfare, between their children.
Author: Ann Harrison Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226318001 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 674
Book Description
Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.
Author: Gulfer Cengiz Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 186
Book Description
First chapter aims to quantify the role of trade in capital goods in cross country income differences. I construct a multi-country general equilibrium model of trade along the line of Eaton and Kortum (2002) and Alvarez and Lucas (2007) and introduce trade in capital goods and capital accumulation. In this framework, comparative advantage and the costs of international trade determine the pattern of production, specialization, and trade. I calibrate the model for 53 countries by estimating trade barriers and calibrating productivity parameters to match the bilateral trade data in 1996. The model is used to analyze full trade liberalizations. I find that removing barriers on investment goods accounts a large portion of reducing cross-country income differences and welfare gain. Counterfactual exercises suggest that developing countries gain relatively more than developed countries. In the second chapter, I focus on the impact of free trade on export-import ratios in two different sectors. I employ a multi-country general equilibrium model of bilateral trade patterns along the line of Eaton and Kortum (2002) and Alvarez and Lucas (2007). I calibrate the model for 20 countries by estimating trade barriers and calibrating productivity parameters to match the bilateral trade data in 1996. The model is used to analyze full trade liberalizations. The impacts of free trade are predicted to be an increase in the export-import ratios in the comparative advantage sector and a decline in the comparative disadvantage sector, on average. In developing countries the average percentage change in export-import ratios exceeds the average percentage change in export-import ratios in developed countries. Finally, in the third chapter, I focus on the intergenerational human capital transmission. I develop and calibrate a theoretical model that considers three mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of human capital: (i) persistence in learning ability; (ii) parental investment in child's human capital; (iii) higher teaching productivity of parents with more human capital. Within this framework, I find that (i) and (ii) plays important roles while (iii) does not. In addition the model generates the documented fact that higher-wage parents spending more time teaching their children in spite of the higher opportunity cost. I assess the role of nature and nurture effects in intergenerational persistence of earnings and I find that nature accounts a large portion of the intergenerational persistence in earnings. I also quantify the relative importance of these mechanisms on wage inequality.
Author: Mumtaz Hussain Shah Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
The first chapter assesses the relative importance of WTO accession in general and that of its three major components, that is, TRIMS, TRIPS and liberalisation in particular in increasing a developing country's attractiveness for overseas investors. Using annual data for a panel of 90 developing countries over the years 1980-2007, I found that trade and investment liberalization, removal of market distortions through TRIMS, strengthening and worldwide harmonisation of IPR standards through TRIPS adds to a developing country's ability to host additional FDI. Consistent with the prediction of the market size hypothesis, population is found to have a significant positive effect on inward FDI. WTO membership, agglomeration and sound macroeconomic management have plausible significant effects on FDI inflows. Traditional FDI factors such as infrastructure availability, financial development and education, though regarded as important location determinants, are not robust with respect to alternative proxies and specification of the estimating model. Language and geographic location dummies confirm that foreign firms prefer Anglophones, and are reluctant to invest in South Asia and Francophone countries. In the second chapter, I investigate the effects of linkage factors with OECD countries on FDI inflows into leading/emerging developing countries. I use the standard gravity model approach, utilising annual data for 12 developing host and 16 OECD source countries from 1990 to 2007, to demonstrate that the increased association between a developed and a developing country is associated with large positive foreign direct investment inflows to the developing country. I found that a bilateral investment treaty, trade agreement and adherence to intellectual property rights conventions/treaties, results in increased FDI inflows, and are increasing with market size of the partners and their geographical proximity to each other. Moreover, I have shown that this effect occurs not only in case of bilateral accords but also multilateral and global pacts involving other countries, signalling increased commitment of the host country to potential overseas investors. However, their effect is more profound when the source and host countries are both members of/adhere to the same pact. These findings are found to be robust across different estimation techniques, model specifications and alternate proxies for variables1 Finally, in the third chapter, I explore the effects of corruption and political and economic institutions on foreign direct investment inflows in five South Asian nations, that is, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Owing to the long-term relationship with the host, strong institutions and absence of corruption and bureaucratic intervention are crucial location advantages of host countries, especially for those which lack abundant natural resources to attract foreign investors like the SAARC economies. For a thorough analysis, I exploited not only the aggregate measures of institutional strength from Fraser Institute, Polity IV and Freedom House from 1970-2009 but also the disaggregated clearly focused set of institutional measures from the Political Risk Services, that are, the sub-components of the International Country Risk Guide for 1984-2008. I found that changes in the institutional variables do not have an overall significant positive impact on FDI when aggregate measures of institutional efficiency are employed. However, when these collective measures are disaggregated to a more clearly focused set of factors, their increased effectiveness leads to additional FDI inflows at least for some indicators.
Author: Amartya Sen Publisher: IDB ISBN: 9781931003568 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 140
Book Description
Basing their discussions on the concept of "intergenerational transmission of poverty"--the "process by which poor parents pass on poverty and disadvantage to their children," in the words of editor Moran (until recently a senior economist with the International Development Bank's Sustainable Development Department)--five essays reflect on political, philosophical, social, and other dimensions of investing in early childhood in Latin America. The essays include Amartya Sen's discussion of early childhood investment within the context of the overall development process, as well explorations of the relationship between health, nutrition, and cognitive and social dimensions of poverty; the impact of early childhood investment on economic growth and equity; and the role of the state in marshalling resources for early childhood investment. Distributed by Johns Hopkins U. Press. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
Author: Kaveh Majlesi
Author: Kaveh Majlesi
Author: Dhanushka Thamarapani
Author: Jessica Ellen Leight
Author: Ann Harrison
Author: Gulfer Cengiz
Author: Emanuela Galasso
Author: 
Author: Scott Burns
Author: Mumtaz Hussain Shah
Author: Amartya Sen