Relative Price Changes and the Growth of the Public Sector PDF Download

Author: M. Shahbaz Khan
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 25

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Author: Norman Gemmell
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This important new book offers fresh insights into the growth of the public sector in advanced and developing economies. The economic causes and consequences of changes in the size of the public sector (especially changes in public expenditure) have fascinated economists from the time of Adam Smith. From the early 1960s, interest has focused particularly on changes in the share of national income devoted to public expenditure. This has exhibited a long-run upward trend since 1945 in almost all OECD countries. Substantial fluctuations over shorter periods have also been observed. Understanding the processes underlying these phenomena is of clear importance for public policy makers, and economists have developed numerous theories attempting to explain them. The major questions of interest are: what 'forces' have been causing the share of public expenditure in GDP to rise over the longer term? Are these forces susceptible to policy? Is the public sector taking an increasing share of 'real' resources? Can government attempts in major OECD countries to control or reduce the size of the public sector in the 1980s and 1990s be sustained? What consequences follow from their success or failure? The Growth of the Public Sector focuses on this important issue and assesses the contribution to current knowledge of different theories including public choice, bureaucracy models, relative price effects and Wagner's Law. It also contains a number of new case studies focusing on specific government activities such as education, health and social security.

Author: M. Shahbaz Khan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Expenditures, Public
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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The relative size of the public sector and the rate at which its size changes may be severely underestimated in developing countries and overestimated in developed countries, if the indicator for the size of the public sector is the ratio of current public spending to GDP.

Author: Mr. Kangni R Kpodar
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1616356154
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 34

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Book Description
This paper investigates the response of consumer price inflation to changes in domestic fuel prices, looking at the different categories of the overall consumer price index (CPI). We then combine household survey data with the CPI components to construct a CPI index for the poorest and richest income quintiles with the view to assess the distributional impact of the pass-through. To undertake this analysis, the paper provides an update to the Global Monthly Retail Fuel Price Database, expanding the product coverage to premium and regular fuels, the time dimension to December 2020, and the sample to 190 countries. Three key findings stand out. First, the response of inflation to gasoline price shocks is smaller, but more persistent and broad-based in developing economies than in advanced economies. Second, we show that past studies using crude oil prices instead of retail fuel prices to estimate the pass-through to inflation significantly underestimate it. Third, while the purchasing power of all households declines as fuel prices increase, the distributional impact is progressive. But the progressivity phases out within 6 months after the shock in advanced economies, whereas it persists beyond a year in developing countries.

Author: Weicheng Lian
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 149832343X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Book Description
Over the past three decades, the price of machinery and equipment fell dramatically relative to other prices in advanced and emerging market and developing economies. Using cross-country and sectoral data, we show that the decline in the relative price of tangible tradable capital goods provided a significant impetus to the capital deepening that took place during the same time period. The broad-based decline in the relative price of machinery and equipment, in turn, was driven by the faster productivity growth in the capital goods producing sectors relative to the rest of the economy, and deeper trade integration, which induced domestic producers to lower prices and increase their efficiency. Our findings suggest an additional channel through which rising trade tensions and sluggish productivity could threaten real investment growth going forward.

Author: Timothy F. Bresnahan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226074188
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
New goods are at the heart of economic progress. The eleven essays in this volume include historical treatments of new goods and their diffusion; practical exercises in measurement addressed to recent and ongoing innovations; and real-world methods of devising quantitative adjustments for quality change. The lead article in Part I contains a striking analysis of the history of light over two millenia. Other essays in Part I develop new price indexes for automobiles back to 1906; trace the role of the air conditioner in the development of the American south; and treat the germ theory of disease as an economic innovation. In Part II essays measure the economic impact of more recent innovations, including anti-ulcer drugs, new breakfast cereals, and computers. Part III explores methods and defects in the treatment of quality change in the official price data of the United States, Canada, and Japan. This pathbreaking volume will interest anyone who studies economic growth, productivity, and the American standard of living.

Author: Michael D. Bordo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226066959
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, the immediate cause of the period’s rise in inflation has been the subject of considerable debate. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Here, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on the ways in which the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today’s global and increasingly complex economic environment.

Author: Alan T. Peacock
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing
ISBN: 9780751202564
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This work examines public expenditure, explaining the size and the structure of the system of public finance. Suitable for use as a course text, it can function as a point of departure for empirical and analytical studies on the behaviour of governments.

Author: David Currie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317215095
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
First published in 1980, this book collects 17 lectures presented at the annual conference of the Association of University Teachers of Economics covering a wide range issues and debates. They include new theoretical points, criticisms of existing theory, the reporting of empirical studies and their implications, and refinements of methodological techniques. Among the topics covered are government deficits and capital accumulation; macroeconomic issues of management policy and foreign trade; empirical studies of foreign exchange markets, and supply and demand of hours of work; public sector and welfare economics; risk and uncertainty; and monopoly, competition and markets.

Author: Pierre-Richard Agénor
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1451854781
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
This paper examines the role of the labor market in the transmission process of adjustment policies in developing countries. It begins by reviewing the recent evidence regarding the functioning of these markets. It then studies the implications of wage inertia, nominal contracts, labor market segmentation, and impediments to labor mobility for stabilization policies. The effect of labor market reforms on economic flexibility and the channels through which labor market imperfections alter the effects of structural adjustment measures are discussed next. The last part of the paper identifies a variety of issues that may require further investigation, such as the link between changes in relative wages and the distributional effects of adjustment policies.