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Abstract: This paper explores the broader setting of urban and economic development that links ports and cities in Europe and aims at enhancing our understanding of the port‐city interface. A relational view is taken for linking local developments and policies with overarching, more remote spheres of influence and impact, which can be considered both beneficial and critical for the port and the city. In order to illustrate the argument, a framework of three issues is applied to discuss the port‐city interface: first, the role of ports as economic engines of their wider region; second, the cruise ship industry as a market segment that re‐connects port and city; third, semi‐political bodies and institutions that play key roles as intermediaries and knowledge brokers. The paper finally discusses the implications of relationality for governing the port‐city interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper interrogates the stability of relative geographical patterns of electoral results in Europe since World War II in a context of the dramatic socio‐economic changes and the deep transformations of the European geography. To do so, we propose a theoretical model in which regional political orientations along the Left vs. Right cleavage dates back to the end of the nineteenth century or even before, related to the land tenure, the familial structure, the time of the industrial take off or the impact of religion. Specifically, we show that the current electoral map is still partly related to such old structures, long after they vanish. To explain this hysteresis, we refer to the role of social networks and institutions embedded in places, allowing the transmission of electoral behaviour from one generation to the other. However, the West European electoral map has not been frozen, and, in the last part of the paper, we explain how major political and socio‐economic changes alter political behaviour of places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A diversity of place‐based community economic practices that enact ethical interdependence has long enabled livelihoods in Monsoon Asia. Managed either democratically or coercively, these culturally inflected practices have survived the rise of a cash economy, albeit in modified form, sometimes being co‐opted to state projects. In the modern development imaginary, these practices have been positioned as ‘traditional’, ‘rural’ and largely superseded. But if we read against the grain of modernisation, a largely hidden geography of community economic practices emerges. This paper introduces the project of documenting keywords of place‐based community economies in Monsoon Asia. It extends Raymond William’s cultural analysis of keywords into a non‐western context and situates this discursive approach within a material semiotic framing. The paper has been collaboratively written with co‐researchers across Southeast Asia and represents an experimental mode of scholarship that aims to advance a post‐development agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty years ago, Bob Jessop (1998) published a defining piece on the "rise of governance" and the "risks of failure", using the example of economic development to frame concerns with the state of capitalism at that time. This charted the rise of governance, outlined key governance practices, and offered preliminary reflections on the nature, forms, and logic of governance failure ‒ given that whilst there are already extensive literatures on market failure and state failure, governance failure required focused concern and thematic analysis. This paper, 20 years post‐Jessop on governance rise and risks, tells the tale of how governance in Britain (and England specifically) has marched on and, building on Jessop, has indeed failed, repeatedly and spectacularly. The paper reveals Jessop's governance dilemmas in action and specifically how the contradictions and crises tendencies of capitalism have both necessitated the use of, and been played out in and through, geographical space. The paper reveals an economic governance landscape of unresolved crises and contradictions, which is linked to problems of state rationality and legitimation, exhibited by the Brexit debacle in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Economic base (or export‐base) theory (EBT) is often presented as a Keynesian‐inspired theory that only accounts for demand‐side factors. However, the recent integration of supply‐side factors into economic base models (EBMs) can contribute to renewing applications of this type of model in regional economics. This paper proposes a literature review focused on new EBMs that explicitly take into account supply effects and includes both North American and European studies. It first explains why integrating supply‐side factors is relevant for EBMs. Second, the paper shows how to integrate these supply‐side factors into the various types of models, focusing on two production factors: land and its amenities and labor. Third, the paper discusses the conditions for integrating such supply‐side factors into EBMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of World Food Policy is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract: This paper aims to assess the efforts of the Saudi government in diversifying its economy. A descriptive analysis was used to evaluate the efforts the Saudi government exerted to enhance economic diversification through nine development plans covering 45 years (from 1970 to 2014). Two measures of economic diversification were applied, instability of private gross domestic product (GDP) and its relation to oil price instability, and relative contribution of private and public sectors to GDP. The research concludes that Saudi government has succeeded in moving towards economic diversification in the last two development plans compared to the previous seven development plans, although the economic diversification was a slow‐paced process. The performance of the private sector is still low which calls for a prompt intervention from the Saudi government to improve the legislative environment, competition, and attracting big international companies to enter Saudi market and raise the level of efficiency of the private sector and achieve its main goal of being less dependent on oil sector and its revenue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A major concern for developing economies is a dependence on commodities when their prices are volatile as a major change in the international commodity price can have important implications for economic growth. While some cross‐country studies exist, there is lack of country specific studies that take into account the different characteristics of low‐income economies. This paper contributes to the growing literature by considering the case of Malawi and the macroeconomic impact of price shocks in its major export crop of tobacco. Using a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) approach on quarterly Malawian data from 1980:1 to 2012:4, the paper establishes that a positive tobacco price shock has a significant positive impact on the country's gross domestic product, decreasing consumer prices and inducing real exchange rate appreciation. The results are robust to alternative specifications of a SVAR on difference stationary data and cointegrating VAR. The cointegrating VAR confirms the existence of a long run‐relationship among the variables and causality that runs from tobacco prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Colombo Plan and Point Four program were programs that provided technical and economic assistance to the newly independent countries of Southeast Asia. They represented Commonwealth and American attempts to promote economic development in the region. This paper will investigate how these policies, which were framed by US policy‐makers and academics, were adopted in Australia. In so doing, it will demonstrate the ways that development was perceived as an important consideration in the foreign policies of both Australia and the United States. It will also examine the place of these programs in the Cold War and postcolonial world of the 1950s. As this paper will show, the interaction of these factors would affect Australian foreign policy for decades to come, revealing much about the complex nature of the Australian‐American relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper reviews the recent (post‐2000) literature that assesses the importance of institutions as a factor determining cross‐country differences in growth rates or in the contemporary level of “prosperity.” It first sketches how institutional economics has evolved. It then examines critically the methods of analysis employed in the recent literature. The paper finds that this literature has made a major contribution to the analysis of the causes of economic growth but the relative importance of institutions as a determinant of long‐run growth and prosperity is still a wide open question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the finance-growth nexus in Italy over a period of more than forty years (1965-2009). After a review of the theoretical and empirical literature, the paper provides evidence that the aggregate indicators of financial depth, constructed by Beck et al. () and widely used in the literature, played no significant role in spurring economic growth, after controlling for the main determinants of growth and corrected for endogeneity biases. The indicator of private credit to GDP-considered the most important measure of financial development-adversely affected growth in the period studied. By contrast, financial development indicators have a positive impact when are associated directly with the real investment rate. The results are robust to the inclusion of various controls and changes in the conditioning set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Irrigation & Drainage is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract: This paper extends a two‐period overlapping generations model of endogenous growth where the interactions between public infrastructure and human capital with research and development (R&D) activities and growth are studied. The paper makes two important contributions. First, it accounts for the spillover effect of the stock of ideas on learning, which in turn promotes the production of innovative technologies. In doing so, it brings to the fore a two‐way interaction between human capital and innovation. The paper then applies various econometric methods which confirm the above theoretical thesis. Second, the solutions of the model emphasize the important role public spending on infrastructure, human capital and R&D can play in promoting economic growth. However, the findings also show that trade‐offs in the allocation of public spending may inevitably emerge. In particular, investment in public infrastructure at the expense of spending on R&D is less likely to succeed in promoting economic growth, whereas it may be more effective to foster growth through an offsetting cut in another productive component, namely, education. In light of these potential trade‐offs, governments in low‐income countries need to use their limited budgets as part of holistic measures in order to achieve efficient outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contract farming is widely promoted by multilateral agencies as an engine of economic growth in developing countries. The agencies often stress the need for governments to create strong farmers' organizations that can shoulder the risks associated with contractual relationships with large corporations. However, empirical studies of farmers' organizations in contractual schemes are few and tend to dismiss the performances of these organizations for not measuring up to donor expectations. This paper seeks to offer a more unbiased examination of what farmer's organizations actually do by recounting the development of out-growers' associations in a contract farming scheme in central Tanzania. The paper explores the new space for social organization and business operations which emerged after privatization in 1998. It is argued that under certain conditions, out-grower associations occupy a crucial position with regard to classic agrarian questions of land, labour and capital accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent headlines frequently refer to rising inequality and its implication on economic growth and social welfare. Addressing the latter is difficult and requires more than simply looking at GDP, as Kuznets long ago pointed out. In this paper we focus on the importance of the income measure underlying the inequality measure when examining the relationship between GDP growth and inequality. We create a mapping using Census Bureau household survey data and Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) consumer expenditure data to create distributional measures of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) personal income. We show that for the period 2000-2012, inequality using personal income is substantively lower than inequality measured using Census Bureau money income, and the trends in both inequality and median income are different. This demonstrates the importance of using a measure a national accounts based measure of income when examining the relationships between inequality and growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses China's provincial border counties as samples to explore the role played by administrative boundaries in uneven regional economic development. The results indicate that the gap between provincial border counties and other regions is increasing and that economic diffusion to provincial border counties from developed regions is extremely weak. Moreover, provincial border counties have become economically backward. A regression analysis model that includes certain novel factors that are likely to influence economic growth confirms the significant effects of government intervention and administrative boundaries on economic growth in provincial border counties. This paper concludes that administrative boundaries' effects should be nullified by limiting preferential development policies and implementing policies that instead help provincial border counties engage in sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite economic growth since the recession, the gap between the richest and the poorest segments of the population remains one of the most pressing concerns of contemporary America. This paper uses IR-95/20, IR-80/20, and IR-65/35 ratios to measure the income divides between the richest and the poorest segments in the mid-to-large-sized metropolises of the U.S. Southeast, their variation across ethnicities, and their association with metropolitan level attributes such as diversity, segregation, socio-economic, and other built-environment, and labor characteristics. The income divide ratios serve as the dependent variables whereas principal components along with state-dummy variables serve as the explanatory variables in regressions analyses. The metropolises that are large, diverse, and better educated are the most income-divided whereas those with lower educated people are less divided. Metropolises with larger shares of their labor engaged in primary sectors of economy have higher income divides; this observation also holds true for African Americans and Hispanics. Metropolises that gained in intermixing during 2000-2014 are associated with a lower income divide and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1957 and 1990, nearly 100 nuclear reactors were constructed throughout the U.S., and nuclear power currently accounts for 20 percent of electricity production nationwide. Nuclear plants are often constructed in small communities for which they constitute a large source of employment and income. To date, 24 nuclear reactors have undergone decommissioning, and more are expected in the future, particularly as nuclear reactors age and face increasingly strict regulations. This paper examines the effects of nuclear decommissioning over time at the county-level on measures of employment, income, and population using difference-in-differences regression and propensity score matching. Panel data are obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau, and cover the years 1975-2014. The analysis finds that nuclear decommissioning is associated with positive and statistically significant increases in employment and per capita income over time. Results suggest that nuclear decommissioning may actually be a positive force in regional economic development, and concludes with limitations of the approach and implications for future research. As an emerging area of research, this paper is meant to build on previous work, as well as to provide a basis for further discussion and debate on the economic future of nuclear host communities and regional economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, fiscal rule was introduced to institutionalize rule-based fiscal control in India by enacting Fiscal Responsibility Legislation by the Union and state governments. Using a 14 year data set from 2000-01 to 2013-14, spread across 14 major states, this paper examines the impacts of fiscal rule on fiscal balance. Our findings confirm that the introduction of fiscal rule resulted in reduction in fiscal imbalance. The paper also found that, to comply with the deficit targets set by the fiscal rule, states resorted to spending cuts, primarily the discretionary development expenditures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying three prevalent approaches-Richard Florida's consumption-related Creative Class thesis, clustering of the creative industries, and global production networks of these industries-to understand the geography and development of the creative industries in existing literature, this paper reviews the significance and limitations of these approaches. It argues that existing literature treat these approaches 'stand alone' from each another, without acknowledging the importance of other actors and forces. Instead, these three dynamics do not function separately, but are interdependent and complementary. It points to a critical agenda for future research, arguing that it is the intersection and synergy between these three dynamics that together shapes the development of the creative industries. This paper calls for further research, first, to examine the interrelationship between the local and the global scales of the creative industries by adopting the Global Production Networks (GPN) approach and, second, to study the association between the consumption-related urban amenities and the production of the creative industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a large and growing literature on the relation between economic growth and poverty reduction. The evidence points to a negative correlation between growth and poverty. However, many studies also find that growth does not mechanically reduce poverty, arguing that in many cases rapid economic growth has not necessarily been pro-poor. This paper uses the concept of 'exit time from poverty' to assess the potential of economic growth to reduce poverty in Benin; thus accelerating the progress of the country toward the achievement of the sustainable development goal of eliminating poverty by 2030. It uses nationally representative household data covering the period 2009-2011 and analyses the impacts of various growth scenarios on poverty. The results show that, with a growth rate in income per capita of 4.2% per year, it will take between 7 and 10 years for the average poor household to escape from poverty. The paper also finds that stronger economic growth leads to shorter average time to exit from poverty. However, there is a lot of heterogeneity in the exit time from poverty, with various households' characteristics such as households' size and human capital being important determinants. Taken together, the results suggest that policies to accelerate poverty reduction should emphasize the development of human capital and ensure that growth is inclusive and pro-poor. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents estimates of the effects that terms of trade volatility has on real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita growth. Based on 5-year nonoverlapping panel data comprising 175 countries during 1980 to 2010, the paper finds that terms of trade volatility has significant negative effects on economic growth in countries with procyclical government spending. In countries where government spending is countercyclical, terms of trade volatility has no significant effect on growth. Conditional on the mediating role of government spending cyclicality, the GDP share of domestic credit to the private sector has no significant effect on the relationship between growth and terms of trade volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans growth framework it is shown that for an optimum a benevolent social planner cannot have an excessive "love of wealth". With a "right" "love of wealth" an optimum exists and implies higher long-run per-capita capital, income, and consumption relative to the standard model. This has important implications for comparative development trajectories. The optimum implies dynamic efficiency with the possibility of getting arbitrarily close to the golden rule where long-run per-capita consumption is maximal. It is shown that the optimal path attains its steady state more slowly. Thus, the beneficial effects of love of wealth materialize later than in the standard model. Furthermore, the economy can be decentralized as a competitive private ownership economy. One can then identify "love of wealth" with the "spirit of capitalism." The paper thus implies that one needs a "right" level of the "spirit of capitalism" to realize any beneficial effects for the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine from a multidimensional perspective the possible existence of a single path that could have conditioned the degree of welfare state development ( WSD) in Latin America. Economic/industrial development, trade-openness, democracy and the strength of leftist parties-labour movement are used as explanatory variables in the qualitative comparative analysis. In contrast to previous findings, this paper shows that there is no evidence of a common path followed by countries with a relatively high/medium WSD. Nevertheless, countries that experienced a low economic/industrial development combined with a low democratic experience were conditioned to have low WSD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how development studies teachers in Japan are caught between Western and Eastern discourses of development amidst the changing political and economic realities unfolding in East Asia. The generally weak involvement of anthropologists in development studies teaching results in the preoccupation of Japan's development community with the task of uncovering the country's unique development experience distinct from the Western countries'. The paper argues that development studies institutions in Japan should become more sensitised to their identity as a source of discourse and that students doing development studies there should be taught to discern the competing Eastern and Western discourses of international development. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nature and origins of state-society relations in sub-Saharan Africa ( SSA). It traces the region's predatory state-society relations to slavery and colonialism and the concomitant extractive institutions, which are not conducive to sustainable economic development. Consequently, attempts to achieve sustainable development have been largely futile. The paper proposes a strategy for transforming the region's economic and governance institutions for inclusive and enduring growth and development. This strategy includes the promulgation and enforcement of coherent international codes and guidelines for state-society relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ongoing academic debate examines the implications of 'developmental patrimonialism' for African citizens. Rwanda is a key case study in this debate, with proponents of developmental patrimonialism and 'party capitalism' arguing that companies owned by the ruling party or the military play positive roles in economic development. This debate often focuses on macro-level, elite politics. This paper instead uses a Foucauldian lens to examine the micro-level politics of pyrethrum production in Rwanda, which is managed by a military-owned company. The company utilizes incentive-based governmental strategies, in line with state discourses, in addition to punitive, disciplinary regimes. The paper demonstrates that state agricultural strategies depend on multiple factors, including multi-scale political tensions between the ruling party's desire for control and its discourse of 'entrepreneurship'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the effects of the size of government on economic growth in a stochastic endogenous growth model involving the supply-side effect and demand-side effect produced by government spending. We show that a rise in the government spending affects economic growth through three channels, including the crowding-out effect, the spin-off effect and the resource mobilisation effect. We demonstrate that there exists an optimal size of government that maximises the economic growth rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines causal relationships between economic globalization, the three indices for product diversification of exports (Theil index, intensive margin and extensive margin) and economic growth in the unbalanced panel data framework in 139 countries over the period 1970-2010. We also consider the subgroup of the countries related to the income levels and run the panel Granger non-causality tests for heterogeneous panels. The empirical results indicate that there is a bidirectional causal relationship between economic globalization and economic growth. There is also a significant causal relationship that runs from all three indices for the diversification of exports to economic growth. After implementing various robustness checks, we observe that diversification of exports and economic globalization are positively related with economic growth merely in the upper middle economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a theoretical method to account for historical episodes of growth disparity. A numerical computation shows that the properties of the local dynamics of the proposed model are consistent with the facts indicated by selected episodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how political settlements can help deepen our understanding of how underlying rules of the game and power relations shape patterns of inclusion and exclusion, and prospects for political, social and economic transformation. Drawing on insights from a growing body of research in the area of the politics of development, the paper explores what kinds of factors have helped to foster more inclusive institutions across the developing world. By way of conclusion, it offers reflections on how a political settlement approach can enable donors to engage more effectively in efforts to foster progressive change. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a two-sector growth model in which industrial accumulation is sensitive to the factor-saving bias of technical change in agriculture. Agriculture features low factor substitutability and hidden unemployment and, in the baseline scenario, industrial growth is constrained by aggregate demand. Land-saving innovations are then shown to raise rural employment, enlarge the domestic market for manufactures, and bolster industrial accumulation, in contrast to labor-saving innovations. The baseline model and its extensions illuminate recent empirical studies which established that higher land yields boost industrial growth in developing countries, as well as accounts of the role of agricultural innovations in the industrialization of Japan, East Asia, and Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents stylized facts on agro-manufacturing, especially the food, beverages and tobacco (FBT) manufacturing value added (MVA) in Africa and empirically analyzes its determinants using data for a panel of African countries over the period 1990-2011. We also estimate for the sample of sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa during the same period. The analysis is extended to food and beverages (FB) only MVA. The analyses point to large differences in sector shares both across countries at different levels of economic development. Using a two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression method, it finds that a large proportion of the cross-country variation in FBT MVA and FB MVA can be accounted for by country characteristics, policy and institutional variables. In particular, the paper finds that an inverted U-shaped relationship with real per capita GDP for FBT MVA and FB MVA, except in FB MVA in North Africa where the reverse is true. Key positive drivers of FBT MVA for the entire continent include government consumption expenditure, household consumption expenditure, social globalization, dependence on oil, minerals, natural gas, coal and forest resources, arable land, and renewable electricity output. Major negative drivers are trade openness and population size. The policy implications and lessons of these results for increasing FBT and FB MVA and feeding Africa are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014 the authors of this paper, evaluators from China and Canada, jointly interviewed 12 policymakers in China at the national and provincial levels. This paper describes the needs of policymakers and how they view the evaluation capacity-building needs of the health system. The learnings from the policymaker dialogues informed the evaluation capacity-building efforts at three pilot sites in China. This paper focuses on the evaluation capacities needed by policymakers and implementers specifically to address inequities in the health sector, unlike most publications that focus on evaluation capacities of researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we outline how evolutionary economic geography (EEG) explains peripheral economic development by comparing two peripheries over extended time periods. This comparison involves critically appraising EEG's capacity to account for peripheral evolution. For geographical, historical, and political reasons, peripheries lack resources that lead to path creation and renewal. The hyper‐peripheral regions of the Pilbara in north‐west Australia and of Buryatia in south‐east Russia provide excellent comparative case studies for understanding how peripheral regional development evolves in ways contingent upon time, state institutions, natural resource endowments, and region/firm dynamics. Our analysis shows that EEG is well equipped to deal with historical factors and capitalist economies but it struggles to reconcile these regions' resilience and ability to sustain both Indigenous and non‐Indigenous socio‐economies. Development in these regions over extended periods of time invites questions about whether it is appropriate to apply EEG and its constituent parts: path creation, renewal, and exhaustion; regional resilience; and institutional thinness and thickness. In addressing those questions, we show that EEG can incorporate temporal development, stretching over long periods and economic analysis. We also critique the extent to which EEG can be used to consider how state activities influence path creation and renewal, the importance of extra‐regional contexts, and heterodox and Indigenous perspectives. This paper compares the long histories of the Pilbara, Australia, and Buryatia, Russia, to examine the economic development of hyper‐peripheries. We use Evolutionary Economic Geography over extended time periods, as well as Indigenous perspectives, to show how peripherality is both ingrained over time and also defined based on core‐periphery power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the effect of corruption on the economic development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries. Using panel data covering the period from 2000 to 2018 and leveraging on two‐way fixed‐effect and system generalized method of moments estimators, we show that a one standard deviation increase in corruption, as measured by the reversed Transparency International's corruption perception index, is associated with a decrease of 12.2% in gross domestic product per capita and a decrease of 3.05% in economic growth. This supports the view that corruption "sands the wheels" of the development of Latin American and Caribbean countries rather than "grease the wheels" perspective that corruption may help compensate for bad governance. We also assess the potential mechanisms through which corruption affects economic performance, providing evidence that corruption is associated with lower investment in physical capital and lower foreign investment flow. Finally, a panel Granger causality test indicates a bidirectional causality between higher corruption and lower economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Excessive support from banks and governments to poorly‐performing firms, making them zombie firms, distorts financial resources—a common factor in firm innovation. Using a large sample of Chinese industrial firms, this paper investigates the impact of zombie firms on the innovation of healthy firms. The results indicate that the prevalence of zombie firms reduces the patent output of healthy firms and seriously jeopardises innovation. Endogeneity analyses and robustness checks validate the results. Further analysis reveals that zombie firms distort the credit resources of healthy firms, especially those that are state‐owned or in high‐tech industries, thereby reducing innovation output. However, the higher financial marketisation of provinces can alleviate this negative effect. This study contributes to an understanding of the negative consequences of zombie firms due to the distortion of credit and provides some policy implications for the disposal of zombies to promote high‐quality economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a unique hand‐collected dataset of 1,251 European Union banks and 20,850 foreign affiliates hosted in 154 countries, this paper investigates how both host country and home country regulations affect the decision on where and how to go abroad in developing countries as opposed to developed countries. We find that banks prefer high‐income countries with numerous activity restrictions and weaker supervision but less developed countries with less restrictions and stronger supervision. In all cases, they avoid locations with stronger capital regulation than at home. Regarding the choice of foreign organizational form (branches versus subsidiaries), banks rather operate subsidiaries in both high and middle‐income countries with stringent entry requirements but prefer branches in developing countries with stringent capital requirements and greater supervisory power. Our findings contribute to the literature examining bank internationalization and have several policy implications for regulatory reforms in developing and developed countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a comparative case study of Nikola Tesla's use as a symbol in interwar Yugoslavia and the contemporary United States to build upon Anderson's theory of modular nationalism. The modularity of national symbols, I argue, is driven by their utility in addressing similar social, political and economic transformations in different countries and may be transmissible through emigrant communities—albeit not without some changes in substance. Just as Yugoslavia used Tesla to bridge ethnic divisions, Yugoslav emigrants deployed Tesla to enhance their status in the United States. The cult of Tesla, moreover, is doubly modular, with its Yugoslav incarnation drawing inspiration from the American cult of Thomas Edison, just as Edison's current obsolescence as a symbol led to the cult of Tesla's adoption in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land finance has become one of the important major sources of fiscal revenue for Chinese local governments. The spatial allocation of land use constitutes a land‐leasing policy operation of local officials, contributing to local economic development and fluctuation. Applying data from 283 prefectural units from 2003 to 2012, this paper explores the existence of land finance cycles, focussing on the changes of the amount (as in 'area') of land‐leasing by negotiation or by auction. The empirical results suggest that land finance cycles synchronise with the PCCP (Provincial Congress of the Communist Party) cycles, in which a prefectural leader decreases the amount of land leased through negotiation and increases that of land leased through auction prior to the year of the PCCP. The findings of empirical results are consistent with the prediction of our theoretical model. Additionally, due to the existence of high uncertainty of prefectural leaders' tenure and political turnover, the effect of prefectural leaders' tenure on land finance cycles is more apparent in the early years of their tenure. The results indicate that Chinese leaders' fiscal strategies are likely to be driven by career concerns for the purpose of maximising a measured economic performance and fiscal rents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International travel has been hypothesized to shape large cross‐country differences in productivity and income. However, evidence supporting this hypothesis, especially from developing countries, remains scarce. This paper fills this gap by studying a novel historical natural experiment—China's removal of travel restrictions on foreigners to designated Open‐to‐Foreigners‐Counties (OFCs). Utilizing the county‐by‐county rollout of the OFCs, we find that removing travel restrictions on foreigners led to a 7.4% increase in per capita industrial output for the OFCs in 1985–1991. The positive effects are larger in counties with more foreign equipment and greater industrial human capital. We highlight the role of person‐based international knowledge diffusion in the economic catch‐up of technology recipient countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is mounting theoretical and empirical research that explains the reasons for the rapid expansion of China's export trade, but they mostly ignore the effects of cultural differences. To fill this gap, this paper provides an empirical investigation of how cultural diversity affects the sustainable development of trade, which is defined as the goal of maintaining certain volume of trade and making trade growth sustainable. The findings are as follows. (1) Cultural diversity can significantly promote the sustainable development of trade. (2) Entrepreneurship is the possible channel wherein cultural diversity affects the sustainable development of trade, including innovation entrepreneurship and business entrepreneurship. (3) Further studies demonstrate that economic openness has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between cultural diversity and the sustainable development of trade. That is, the higher the level of openness of a city, the stronger the promotion of cultural diversity to the sustainable development of trade. This study not only deepens understanding on the relationship between culture and trade but also provides important policy implications for many countries that have high migration rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human agency has become a core topic in economic geography complementing traditional, structural approaches to explain regional development. This paper contributes firstly with a discussion of the theoretical and conceptual relationships between the agency of individuals, organizations, and systems. Secondly, it proposes a novel analytical framework for studying how human agency, combined with external changes affects regional economic development, and how regional structural preconditions and external changes explain the activation of change agency. Thirdly, the relevance of the framework is examined through comparative studies of about 20 years of industrial development in three Norwegian regions. This illuminates the importance of human agency in regional transformation processes, how regional preconditions influence but not determine the activation of change agency, as well as why and how regional policy plays a role in the emergence of change agency. Yet, future research needs to investigate the context conditions, which promote or hinder the activation of change agency, to trace change in economic activities over time and link it to causal mechanisms, and to pay attention to the unintended consequences of change agency in the longer‐term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Services constitute a significant part of GDP and overall trade in modern economies, but little is known about the magnitude of its obstacles. Great effort has been made to establish measures of services trade frictions on the part of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank. A customary way of using these measures is to employ them in log‐linear regressions to gauge their effect on services trade flows. This may be problematic to the extent that these measures do not capture ad valorem (tariff type price increasing) trade costs. Hence, it is natural to believe that available services trade cost measures may have a nonlinear impact on services trade flows. The present paper documents that this is the case, using nonparametric estimates to quantify the direct impact of important trade cost measures captured by the Services Trade Restrictiveness Index of the OECD on cross‐border services transaction costs and trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the medium‐ to long‐run effects of slavery in the United States in a spatial regression discontinuity design. Using the boundary between free and slave states immediately antebellum, we find that legal slavery decreased per capita manufacturing output by as much as 30% in the decades following the Civil War. Perhaps surprisingly, agricultural output and farm values were only briefly depressed in former slave states after the war. Although emancipation ended slavery, political forces kept the institution from being completely disintegrated, and we explore channels through which this was possible. We show that slavery affected the structure of the economy in a given region—specifically through agricultural production decisions—and that these structures persisted long after passage of the 13th Amendment. However, sharecropping played a relatively small role in this region. Our results support mounting evidence in recent literature of the significant and lasting effects of institutions on economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses empirical evidence to examine the causality relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth in OPEC countries by using annual data (1980-2011); this paper also utilises the panel cointegration and panel-based error correction approach models and framework. To the best of the authors' knowledge, most of the studies in this field have applied the error correction models, auto regressive distributed lag and panel data based on fixed-effect model in which coefficients obtained by these models cannot be deemed as a general finding applicable for other countries. The superiority of our article is in applying full modified ordinary least square estimation method for heterogeneous panels; our study also has stable and consistent coefficients and is also a dynamic model. Moreover, with regard to previous studies, our paper includes more countries which increase the reliability of the results. The results indicate that a long-run relationship exists between real gross domestic product ( GDP), electricity consumption and trade activities that involve export and import (control variable). The short-run results also indicate the importance of electricity consumption to economic growth and vice versa, supporting the feedback hypothesis which asserts that energy policies oriented towards improvements in electricity consumption efficiency would not adversely affect real GDP. It also apears that policies for energy efficiency have no statistically significant impact on economic growth in long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What causes firm-level product innovation in developing economies? This paper answers this question by emphasizing the role of process improvements that are influential in product innovation. We construct a firm-level innovative capability score using novel, broad-based, but detailed data on various process improvement practices obtained from firms in Southeast Asia. We then investigate the factors that may affect innovative capability. We also estimate the effect of the innovative capability score on product innovation controlling for research and development intensity and other firm characteristics. Our empirical investigation identifies a chief executive officer ( CEO)'s past experience at a foreign or large firm, and buyer pressure to adopt international standards as key determinants of innovative capability. Novel and unique findings from our examination include: ( i) the impact of a CEO's past experience at a foreign or large firm on the innovative capability is larger for local enterprises and small- and medium-sized enterprises; ( ii) the impact of share of foreign workers in the upper managerial levels only appears to be significant in foreign firms and larger firms; and ( iii) buyer pressure is a more likely contributor to innovative capability compared with capital tie-ups with multinational enterprises or joint venture buyers that capture vertical technology transfers. Finally, our empirical results show that a firm in Southeast Asia is more likely to achieve product innovation if the firm has had a higher innovative capability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the determinants of economic growth in developing countries within the standard growth regression framework, with special attention being paid to the experience of landlocked developing countries ( LLDCs). The results confirm that the landlockedness hampers economic growth, but the magnitude of negative impact is sensitive to alternative estimation methods. However, the analysis suggests that good governance, trade openness and coordinating infrastructure development with neighbours explain the significant aspect of the inter-country differences in growth rates among LLDCs. The results also suggest that African landlocked countries are not different from the other LLDCs. Contrary to the 'resource curse' hypothesis, natural resources seem to contribute to economic growth of LLDCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]