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Publications (82)
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Ethiopia has experienced rapid economic growth since 2005. Real gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an average rate of 10.5 per cent per annum for the period between 2004–05 and 2013–14. Public investment in key infrastructure and interventions in the agriculture sector have made important...
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This paper looks to uncover the growth traps and opportunities for the South African economy, with a focus on underlying labour market dynamics. We explore the potential of South Africa’s demographic dividend. We also consider the structure of the labour market and the growth-employment interactions...
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Ghana’s status as one of the African Lions is linked to the country’s remarkable growth performance, which culminated in the attainment of lower middle-income status. However, employment response to growth has been weak. Additionally, growth has been accompanied by substantial reduction in poverty...
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– Kenya country case study
This paper mainly analyses the drivers of economic growth in Kenya and the linkages to the labour market dynamics, with a focus on population growth, its structure, and the prospects of reaping a demographic dividend. This is in recognition that Kenya, as the ninth largest economy in Africa and the...
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This study examines the relationship between growth and employment in Nigeria to gain insights into the country's paradox of high economic growth alongside rising poverty and inequality. The methodology adopted is the Shapley decomposition approach, complemented with econometric estimation of the...
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Over the past twenty years, Mozambique has achieved remarkable progress in promoting macroeconomic growth and stability. Nonetheless, poverty rates remain high and labour market activity is dominated by smallholder farming. We use recent household survey data to dig into these trends and provide an...
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– The Case of Latin American Countries
Foreign bank presence has substantially increased in Latin America during the second half of the 1990s, which has prompted an intense debate on its banking and macroeconomic consequences. In this paper, we apply ARCH techniques to jointly estimate the impact of foreign bank presence on the level and...
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Trade flows among countries have increased dramatically during the last globalization episode creating new winners and losers between and within countries. This paper revisits the contested topic of the impact of globalization on within-country inequality in Latin America from a historical...
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– Evidence from China and India
This paper examines the country specific effect of policy reform on infrastructure spending in China and India. In China we have examined how marketization and decentralization has affected the composition of provincial public expenditure and in the case of India we have examined the impact of...
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– The Empirical Study of Brazil
Set in the context of the recent theoretical and policy debates on appropriate exchange rate regimes for emerging market economies in a world of free capital mobility, the paper attempts to present the case for an intermediate exchange rate regime, drawing on recent theoretical and empirical...
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Using a comprehensive firm-level dataset spanning the period 1998-2005, this paper provides a thorough investigation of the relationship between firm size, total factor productivity growth and financial structure in China, controlling for the endogeneity of the latter. Generally, it finds financing...
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This paper uses annual aggregate data for 36 low or middle income countries covering the period 1995-2001 to investigate the effect of FDI on private investment. It also explores if the relationship between FDI and private investment is influenced by the nature of the political regime, using four...
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For many in Latin America, the increasing participation of China and India in international markets is seen as a looming shadow of two ‘mighty giants’ on the region’s manufacturing sector. Are they really mighty giants when it comes to their impact on manufacturing employment? This paper attempts to...
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– Long Term Forecasts for Regional Integration
Economic emergence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and India has fundamentally altered the economic landscape of Asia and its relation to the global economy. Using the new dynamic global model, we present forecasts for Asian expansion over 2025. These baseline growth forecasts elucidate...
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– Brazil and the CIBS in a Comparative Perspective
Schumepterian growth theory stresses the role of structural change in long run growth. Countries which increase the share of technology-intensive sectors in their economic structures benefit more from technological learning and innovation. In addition, they are more able to respond to changes in the...
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China’s global expansion has led to concerns amongst other developing country exporters that they will be displaced by Chinese competition in their export markets. The paper develops a new index to measure the extent of the competitive threat which countries face from China, which is then applied to...
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– The Role of FDI
China has been running a large trade surplus with the rest of the world, particularly with the USA and EU. This has caused considerable diplomatic tensions and tremendous pressure on the Chinese currency. Existing analytical studies, however, mostly focus on real exchange rate and income as...
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– US FDI in Emerging Economies
The paper investigates the impact of exchange rates on US foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to a sample of 16 emerging market countries using annual panel data for the period 1990-2002. Three separate exchange rate effects are considered: the value of the local currency (a cheaper currency...
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China’s engagement in the so-called international fragmentation of production – namely ‘cross-border dispersion of component production/assembly within vertically integrated manufacturing industries’ – has become an increasingly important form of its economic integration into the regional as well as...
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– A Bird’s Eye (Re)view
The paper builds a framework for the analysis of research and development (R&D) offshoring and outsourcing that encompasses several strands of the economics literature. It surveys the predictions from key theoretical models advanced in the literature on international trade, foreign direct investment...
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– An Analysis of Services and Manufacturing
Manufacturing has traditionally been regarded in the development literature as having special ‘growth-pulling’ or ‘growth-enhancing’ properties. The share of manufacturing in GDP has been declining slightly over time in South Africa, while that of services has been growing. This study focuses on the...
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Static and dynamic gains from trade are the reasons why countries embark on the path of free trade, expecting this to promote industrialization and development. There is nothing, however, in the conventional theory of international trade that guarantees that these gains will materialize and even if...
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– The Case of China
This paper analyses the paths of technology development among regions with heterogeneous economic and technological characteristics, focusing on the case of China. It finds that intra-national technology transfer, that is, the technology transfer from technologically advanced provinces to less...
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– The Case of Brazil and the Czech Republic
The bulk of recent literature on foreign exchange interventions has overlooked the potential interdependencies that may exist between these operations and the conduct of monetary policy. This is the case even under inflation targeting and especially in emerging-market economies, because central...
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China’s economic miracle over the past three decades has been featured with its open-door policy, especially the absorption of foreign capital. One downside effect of economic reform has been the ever rising interregional inequality. As FDI is highly unevenly distributed across regions, many...
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– Extent and Impact
Should developing countries focus on diversifying their export basket or should they instead specialize their exports according to their existing comparative advantage? In this paper we attempt to answer this question by reviewing the literature on export diversification and specialization, by...
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– South Africa’s Influence and the Role of Technological Interaction in Botswana’s Diversification Effort
In less than a decade after the end of the apartheid, South Africa has intensified its economic ties with its African neighbours to become one of the top-ten investors and trading partners of many African countries, displacing companies from the former colonial powers in Europe. Among such South...
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Three features of China’s trade patterns suggest that elements beyond factor abundance explain its export performance. The high penetration in world markets of labour-intensive products has been accompanied by: (i) a high share in exports of productivity-advanced foreign-owned enterprises (FIEs),...
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– India in Light of China
The paper introduces a reform trajectory we call ‘revolutionary incrementalism’ in which partial and incremental measures add up to profound transformation. Recent advances in economic theory demonstrate that growth is not hard to start: it almost starts itself, somewhere, sometimes. But keeping it...
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– The Roles of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa
Software technology is gaining prominence in national information technology (IT) strategies due to its huge potential for socioeconomic development, particularly through the support it provides in the productive sectors of the economy, delivery of public services and engagement of citizens. In...
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We use a modified gravity model to estimate the relationship between trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). We find evidence of a significant causal relationship from SADC’s exports to inward FDI. Distance (reflecting remoteness and transport...
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– A Comparative Study
The Indian economy has observed significant trade reforms since the mid 1980s, and the Indian manufacturing sector has rapidly increased its integration with the world economy. In this paper, we ask the question: did the increased trade integration create or destroy jobs in the Indian manufacturing...
Displaying 32 of 82 results