How has the Great Recession influenced labour migration in Europe? What can Chile tell us about entrepreneurial traits and innovation? And what can struggling economies learn from the BRICS group of countries? These are a few of the questions tackled by our researchers over the last month — in two books, five journal articles, one research report, four working papers and two PhD dissertations, among others. Click here for the full list.
Books
‘Labor Migration, EU Enlargement, and the Great Recession’ aims to extend and deepen our knowledge about cross-border mobility and its role in an enlarged EU. More specifically, the book’s main purpose is to enlighten the growing and yet rather uninformed debate about the role of post-enlargement migration for economic adjustment in the crisis-stricken labour markets of the Eurozone and the EU as a whole. The book addresses the political economy aspects of post-enlargement migration, including its broader political contexts, redistributive impacts, but also nationalisation of the enlargement agenda. By Prof. Klaus F. Zimmermann et al.
‘Chile’s Salmon Industry: Policy Challenges in Managing Public Goods’ is the first book to analyse Chile’s salmon farming industry by discussing industrial development in terms of the management of public goods. The book highlights important aspects of learning and capacity development, environmental sustainability, institutions, and social welfare or inclusiveness. By considering the development of the Chilean salmon industry not only in holistic and historic terms but also from a socio-economic point of view, the authors offer insightful lessons that can be applied to other natural resource-based sectors facing similar challenges in the course of development. By Dr. Michiko Iizuka et al.
Journal Articles
‘Do remittances and social assistance have different impacts on expenditure patterns of recipient households? The Moldovan Case.‘ While two separate strands of literature have looked at how social assistance or remittances have been spent, few studies have compared them directly. Using data from a household survey conducted in Moldova in 2011, this article assesses the impact both types of transfers have on household expenditure patterns. Contrary to the common assumption that money is fungible, the authors find that social assistance and remittances have different impacts on expenditure patterns (having controlled for potential endogeneity). In other words, where the income comes from can determine how it is spent. As such, different sources of income may have different poverty impacts. By PhD fellow Jennifer Waidler, Prof. Franziska Gassmann, Dr. Melissa Siegel et al.
‘Tariffs and Firm Performance in Ethiopia‘ uses data on Ethiopian manufacturing firms and commodity-level data on tariffs to examine the effects of trade liberalisation on firm performance. The authors distinguish the productivity gains that arise from reducing final goods tariffs from those that arise from reducing tariffs on intermediate inputs. They find no evidence that output tariff reduction improves productivity, but find large positive effects of input tariff reductions. These are robust to alternative productivity measures, treating tariffs as endogenous, and various generalisations of the model. The article concludes that policy measures designed to facilitate access to inputs produced abroad may lead to productivity gains. By Dr. Mulu Gebreeyesus et al.
‘A new strategy: Coherent and complementary integration and development policies‘ looks at the tendency within the debate of migration and development nexus to consider migrants as agents of development without acknowledging the conditions under which migrants aspire to and have the capacity to engage in activities that link their migration experience with development-related efforts, be it on the micro or macro level. This article presents an argument for a new perspective in migration and development discussions. By Dr. Özge Bilgili.
‘The Dynamics of Stagnation: A Panel Analysis of the Onset and Continuation of Stagnation‘ analyses periods of economic stagnation in a panel of countries, tests whether stagnation can be predicted by institutional characteristics and political shocks, and compares the impacts of such variables with those of traditional macroeconomic variables. In contrast to the previous literature, this article explicitly examines the hypothesis that the effects of variables on the onset of stagnation and on the continuation of stagnation may be different. They identify several factors that explain the incidence of stagnation spells. By Dr. Richard Bluhm, Prof. Adam Szirmai et al.
‘The effects of remittances on support for democracy in Africa: Are remittances a curse or a blessing?‘ examines the effect of remittances on the legitimacy of democracy in Africa, testing whether remittance recipients are less likely to support democracy than non-recipients. The article hypothesises that the effect of remittances on support for democracy varies across classes (i.e., groups or subtypes) of individuals sharing similar but unobserved background characteristics. The results support that remittances may be a curse for the degree of endorsement and support for democracy, depending on the class of individuals that are considered. The analysis of the probability of being in the remittance curse class indicates that the perception of national priorities plays an important role. People who attest that freedom and rights are the main national priorities have a lower probability of belonging to the remittances curse class than individuals who choose national priorities that are oriented towards the economic conditions of their country. By Dr. Maty Konte.
Research Reports
‘Estimation of Rates of Return (ROR) on Social Protection Investments in Lesotho‘ seeks to estimate the Rate of Return (RoR) on Social Protection Investments (SPI) in Lesotho, thereby generating evidence to support the advocacy for social protection in Lesotho and assisting relevant ministries in planning the allocations for SP instruments. The primary focus of the study is the Child Grant Program (CGP). The findings suggest large program effects on poverty and inequality outcomes. Simulating the CGP on the national level reduced extreme poverty by more than 20% per year and reduced inequality by up to 7%. This indicates the potential of CGP for poverty reductions in Lesotho. By Franziska Gassmann, Dr. Nyasha Tirivayi, Dr. Stephan Dietrich and Hanna Röth.
Working Papers
‘Migration, occupation and education: Evidence from Ghana‘ investigates whether the occupational productivity and employment status of individuals living in a household with migrants differ from those living in non-migrant households and studies how migration interacts with the occupational choice and productivity of left-behind relatives. The paper finds that for migration to contribute significantly to structural transformation, it would need to be complemented by certain policies. First, policies to improve the quality and relevance of education, as this may be a major motivation for migrating and facilitating occupational mobility. Second, policies that will raise the productivity, waged-employment and consumption of rural households, including for instance measures to enhance the business environment for farming and rural non-farm enterprises, and that provide better (rural) social security. Finally, policies to support and enable greater internal migration will help promote structural transformation. By PhD fellow Clotilde Mahé and Prof. Wim Naudé.
‘Technological Innovation Systems and the wider context: A framework for developing countries‘ addresses limitations of the Technological Innovation System (TIS) functions approach and proposes a framework that both takes into consideration the wider context in which the focal TIS operates, while making adjustments to better account for the context found in many developing countries. The inclusion of the socio-technical landscape in the analysis of TIS proposed in this paper should be seen as a first step to improve the analytical comprehensiveness of the TIS framework. The author argues that it is important to find a balance between a comprehensive framework that takes into account the intricacy of the system and the factors that influence it, and a practical framework that can contribute to the decision-making process. By PhD fellow Hans-Erik Edsand.
‘The impact of ex-ante subsidies to researchers on researchers’ productivity: Evidence from a developing country‘ performs a short-run impact evaluation of a programme that provides ex-ante subsidies to researchers in Paraguay. The analysis of the effects of this type of subsidies, that are prevalent in Latin America, has received little attention in the literature. This paper examines the impact of the programme in dimensions of researchers’ productivity that have been mostly overlooked previously, such as technical production, own education, the training of other researchers. It also provides estimations of the impact on quantity and quality of publications based on more traditional sources of data. By PhD fellow Ezequiel Tacsir et al.
‘Structural transformation in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS)‘ provides a comparative overview of the experiences of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) with structural transformation since the 1980s. The paper evaluates the different outcomes in industrialisation in these countries, explores the reasons for success (and failure); and also asks what currently industrially lagging countries can learn from the BRICS in this regard, and what impact their industrialisation had on poverty reduction. The authors point out that important areas for future research and current challenges remain. Foremost in this is the need for BRICS to drive their further structural economic transformation through innovation, taking into consideration their stage of development and the particulars of the sectors involved. As they develop, entrepreneurship and the role of the private sector seem to become more important. The paper is based on their edited book published in 2015 by Oxford University Press ‘Structural Change and Industrial Development in the BRICS’. By Profs. Wim Naudé and Adam Szirmai et al.
PhD Dissertations
‘Entrepreneurial traits and innovation: Evidence from Chile‘ aims to broaden the understanding of the innovating entrepreneur, one particular character among the continuum of individuals who compose the heterogeneous population of entrepreneurs. This is interesting because innovating entrepreneurs are the ones that have the potential to generate larger economic impacts through the ventures they create. However, they are a select few among the population. New insights that uncover who they are and what makes them different from the rest is relevant from a policy making point of view. The research relies on both quantitative and qualitative methods to answer a set of research questions that explore the sources of entrepreneurial heterogeneity and how they relate to innovative ventures. By Dr. Jocelyn Olivari Narea.
‘Essays on the Role of Knowledge, R&D, and Technology-Based Firms in the Evolution of Socio-Techno-Economic System‘ focuses on technological change as a central topic in the field of economics and management of innovation. Identifying the locus of transformative technological change (TTC) and determining its direction is an important problem from the perspective of public policy as well as business strategy. This thesis proposes that this problem can be solved by shifting the focus of scientific inquiry from the product space to the knowledge space. It posits that knowledge as the DNA and ideas as the genes determine the evolution of a socio-techno-economic system (STES) and that structural change in this system follows the structural change in the universe of knowledge that is broadly organised in two domains, science and technology. It argues that the proposed change in the focus of inquiry will help depict the TTC more clearly and increase the prospects of predicting it. By Dr. Muhammad Shafique.
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