The thesis focuses on policy measures between 196A and 1978 to improve performance and growth in U.K.'s private industry. Underlying structural weaknesses and institutional constraints characteristic to U.K.'s company sector are identified and analysed in Part One. This exercise provides the basis for both a definition of the concept of "industrial policy" and a critical assessment in Part Two of its relevance and effectiveness to tackle industry's main difficulties. In discussing policy initiatives to assist companies with public funds for investment finance, industrial reorganisation and the application of new technology, a variety of problems associated with state intervention in private industry are highlighted. The various attempts by policy-makers to overcome shortcomings in the coordination of policy, communication with firms, public monitoring and exercise of control as a result of experience with existing measures and by means of new, more powerful instruments are examined in detail. Industry's growing difficulties and pressure on policy-makers to expand or at least improve public assistance meant that industry policy evolved, despite controversy and policy shifts, with a certain degree of continuity. In the three case-studies which follow, shipbuilding, computers and the NEB, these dynamics are explored in depth. One useful contribution of this thesis is to explain industrial decline in the U.K. economy in terms of supply-side constraints in the private sector. This approach avoids the methodological shortcomings of currently popular theories which instead concentrate on factors outside private industry, such as the public sector or international trade. The analysis of overall industrial policy since 1$6A and the attempt to develop criteria for assessing its effectiveness contribute to a better understanding of this subject. The case studies cover new areas of research. By linking the analysis of policy-making with theoretical hypotheses concerning industry's main problems the effects of policy measures in private industry can be evaluated to determine both the limitations and the potential of state intervention in private industry.

Increased competition in the modern economy has driven firms to search for increased efficiency, as well as an increased access to information. This, in conjunction with the continual advancement in information and communication technologies (ICTs), and coupled with falling prices, has inspired firms to adopt different types of ICTs in order to be competitive. This has heightened and provoked research interest in the effectiveness of ICT at the firm level. However, most studies on the use and effectiveness of ICTs in firm development have focused on developed economies, with mainly anecdotal evidence on many developing countries. Using data collected on 3,996 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across 14 Sub-Saharan African countries, the thesis examines the factors that motivates the adoption, usage and the contribution of ICTs to turnover of firms. The thesis uses a seemingly unrelated bivariate probit model and meta-analysis technique to determine the factor that influence SMEs decision to adopt ICT. We also employ two different production function specifications to ascertain the effect of ICT adoption on turnover of SMEs, as well as on technical efficiency. The effect of ICT on turnover is thoroughly examined also employing quantile regression technique to ascertain the productivity effect of ICT along the entire distribution. The thesis assesses the contribution of ICT adoption to turnover differential among various types of SMEs using a recently proposed decomposition technique. The factors influencing adoption decisions of firm vary significantly across the countries. Nonetheless, the meta-analysis identifies common determinants of ICT adoption among SMEs in these countries. The findings indicate that the ratio of users of computer and the Internet in an industry and perceived national competition influences adoption decisions of firms. Our findings also indicate that ICT capital have a positive and significant effect on firm’s output, suggesting that there is no ICT productivity paradox among SMEs in Africa. We also find that ICT adoption positively influences technical efficiency of firms. Further, the results show that the contribution of returns to ICT adoption to turnover differential varies considerable across income groupings of countries as well as various types of firms.

Environmental accounting literature reminds us that prosperity can be ephemeral if it is built on depletion of natural resources. Traditional national accounting practice ignores the loss of natural resources. According to standard environmental accounting, this produces exaggerated income, encourages unsustainable levels of consumption and is misleading when assessing the economic prospects of resource extracting countries. While the historiography of oil-extracting countries departs from entirely different concepts and methods, it contains plenty of arguments that resemble those of the environmental accountants. This thesis shows how Mexican and Venezuelan scholars have discussed the concept of national wealth, the ephemeral prosperity delivered by oil depletion and the biases that oil cash introduced in the perceptions of their countries' economic performance. Nonetheless the arguments in the historiography lack quantitative support for the most part. The dissertation connects these previously disparate literatures and explores the resulting synergies. A priori, it seems that environmental accounting provides the tools for quantifying the hitherto qualitative observations of the historiography of two countries with very different strategies regarding the depletion of their natural resources. While Mexico approximates very closely the theoretical case of a closed economy, Venezuela has been considered the textbook example of a resource-export-driven economy. In the end, history proves to be an excellent laboratory for an ex-post analysis of the concepts, models and methods of environmental accounting. This study contributes to the surprisingly small amount of comparative historical studies of the oil industries and the economic histories of Venezuela and Mexico. The most important conclusion derived from the comparative analysis of the theoretical models of environmental accounting is that the competing methods available in the literature seem to apply to different scenarios. Furthermore, the results of the thesis show that the role of technological change in sustaining the historical levels of consumption is substantial since the terms of trade did not improve in the continuous way needed to rescue economies from declining levels of consumption. This is an important finding because gains from trade have now been included in some environmental accounting models but technological change is left out. Overall, the thesis is an examination of the tractability and usefulness of environmental accounting as a tool of economic analysis over the long run.

This thesis consists of three chapters that study public service delivery, nutrition and agricultural productivity in developing countries. The first chapter investigates whether imposing price-caps on frontline service delivery agents enhances welfare. I implement a field experiment in which I randomize whether public extension agents are subject to a price-cap or not. I find that while price-caps are effective in enhancing the affordability of extension services and increasing recipients’ surplus, they also reduce the geographic coverage of services. This suggests that price-cap regulation creates a tension between making services affordable and providing incentives for agents to serve remote recipients. I then show that the marginal welfare effect of reducing discretion over prices can be expressed as a function of two sufficient statistics: the elasticity of geographic service coverage with respect to the price-cap and the price elasticity of demand. Calculating the welfare effects, I find that any reduction of agents’ discretion reduces social welfare. The second chapter is concerned with contract design in public service delivery when delivery agents are boundedly rational. A theoretically efficient contract that minimizes moral hazard costs and avoids behavioural distortions charges agents a fixed fee for the usage of public assets and makes them residual claimants on its returns. I investigate whether such contracts are indeed efficient in practice by investigating whether imposing lump-sum fees on livestock extension agents distorts their choices. Using a field experiment, I first show that, contrary to classic economic theory, levying a fixed fee on agents leads them to increase user fees for a livestock vaccine and induces demand effects that reduce quantities. To understand the mechanisms underlying this result, I implement a series of lab-in-the-field experiments with a subset of the field-experimental participants. The results suggest that instead of setting prices for user fees as mark-ups over marginal costs agents use simplified rules-of-thumb that anchor pricing decisions on aggregate profits. The results highlight that boundedly rational behavior can reduce the effectiveness of adopting fixed fee contracts. The third chapter investigates whether improvements to agricultural production technology, a common response to undernutrition, can enhance food security and improve nutrition. In India, groundwater irrigation using tube wells has long been promoted as a means to reduce rainfall-dependence and enhance food security. The merits of adopting tube wells have, however, been debated widely, with opponents fearing a deprivation of smaller farmers and impoverishment of rural laborers. To evaluate the causal effects of tube well adoption on nutrition, I employ an instrumental variable framework that exploits variation in land suitability for deep groundwater irrigation caused by differences in hydrogeological structures. I find that groundwater irrigation significantly improves nutrition across the income spectrum: a one standard deviation increase in the proportion of cropped area irrigated with tube wells increases calorie intake by 770 to 915 calories per day. In addition, groundwater irrigation generates positive spillovers on the calorie intake of urban populations and households not employed in agriculture. I present additional evidence which suggests that these effects are driven by increases in agricultural productivity that reduce staple prices and raise wage rates. The findings thus highlight the value of groundwater irrigation in fighting undernutrition and promoting agricultural development.

Multi-stakeholder Initiatives (MSIs) bring multiple stakeholders (usually government, business, and civil society) to a common platform to dialogue, design, and implement sustainable solutions to identified governance issues. However, what factors are likely to determine the effectiveness of MSIs? The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is a global MSI, established in 2003, that seeks to improve the management of natural resource wealth in implementing countries through increased transparency. This study examines the Nigerian EITI to explore the factors that influence the organisation and effectiveness of MSIs. We find that the Nigerian EITI (NEITI) falls short of a truly multi-stakeholder initiative and hence is limited in its impact and effectiveness in improving resource wealth management in Nigeria. Four factors deduced from a combination of agency and collective action theories appear to be strong in explaining the shortcomings of the NEITI. These factors are the Nigerian structural environment, the characteristics of the stakeholders to the Nigerian extractives industry, the emergent governance structure of NEITI, and the nature of external influence on NEITI. Evidence gathered from the implementation of NEITI, demonstrates that a combination of these factors has contributed to the difficulty in achieving a truly multi-stakeholder structure and hence the limited impact of the initiative on improving resource wealth management in Nigeria.

Firstly, we employ a three-state hidden semi-Markov model (HSMM) to explain the time-varying distribution of the Chinese stock market returns. Our results indicate that the time-varying distribution depends on the hidden states, represented by three market conditions, namely the bear, sidewalk, and bull markets. Secondly, we further employ the three-state HSMM to the daily returns of the Chinese stock market and seven developed markets. Through the comparison, three unique characteristics of the Chinese stock market are found, namely “Crazy Bull”, “Frequent and Quick Bear”, and “No Buffer Zone”. Thirdly, we propose a new diffusion process referred to as the ``camel process'' to model the cumulative return of a financial asset. Its steady state probability density function could be unimodal or bimodal, depending on the sign of the market condition parameter. The overreaction correction is realised through the non-linear drift term. Lastly, we take the tools in functional data analysis to understand the term structure of Chinese commodity futures and forecast their log returns at both short and long horizons. The FANOVA has been applied to examine the calendar effect of the term structure. An h-step functional autoregressive model is employed to forecast the log return of the term structure.

This thesis investigates the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in Egypt in the last four decades. To achieve this, five empirical studies are included in this thesis. The consumer‟s expenditure is estimated in Chapter 3, while the investment expenditure under uncertainty is estimated in Chapters 4. Furthermore, the results of these two chapters paved the way to the next chapters, the interest rate channel, chapter 5, and the bank lending channel, Chapter 6. Moreover, Chapter 7 devoted to estimate the exchange rate channel under the regime shift. However, Chapter 2 provides all the required discussion about the economic policies and developments in the Egyptian economy for the purpose of this thesis. The time series econometrics is used in all of these chapters. The unit root tests, the Engle-Ganger two-step cointegration approach, the bounds tests, and GARCH models are used in Chapters 3 and 4. However, unit root tests, the VAR models, Granger-causality, the impulse response function, variance decomposition, the Johansen‟s cointegration, and the VECM are used in Chapters 5, 6, and 7. The results of these chapters assert the existence of the channels of monetary transmission mechanism in Egypt between 1975 and 2010.

The determinants of residing arrangements of senior citizens to explain household formation behaviour, the role of public education expenditure to change income distribution, and the success of educational policies to increase school attendance in Bangladesh are the research objectives of this thesis which consists of four independent essays. Theoretical models and empirical analysis have been conducted both in the first and second essays to find appropriate determinants of residing arrangements of senior citizens in developing and developed countries respectively. The results suggest that economic growth and religion determine co-residence arrangements in developing countries while life-cycle pensionable wealth and cultural factors determine solitary residing patterns in developed countries. The third essay investigates, theoretically and empirically, the impact of public education expenditure on income inequality. The findings show that public education expenditure reduces income inequality for developed OECD countries but increases for developing countries. Finally, the success issues of two education policies in Bangladesh – the “(Obligation to) Primary Education Act 1990" (PEA 1990) and the “Female Secondary School Stipend Program 1994" (FSSSP 1994), are theoretically and empirically evaluated. The results highlight that the PEA 1990 policy is not fully successful but the PEA 1990 and the FSSSP 1994 policies jointly make remarkable success in school attendance and literacy rates in the country.

In chapter 1, we introduce mechanism and present results of an integrated investment appraisal of an onshore wind farm for electricity generation in Cape-Verde that is owned and operated by a private investor. From the perspective of the electric utility and the economy, the results of such an ex-ante financial and economic appraisal of wind electricity generation depends critically on one’s view of the expected long-term level of future fossil fuel prices, negotiations of the power purchase agreement (PPA) price and wind capacity factor. In Chapter 2, we investigate the impacts of wind and solar renewable power sources on both electricity generation and planning by employing and applying a cost minimization model in Cyprus. The cost minimization model demonstrates that the use of wind alone and mix of wind and solar power in an electricity generation mix reduces the overall cost of the system. Due to high cost of electricity generation from fuel oil in Cyprus, we conclude that shift toward wind and solar mix of energy sources in Cyprus will have significant impact by means of cost reduction. Therefore, integrating these renewables will essentially contribute to the welfare of Cypriot consumers alongside its environmental and health benefits associated in them. In Chapter 3, we study the impacts of implementing real-time electricity pricing (RTP) in the Cypriot electricity market with and without wind/solar capacities. We use a merit order stack approach to generation investment and operation decisions. Empirical results show that dynamic pricing will increase generation capacity utilization by means of reduction in equilibrium installed capacity reduction and increase in load factors of off-peak plants. These savings are larger at higher demand elasticities. The emissions from electricity generation will potentially increase resulting from increased energy consumption, however. Because wind (solar) availability comes mostly during low (high) demand hours when relatively cleaner (dirtier) plants operate in the system, we find that there is considerable potential for capital cost savings and emission savings from smart metering even with only a small consumer response and at moderate participation in the programme. At the current costs of solar, investing in wind alone will however yield higher bill savings.

The developmental state has been widely credited as the most important factor behind the East Asian post-ar “miracles.” Indeed, it is generally seen as having helped to shift the weight of the international economic order towards ‘the East.’ However, the dominance of processes associated with ‘globalisation’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century is commonly thought to have substantially undermined the viability and potential of this state-led development model. Yet, the recent rapid transformation of some emerging economies, notably China and Vietnam, suggests that this economic development model may remain important even in an era of globalisation. Taking Vietnam as a case study, this thesis argues that despite significant differences in the actions, capacities and ideological orientations between the Vietnamese state and other states in the region, the political leaders of Vietnam have followed the interventionist, state-led pattern of development that is connected to the successful East Asian developmental states. As a consequence, and on the basis of the original empirical research undertaken here, the thesis further argues that despite the potentially transformative impact of processes associated with globalisation, the developmental state, or the state-led development model, remains a viable, influential, and persistent feature of the development processes in Vietnam.