I examine the importance of human capital for economic development in Thailand during the period of high economic growth and structural transformation (1985-2000), using labour force survey data. The three main chapters attempt to estimate the effects of education, as a measure of human capital, on three major outcomes in the Thai labour market, namely (i) earnings; (ii) sector of employment; and (iii) earnings inequality. I address the endogeneity problem of education using an education policy shift—the change in the compulsory schooling law—that produces exogenous variation in education. The three main chapters adopt distinct modelling frameworks. The details of each of the main chapters are as follows. The third chapter investigates how education increases earnings and the probability of being in the non-agricultural sector. As the education policy shift influences educational attainment in a discontinuous way, a regression discontinuity (RD) framework is adopted to identify the average returns to education and the effect of education on the sector of employment. It is important to emphasise that the RD technique constrains the effects of education on the two outcomes to be linear and to be applicable only to sub-populations. My results confirm significant effects of education on both earnings and the sectoral sorting process. In addition, there are heterogeneous effects of education by gender. The fourth chapter is an extension of the previous chapter. I allow the returns to education to be heterogeneous across education levels and sectors of employment, while attempting to estimate the returns for the entire population. I use a control function (CF) approach and a double selection correction to estimate the sectoral earnings process, while jointly accounting for the choice of education and the selection into sectors and paid employment. I find that the returns to education are non-linear and higher in the non-agricultural sector especially for medium and highly educated workers. This suggests that human capital plays a crucial role in facilitating a structural transformation towards the non-agricultural sector. In the final chapter, I study how the increased primary education completion rate affects earnings inequality. While there exists a burgeoning literature on the average returns to education, less attention has been devoted to estimating the effects of education on the distribution of earnings. I identify the effects of primary education completion on earnings at different points of the distribution, and thus earnings inequality, using a recently developed approach, called regression discontinuity distributional treatment effects. My results suggest that the increased primary education completion rate reduces earnings inequality as the returns to primary education are larger for the poor than the rich.

No description available.

This thesis considers how fiscal and monetary policy should be conducted in resourcerich economies. It consists of three papers addressing: whether governments should spend, save or invest volatile oil income; the assets they should save in; and how monetary policy should respond. The first, “Eight principles for managing resource wealth”, shows that capital-scarce countries should save relatively less against oil price volatility, and invest more in domestic capital. They also should prepare for volatility in advance, and treat savings as a source of income rather than a temporary buffer. To show this the paper develops a framework that nests a variety of existing results, which are presented in eight principles. The second, “The Elephant in the Ground: Oil extraction and asset allocation in sovereign wealth funds”, shows that governments should use sovereign wealth funds to offset oil price risk, extract oil faster if its price is pro-cyclical, and use precautionary savings to manage any residual volatility. To do this it combines three strands of literature for the first time: on continuous-time portfolio theory, oil extraction and precautionary savings. The third, “Optimal monetary responses to oil discoveries”, addresses the anticipation effects around an oil discovery. It shows that the terms of trade will need to appreciate twice: once when oil is discovered and consumers anticipate future revenues; and again when the government begins spending the revenues. Oil wealth will give the monetary authority an incentive to appreciate the terms of trade, in addition to stabilising domestic inflation and the output gap. Optimal policy is well-approximated by a standard monetary rule that also responds to expected changes in the natural level of output.

This thesis consists of four separate chapters which address different aspects of inequality and income determination. The first three chapters are country-level studies which examine (1) how incomes are shaped by spatial price differences, (2) the factor income composition, and (3) enterprise size. The final chapter analyses how income inequality changed at the global level. The first chapter investigates the implications of regional price differences for earnings differentials and inequality in Germany. I combine a district-level price index with administrative earnings data from social security records. Prices have a strong equalising effect on district average wages in West Germany, but a weaker effect in East Germany and at the national level. The change in overall inequality as a result of regional price differences is small (although significant in many cases), because inequality is mostly explained by differences within rather than between districts. The second chapter is motivated by the rapid increase in top income shares in the United States since the 1980s. Using data derived from tax filings, I show that this pattern is very similar after controlling for changes in tax unit size. Over the same period as top income shares increased, the composition of these incomes changed dramatically, with the labour share rising. Using a non-parametric copula framework, I show that incomes from labour and capital have become more closely associated at the top. This association is asymmetric such that top wage earners are more likely to also receive high capital incomes, compared with top capital income recipients receiving high wages. In the third chapter, I investigate the positive cross-sectional relationship between enterprise size and earnings using panel data from Ghana. I find evidence for a significant firm size effect in matched firm-worker data and a labour force panel, even after controlling for individual fixed effects. The size effect in self-employment is stronger in the cross-section, but it is driven by individual time-invariant characteristics. The final chapter studies the global interpersonal income distribution using a newly constructed and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. The chapter finds that the global Gini remains high and approximately unchanged at around 0.7. However, this hides a substantial change in the global distribution from a twin-peaked distribution in 1988 into a single-peaked one now. Furthermore, the regional composition of the global distribution changed, as China graduated from the bottom ranks. As a result of the growth in Asia, the poorest quantiles of the global distribution are now largely from Sub-Saharan Africa. By exploiting the panel dimension of the dataset, the analysis shows which decile-groups within countries have benefitted most over this 20-year period. In addition, the chapter presents a preliminary assessment of how estimates of global inequality are affected by the likely underreporting of top incomes in surveys.

Garment sector trade unions have proved largely powerless to combat hypermobile transnational capital’s systematic extraction of surplus value from the newly industrialized Global South. Optimized conditions for accumulation coupled with the 2005 phase-out of the Multi-Fibre Agreement (MFA) have meant a radical geographic reconfiguration of the globalised garment industry heavily in favour of capital over labour. The thesis approaches the global garment sector from multiple vantage points across the world with the goal of uncovering the obstacles to workers' organisation, examine workers' strategies of resistance, and analyse the changing composition of labour and capital within the clothing commodity chain. The thesis highlights five distinct but interconnected case studies including a transnational workers campaign from a garment factory in Honduras; a history and present-day feasibility of establishing a transnational collective bargaining from El Salvador to Turkey to Cambodia; the prospects for a countermovement in the organizing strategies at the bottom of the clothing commodity and supply chain in Bangalore; the growth of a 'full package' denim manufacturer in changing the relationship between 'buyers' and 'suppliers' on the outskirts of Bangalore; and finally a continuation of this analysis the case of a strike at a monopoly footwear supplier in China. The central research question is: How do workers build power and establish workers' rights in the globally hypermobile garment sector? Ultimately, what is demonstrated within this thesis is that the actions of garment workers shaped and circumscribed the actions of capital in the sector, and as capital transformed new landscapes for accumulation new vistas for opposition begin to emerge.

Submitted by Cristiane Shirayama (cristiane.shirayama@fgv.br) on 2011-05-19T17:45:31Z No. of bitstreams: 1 60090200006.pdf: 408483 bytes, checksum: 30af984f5fb81aea372a5e3985cc0df9 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Gisele Isaura Hannickel(gisele.hannickel@fgv.br) on 2011-05-19T17:46:37Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 60090200006.pdf: 408483 bytes, checksum: 30af984f5fb81aea372a5e3985cc0df9 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Suzinei Teles Garcia Garcia(suzinei.garcia@fgv.br) on 2011-05-19T17:47:23Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 60090200006.pdf: 408483 bytes, checksum: 30af984f5fb81aea372a5e3985cc0df9 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2011-05-19T17:48:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 60090200006.pdf: 408483 bytes, checksum: 30af984f5fb81aea372a5e3985cc0df9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-04-08 / This dissertation thesis examines the environmental licensing of a hydroelectric power plant in the Amazon Basin: 'Usina Jirau.' This starting point for this case study was an allegation that the Brazilian environmental licensing process for hydroelectric power plants slows down the Brazilian development. As an initial matter, I assumed that such an argument is partially mistaken. On the one hand there may be problems in the administrative procedures and in the institutional design and functioning of the environmental agency, IBAMA; but on the other hand, the entrepreneurs did not properly consider legal environmental rules during the planning process. To test this hypothesis, I attended specific meetings on the subject, conducted interviews with key actors in the process, and researched the issues raised in different courts by a variety of litigators. I also analyzed the environmental licensing procedures extensively and some other to understand the economic argument, its variations and the proponents of such ideas. Additionally, I explain how and which hypotheses were tested in my research. In part II, I discuss the environmental licensing economic content, put the environmental documents from both state and non-state players. This paper is divided into four separate parts, and a conclusion. In part I, I explain the research problem, the context surrounding the construction of Usina Jirau as well, discuss some key players, and demonstrate how licensing rules together, and assess how the two aforementioned perspectives relate to each other. In part III, I describe the IBAMA bureaucracy functions as a means of assessing if, as a public administration, it was inefficient in licensing Usina Jirau. Thus, I describe the IBAMA authority to license such entrepreneurship, its structure and ability to provide this service, and list other administrative branches and entrepreneurs’ obligations. Lastly, I identify what were the sensitive points in the environmental licensing dynamics, which may have offered obstacles to the process. In park IV, I discuss the supposed failures in the control system of administrative duties. In conclusion, I summarize the research key points, offer some suggestions to improve the environmental licensing process and establish the distinction between inefficiency and enforcement of environmental conservational legal rules. Usina Jirau is an exemplary case of how a licensing process does not slow down the Brazilian development, and it is also a calling for Brazil to modernize and rationalize its environmental regulatory framework. / Esse é o caso do licenciamento ambiental do aproveitamento hidrelétrico Jirau, parte do Complexo Hidrelétrico do Rio Madeira. O ponto de partida da pesquisa foi a alegação de que o licenciamento ambiental de usinas hidrelétricas atrapalha o desenvolvimento brasileiro. Para enfrentar o argumento mencionado, levantei a suspeita de que o mesmo está parcialmente equivocado. Se por um lado, há problemas no procedimento administrativo do licenciamento ambiental e na estrutura e funcionamento do órgão licenciador; por outro lado, os interessados no sucesso da obra fizeram o planejamento do empreendimento sem levar em consideração exigências legais relativas ao ambiente. Para confirmar ou negar minha suspeita, fiz um levantamento dos atos do processo administrativo e das ações judiciais movidas por diferentes partes referentes ao licenciamento da UHE Jirau, conduzi entrevistas semiestruturadas com algumas pessoas envolvidas nesse processo, e consultei documentos dos órgãos estatais relacionadas ao caso, bem como documentos dos consórcios de empresas que concorreram ao leilão de geração de energia. O caminho metodológico adotado me fez dividir o trabalho em quatro capítulos e uma conclusão. No primeiro capítulo, apresento o problema da pesquisa, explico qual é o contexto da construção da UHE Jirau, e menciono os principais atores envolvidos. Também explico o funcionamento do argumento enfrentado. Por fim, explico como e quais são as hipóteses que serão testadas: hipótese da falha no sistema de controle e hipótese da ineficiência do procedimento. No segundo capítulo, trato do sentido jurídico-econômico do licenciamento ambiental, mapeio as regras que disciplinam esse instrumento de política ambiental e mostro o funcionamento da teoria e das regras na prática do licenciamento da usina Jirau. No terceiro capítulo, descrevo o funcionamento da burocracia do órgão licenciador para avaliar se o licenciamento ambiental da usina hidrelétrica Jirau foi ineficiente. Assim, descrevo as competências, a estrutura e a capacidade de atendimento do órgão licenciador, bem como as obrigações do empreendedor e demais órgãos. Por fim, identifico quais foram os pontos sensíveis da dinâmica do licenciamento ambiental que podem ter eventualmente impedido a administração de cumprir prazos legais. No quarto capítulo, busco identificar eventuais falhas no sistema de controle do processo do licenciamento ambiental da UHE Jirau a partir dos embates administrativos e judiciais que ocorreram a partir da alteração do projeto da usina após a realização do leilão, assim como das inovações processuais ocorridas no caso. O capítulo derradeiro retoma os pontos chave da pesquisa; aponta caminhos para a melhoria do licenciamento ambiental de usinas hidrelétricas no âmbito do órgão federal; e indica algumas exigências próprias da natureza das leis de conservação ambiental, as quais não devem ser confundidas com fatores de produção de ineficiência do procedimento. O caso de Jirau não pode ser acusado de criar embaraços temporais à expansão da oferta da energia necessária para o desenvolvimento brasileiro em razão de burocracia excessiva e fragilidades institucionais do órgão. O temor de criminalização dos técnicos aumentou o grau de exigências e o sistema de controle administrativo e judicial expôs à sociedade questões do licenciamento sem fazer com que o mesmo demorasse ainda mais. Palavras-chave: Usina hidrelétrica Jirau. Licenças ambientais. Direito Ambiental. Desenvolvimento Econômico.

This thesis is an investigation into the microeconomic mechanisms that govern some of the occupational choices faced by workers in Sub-Saharan Africa, and into the monetary and non-monetary returns to their decisions. Chapter 1 begins by exploring the decision process that leads workers to allocate themselves to different occupations within the economy. In particular, I investigate the role of risk-aversion in the allocation of workers between formal and informal jobs in Ghana, hence attempting to explain a fundamental dimension of duality through an investigation into workers' preferences. In my model of sectoral allocation risk-averse workers can opt between entering the free-entry informal sector and queuing for formal occupations. Conditional on identifying the riskier option, the model yields testable implications on the relationship between risk-aversion and workers' allocation. My testing strategy proceeds in two steps. First, using the first three waves of the Ghana Household Urban Panel Survey (GHUPS) dataset, I estimate expected income uncertainty and find it considerably higher in the informal sector than in formal employment. Second, using experimental data to elicit risk-attitudes I estimate the effect of risk-aversion on occupational choices and I find that, in line with the first result, more risk-averse workers are more likely to queue for formal jobs and less likely to be in the informal sector. The conclusion of the first chapter is that attitudes to risk should feature more prominently in models of sector allocation and in the design of labour market policies, in particular when those policies aim to impact workers' vulnerability to risk and uncertainty. Chapter 2 focuses on the largest occupational category in the Developing world, self-employed workers with small productive activities, and it tries to estimate the returns to different productive assets, namely physical capital, labour and human capital. These are the workers that form most of the informal sector analysed in chapter 1, which allows me to draw a direct link with the analysis so far. The chapter begins by specifying a model for the income-generating process grounded in the literature on firms' production and hence abridging the gap between the analysis of individual earnings and the study of firms' value added. Identification in the empirics is achieved by means of panel estimators that are suitable to address the endogeneity of input choices, which derives from both time-varying and time-invariant unobservable heterogeneity. The use of these estimators is made feasible by the length of the Ghanaian Household Urban Panel Survey dataset at CSAE. I also explore issues of endogeneity in the selection of different technologies, defined by their relative capital and labour intensity. Finally, I analyse the shape of returns to capital, with the aim to detect potential non-convexities in technology. The results show that capital and work-experience play the strongest role in income-generation, while the shares of value added attributed to labour and to formal schooling are low. Marginal returns to investment are high at low capital levels and they decrease very rapidly, pointing against the existence of non-convexities due to minimum scale requirements, but implying that real income gains resulting form micro-investment are modest. Chapter 3 returns to the issue of earnings uncertainty and risk-aversion explored in Chapter 1, but it now takes the allocation choice as given and explores the direct welfare implications of income uncertainty for worker's well-being. Namely, the chapter explores the relationship between income and welfare, with a particular attention on the link between income vulnerability and happiness. Using unique longitudinal data on life-satisfaction and labour market outcomes, I estimate an individual measure of vulnerability (defined as the probability of falling below a low-income threshold) and investigate its effect on well-being. After controlling for unobservable individual fixed effects, work-satisfaction, relative income and other relevant worker characteristics, I find a sizable impact of vulnerability, over and above the income effect. When I explore the mechanisms behind my results, I find that aspiration adaptation to current income may result in a transitory income effect. Moreover, using my direct measure of attitudes to risk from field-experiments (already used in chapter 1), I can test directly the hypothesis that more risk-averse agents suffer more heavily from a given increase in income vulnerability. Overall, my findings support policy interventions that aim to reduce vulnerability, as I expect such policies to have a 'direct' impact on agents' happiness given the prevailing attitudes to risk and uncertainty in the population. Finally, from the point of view of overall social welfare, my results suggest that non-Rawlsian growth models, whereby 'someone may be left behind', may fail to enhance general welfare, for high enough levels of risk-aversion in the population, if the risk of falling behind is sufficiently widespread.

This study identifies additional investment incentives, applicable to the manufacturing sector, which the South African government could introduce to encourage investors to choose the South African manufacturing sector as a desired investment destination. A comparison is made between the relevant investment incentives provided to manufacturing companies by Malaysia and Singapore and those provided by South Africa, in order to examine the similarities and differences between these incentives. In the light of these findings, recommendations are made for revised or additional investment incentives in South Africa to promote investment in South African manufacturing companies and reduce some of the barriers that prevent local and foreign investment in South Africa. / Accounting / M. Com. (Accounting)

The <u>first essay</u> [“Twin Deficits and Free Lunches: Macroeconomic Outcomes In Anticipation of Foreign Aid”] concerns itself with situations in which private agents anticipate a future windfall (free lunch) that will help service the debt resulting from a present fiscal expansion (implemented via a temporary tax cut). Such expectations of a windfall can arise in the context of natural resource discoveries or, more interestingly, due to perceptions by agents in “too important to fail” countries that will be bailed out through higher foreign aid or debt relief. We employ an overlapping generations model featuring credit constraints to study the real effects of such free lunch expectations in a small open economy, drawing contrasts with the standard tax and money finance closure rules. The model is solved analytically and shows that anticipated aid is equivalent to current aid when agents have perfect foresight, so that a temporary tax cut is seen as permanent. Accordingly, agents raise their consumption and indebtedness (at the expense of future generations) by an amount that is an increasing function of their “impatience” (subjective rates of time preference plus probability of death). A worsening of the current account obtains (twin deficits) across a range of plausible closure rules, including those featuring money finance. The introduction of credit constrained households (we study the variant where myopic agents spend their current disposable incomes) does not alter the basic result in the case of full aid finance, but does matter for mixed tax-aid regimes, in more complex settings where agent expectations and donor promises on aid diverge, and when governments face borrowing constraints so that the timing of aid delivery matters. The <u>second essay</u> [“The Role of Domestic Debt in Economic Growth: An Empirical Investigation For Developing Economies”] focuses on the remaining source of government financing, i.e. domestic debt, and the role it can play in mobilizing private savings, facilitating credit intermediation in higher risk settings (i.e. serving a “collateral” function on bank balance sheets), developing financial markets and supporting economic growth in general. To investigate this question empirically, we set up a new domestic debt database covering about 100 developing economies, going back three decades to 1975; explore Granger causality links between domestic debt and key macroeconomic and institutional variables; and estimate the growth impact of domestic debt using panel regressions, allowing for non-linear effects. Domestic debt, as a share of GDP is found to exert a significant positive impact on economic growth, with potential channels including domestic savings mobilization, provision of risk-insurance on banks’ balance sheets; and greater institutional accountability of the state to its citizens. Although this result countervails more established arguments against domestic debt (i.e. that it leads to crowding out and banks to become lazy), there is some evidence that above a ratio of 35 percent of bank deposits, domestic debt does begin to undermine economic growth. The growth payoff also depends on debt quality, with higher payoffs observed for positive interest-rate bearing marketable debt issued to nonbank sectors. The <u>third and final essay</u> [“Why Do Banks in Developing Economies Hold Domestic Government Securities?”] explores demand-side determinants of domestic debt, by focusing on commercial bank holdings of government paper, discriminating carefully between voluntary factors (such as mean-variance portfolio optimization) and statutory ones (cash reserve and capital adequacy requirements). The analysis is made possible by the construction of a dataset on government and private returns (real and nominal) for almost 600 banks from 70 emerging and low-income economies, spanning the (pre-Basel II) period 1995-2005. A battery of structural cross-section regressions indicates that banks’ portfolio decisions are at least as significantly influenced by mean-variance considerations as regulatory factors: the actual portfolio share of government securities (λ) responds intuitively, and sizably, to variations in the moments of the distributions for government and private returns as well as in the minimum-variance portfolio share (λ*). Higher cash reserve requirements tilt portfolios away from government securities toward riskier private lending, while higher capital adequacy requirements work the other way. The association between actual portfolios and the identified determinants is noticeably weaker at lower ends of the λ distribution, suggesting the domination of non-CAPM factors in those contexts.

Between 2000 and 2015 the Millennium Development Goals were the focus of much global attention and activity. They were selected in light of astounding poverty, with over 1 billion people at the time living on less than $1 per day. In a sense the MDGs were morally undeniable. The focus of this study is MDG2, universal primary education. It sets out to establish how and why MDG2 came to be selected. Whilst its selection seems obvious, for years developing countries complained about the short-sightedness of prioritising primary over secondary and tertiary education (Klees 2008). A task force commissioned by the World Bank and UNESCO at the time showed that the Bank’s rate of return analysis on primary education was flawed. It argued that developing countries need highly educated people to be economic and social entrepreneurs, develop good governance, strong institutions and infrastructure. In this way MDG2’s selection is problematic. Using case study method, first the literature is examined. Three hypotheses are generated: one based on a rational synoptic theory, one on critical theory and one on world society theory. A range of data are used to establish findings and test hypotheses. The study then considers implications of the findings for theory and the policy process. The findings show that priorities promoting more equal opportunities, such as MDG2, were gradually preferred. Whereas priorities promoting more equal outcomes, such as elimination of trade barriers, were gradually excluded. The study finds no evidence that the General Assembly ever voted on the list of 8 MDGs. Rather, the MDGs were selected by elite policy actors, addressing multiple interests. The study considers the assertion that marginalization of the poor does not happen because people harbor ill will toward them, rather because “The poor have no friends among the global elite” (Pogge 2011, p. 62).