This study attempts to ascertain the importance of foreign capital inflows (FCIs) in Pakistan. We do so by first finding the key determinants of FCIs in Pakistan. Secondly, we attempt to investigate the relationship of FCIs with economic growth and finally we study the impact of FCIs on unemployment, poverty and income inequality. FCIs in this study are combination of foreign direct investment, remittances, foreign aid and external debt. Using data from 1973-2008 for Pakistan we found that growth is key determinant of FCIs both in aggregated and disaggregated forms. Moreover, FCIs have positive impact on economic growth in Pakistan. We also found that FCIs do help in reducing unemployment. Impact on poverty and inequality, however, was found to be insignificant. Results suggest that though FCI is beneficial for growth, the spillovers of the growth are not reaching the poor segment of the society. Policy makers should therefore focus on utilizing these foreign resources, especially remittance inflows, to strengthen domestic financial sector, reduce poverty and inequality. JEL Classification F21, F24, F29 Keywords International Capital Flows, Economic growth, Foreign Direct Investment, Remittances, Foreign Debt, Foriegn Aid, ARDL, Poverty Author's e-mail alionline83@yahoo.com Supervisor's e-mail...

This study applies the cross-country growth accounting regressions derived from the augmented Solow-Swan model to ascertain the growth effects of education in CEE and Balkan countries. We firstly test whether the total stock or accumulation of education matters more for corresponding countries' growth and afterwards we decompose the total stock into educational stocks at primary, secondary and tertiary levels to test whether the disaggregated educational levels have different growth effects. We do so by applying the panel fixed effects technique on 17 CEE countries during the 1990-2010 period. In addition, we address the endogeneity of education by using the lags of different educational proxies as instruments. The results suggest that the average stock of education is significantly contributing to economic growth of CEE countries with the biggest growth effect of tertiary education. Regarding the Balkan countries only, the growth effect of education is almost a null. We conclude that one cannot have economic growth without a good educational system and efficient usage of human capital. Thus, the policy implications should be related to the proper identification of the quality of educational governance, problem of mismatch on labor market and better utilization of human capital. Keywords:...

Information and telecommunication technologies are always joint with economic growth in modern economies, because they participate on reduction of transaction costs and increase production factors productivity and competitiveness. Benefits from ICT had been obvious untill 2001, but right after the investmens and expenditure in ICT started to decrease rapidly. There are studies capturing this drop in developed economies, whereas there are not many works considering the situation in center and eastern Europe. This master thesis brings an analysis of impact of ICT capital and production factors productivity on gross value added by growth accounting methodology in Czech Republic between 1996-2007. It also provides econometric testing of the impact of investments in ICT equipment and software on gross value added in Czech Republic between 1993-2013 by fixed effects model. The output of the master thesis demonstrates the empirical evidence of significant negative impact year-by-year change investment in ICT equipment and software on a change of growth pace of gross value added.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Economics / Steven P. Cassou / Although geographic proximity is not enough to imply similar social, political and economic outcomes, the Portuguese and Spanish development experiences have been quite alike since the 15th century and in particular during the post-WWII period. Since 1950, both countries went through significant market transformations, ranging from democratization to market liberalization and adhesion to the European Union. However, even today, these economies, and in particular Portugal, do not rival those of the more developed European countries. This dissertation contributes to the growing body of literature on the Iberian economies by presenting three essays that employ modern macroeconomics tools to further our understanding about the growth and development experiences of these countries. The first essay provides a detailed growth accounting exercise and reconciles the results with the political and socioeconomic context of the 1950-2004 period. Since Total Factor Productivity is identified as the main engine of growth, the second essay explores a quantitative measure for the level of barriers that each country faced in the process of adopting new technologies. The numerical experiments suggest that Spain had consistently lower barriers than Portugal and that the gap has been increasing since the establishment of the European Single Market. The last essay investigates the role of fiscal policy and, specifically, if distortionary taxes on capital and labor income may have been a key factor behind the observed volatility for factor inputs. The simulation results derived from several potential scenarios support this conjuncture. Additionally, the last essay contributes by offering a time series for the levels of effective tax rates on labor and capital income in the Iberian economies over the 1975-2004 period.

<div> <p>This dissertation examines long-run food security in Niger in an era of climate change and comprises three interlinked essays. The first essay investigates the socio-economic projections for Niger in the current climate change literature in a growth accounting framework and provides a critical assessment to evaluate global projections in the context of a low-income developing country. The second essay quantifies the combined and individual impacts of income, population growth, agricultural productivity, and climate change on food security outcomes by mid-century in rural and urban Niger. Finally, the third essay assesses three policy scenarios considering accelerated investments in agricultural research and dissemination (R&D), reductions in fertility rates, and regional market integration.</p> </div> <br>

Development of information and communication technologies (ICT) has recently increasing importance. ICT has therefore become one of the effective tools in process of optimization and increase of competitiveness on the market. As a result of this trend, there are already some studies, having ambitions to explicitly formulate their importance. The application of ICT in the Czech Republic is similar, but there are not many studies with such ambitions. This thesis analyzes (i) the relations between, the use of ICT, total factor productivity and growth of gross added value in the Czech Republic in 1997-2007 based on growth accounting and (ii) based on econometric analysis of panel data for the Czech Republic, also estimates the importance of selected determinants influencing adoption of ICT. The output of the thesis consists of (i) determining the contribution of each input and discussion of possible synergies of ICT capital deepening and total factor productivity and (ii) specification of variables that are, based on the formulated model, shown to be statistically significant and they may affect the adoption of ICT.

The aim of this thesis is to gain improved understanding of the income convergence between Finland and Sweden 1950-2000 with a focus on catch-up growth, wage formation, productivity growth, migration and structural change in a setting of structural and institutional differences on the factor markets. Earlier studies of Finnish and Swedish convergence has overlooked the international perspective and therefore missed the general European – US convergence during the period. The results shows that Sweden converged to 80 percent of the US productivity level in the early 1970s and is following US productivity growth thereafter. The Finnish catch-up growth towards the US continues until the beginning of the 1990s. This corresponds well with the convergence of labour productivity between Finland and Sweden which took place around 1970 and the gap was closed in the beginning of the 1990s. The convergence between the countries can therefore be understood from the catch-up growth against the USA and if the countries growth rates are plotted against their income level 1950 one can see that the two countries are well in line with other West European countries. This means that either country is deviating in a positive or negative direction during the period. This is to some extent in contrast with the view that has been put forward in the countries national economic historical writing where Finland is often since as a growth miracle while Sweden especially since 1970s is seen as a case of falling behind.      In order to explain the convergence scenario structural and institutional differences on the countries factor markets is examined. One aspect concerns Barry Eichengreens hypothesis regarding wage moderation as cause of the Post-War European convergence. The wage setting system in Sweden has been put forward by Eichengreen as a raw model for the type of institutional setting that would promote wage moderation. One central finding in this thesis is that we can not find support for wage moderation for Sweden as the labour share of the national income rises during the phase of Swedish catch-up growth while the labour income share was constant and periodically falling in Finland. In contrast with the view of the Finnish low interest rate policy during the post- the actual real interest rate was lower in Sweden.      There has also been a significant migration flow from Finland to Sweden especially from the 1950s to mid 1970s.  In the thesis we find a positive and significant relationship between wage and productivity differences on industry level between the countries. This supports the conclusion that migration was leading towards factor price convergence between the countries.      The shift-share analysis shows that there were higher gains for the productivity growth in reallocating labour on the Finnish labour market than in Sweden. This could be explained by the higher share of the labour in the agricultural sector as predicted by Peter Temin.

Made available in DSpace on 2010-04-20T21:00:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 3 marcelofatioturma2004.pdf.jpg: 16086 bytes, checksum: 5090b863d17b5ef434673e8759006297 (MD5) marcelofatioturma2004.pdf: 214712 bytes, checksum: 0f0a15eb1acc24638d6ff471a67fc55b (MD5) marcelofatioturma2004.pdf.txt: 66846 bytes, checksum: 685e8939ce9226930820f666f977e5bb (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-03-13T00:00:00Z / O presente trabalho utiliza a 'Contabilidade do crescimento' para analisar e explicar as diferenças nas taxas de crescimento do PIB per capita dos países Brasil, Chile, China, Índia e Coréia no período compreendido entre os anos 1960 e 2000. Descrevendo os quatro fatos estilizados do crescimento econômico, a 'Contabilidade do crescimento de Solow', bem como a função de produção Cobb-Douglas, buscou-se dar o embasamento teórico para o modelo utilizado de fato no presente trabalho, que decompôs o crescimento dos diferentes países para identificar qual fator mais contribuiu ou quais fatores de produção mais contribuíram para os diferentes níveis de crescimento econômico dos países analisados. A metodologia utilizada no trabalho baseia-se em pesquisas bibliográficas, que visam primordialmente a fundamentação conceitual e teórica de alguns conceitos utilizados e em pesquisas às diferentes bases de dados históricos referentes aos países e variáveis analisadas. Pode-se afirmar que as principais fontes de consulta foram a 'Penn World Table' da Universidade da Pensilvânia e o Banco Mundial. O estudo irá demonstrar, além dos diferentes níveis de cada um dos fatores (capital humano, físico e progresso tecnológico ou 'TFP – Total Factor Productivity' ) nos países, como cada um desses fatores evoluiu ao longo dos anos e qual a contribuição de cada um nas taxas de crescimento do PIB per capita de cada um dos países analisados. É feito um estudo da variância do crescimento do PIB per capita, onde ficará claro que boa parte das diferenças apresentadas nas taxas de crescimento dos países vem do progresso tecnológico ou da covariância dos fatores, que são progresso tecnológico e o agrupamento do capital físico e humano. Também verificou-se a correlação existente entre a variação do PIB per capita e as variáveis que o compõe, permitindo a visualização do alto grau de correlação existente, principalmente com o progresso tecnológico ou 'TFP'. / This study applies the “Growth Accounting” to Brazil, Chile, China, India and Korea, intending to explain the differences in the GDP per capita growth rates of these countries from 1960 to 2000. Describing the four “Stylized Facts” of Economic Growth, the “Solow Growth Accounting” and also the “Cobb-Douglas” Production Function, a theoretical support for the model was used in the present study, which segmented the different growth rates for the focused countries in order to identify which factor or which factors have contributed more for their different levels of economic growth. The methodology is based on bibliographic research that provided the theoretical support for the analysis and also on historical data research for the countries that are part of this study. The main sources of data were the World Bank and the “Penn World Table” provided by the University of Pennsylvania. The study will demonstrate the different levels of each production factor (human and physical capital and technological progress or “TFP – Total Factor Productivity”) country by country, the evolution of these factors in the period and also how each factor has contributed for the growth of the GDP per capita of the focused countries. Through a variance analysis of the rate of GDP per capita growth, it can be shown that the technological progress and the covariance between technological progress and a composition of physical and human capital, are the main sources which explain the differences in the rates of economic growth. Furthermore, the correlation among the changes in the GDP per capita and the variables which compose that figure that were analyzed, allow for the perception of a high degree of correlation, especially between the GDP per capita growth rate and the “TFP – Total Factor Productivity”.