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The economic and political condition of a country usually determines its fiscal policy. When Chiang Ching-Kuo was in charge of Taiwan¡¦s political and economic power between 1972-1988, his administration pushed forward many new public policies and economic growth plan in order for Taiwan to continue development. There were several different exhaustive expenditures and transfer payments. The financial resources to make this happen include tax revenue, commercial revenue, administrative revenue and debt-created revenue. The fiscal policy is necessary and important complimentary part of a government¡¦s public administrative policy and economic development plan. However, under the democratic system of Taiwan, fiscal policy is often over used or abused. On the one hand, the government¡¦s expenditure in national defense, social security, education, economic development, etc., continue to expand; on the other hand, tax revenue continue to be cut down to please the constituents. On the surface, this policy during reign of Chiang Ching-Kuo did not appear to have any financial burden; in truth the potential fiscal deficit has already began to grow. Unfortunately, this negative impact by the policy did not become apparent until the recent years. Economic growth has always been the goal of all governments around the world. When economists report on the economic development plan of his/her country, most will assent that the fiscal policy is the key to the economic growth. My dissertation is focused on the period from 1972-1988 when Chiang Ching-Kuo is in control of Taiwan. I will focus on how the financial expenditures and revenues, as well as tax burden, income distribution, public debit and credit, investment encouragement and import-export policies, together with the economic facts of the time, to correlate in further detail the meaning and affect of the past policies. Furthermore, I hope to gain new economic insights through restudying of past, and allow this dissertation be of help to the present economic administration.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2001. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 61 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 45-50).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains x, 113 p. Includes abstract and vita. Advisor: Patricia Reagan, Dept. of Economics. Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-108).

Thesis (MTech (Entrepreneurship))--Peninsula Technikon, 2002. / Word processed copy. Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 53-55). Also available online.

Billions of dollars in development aid are sent to developing countries every year. Weak institutions in recipient countries are the main impediments often discussed to prevent aid from reaching the intended targets. At the same time, they also hinder aid effectiveness in improving the lives of the people. This dissertation argues that the impact of aid on income distribution and human welfare in recipient countries differs by their institutional quality. Institutions encompass many different dimensions. This dissertation focuses on: corruption in government, quality of bureaucracy, and the rule of law. This study explores the impact in two essays. The first essay investigates the role of institutions in aid distribution. In particular, we examine the interplay between aid and institutions on income shares of different population groups (measured by income quintiles), and on the gap between the rich and the poor (measured by the Gini coefficient). The study uses Principal Component Analysis to construct an institutional index from the three components: corruption, bureaucratic quality, and the rule of law. Employing Two-Stage Least Squares (2SLS) methodology on a panel data of 85 countries from 1960 to 2004, this study finds that an increase in aid as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) decreases the income shares of the poor (quintile 1 and quintile 2), but increases that of the rich (quintile 5), thereby widening the gap between the rich and the poor (Gini coefficient). Contrary to our main hypothesis, though, recipient countries’ institutions do not play any role in aid distribution. Similarly, the second essay also focuses on the importance of recipient institutions, but it assesses aid effectiveness in improving human welfare. The study considers five human development indicators: the Human Development Index (HDI), the health index, the infant mortality rate, the education index, and the average years of schooling. The study empirically tests the hypothesis by utilizing the same methodology as in the first essay, but on a panel of 80 countries from 1980 to 2004. The findings suggest that human welfare in recipient countries improves as aid increases. The improvement appears to be driven more by the health than the education sector. Furthermore, aid is more effective in countries with poorer institutional quality, which is contrary to the hypothesis. However, the results are not consistent when taking into account government’s pro-poor public expenditure.

This dissertation studies the effect of heterogeneity in consumer incomes on outcomes in vertically differentiated markets. When products are differentiated in quality, the consumer's choice of a particular product is a function of her income. Thus, the distribution of incomes plays an important role in shaping the demand for individual products in vertically differentiated markets. The first two chapters of the dissertation study the demand for passenger cars and trucks in the US. These vehicles are differentiated by quality that depends on vehicle's age. The first chapter studies the relationship between the distribution of consumer incomes and the distribution of vehicle vintages using a dynamic, heterogeneous agents model. The model predicts that higher per capita incomes are associated with younger vehicle stocks, if the vehicle ownership rates are high. If the per capita incomes are low, and so are the endogenous vehicle ownership rates, increases in income may lead to the aging of vehicles, by encouraging entry of lower income consumers into vehicle ownership via purchases of older vehicles. Higher levels of income inequality are associated with older vehicle stocks. The second chapter of the dissertation asks whether some of the observed increases in the average age of vehicles in the US can be attributed to the rise in real consumer incomes and the resulting changes in the composition of demand for different vehicle vintages. The dynamic, non-stationary, heterogeneous agents model, estimated on the aggregate vehicle ownership data for the US over the 1967-2001 period, provides a positive answer to this question. The third chapter of the dissertation studies the effect of inequality in consumer incomes on firms' entry, location, and pricing decisions in a static oligopoly model of vertically differentiated products. This paper computes the Nash equilibrium of a three-stage game similar to Shaked and Sutton (1982), to find that greater inequality in consumer incomes leads to the entry of more firms and results in more intense quality competition among the entrants. The consumption inequality is lower and the aggregate consumer welfare is higher in economies with greater income inequality. / text

This thesis analyses the evolution of informal and formal, private and public income security mechanisms in Canada from the beginning of the colonial period to the present. These programs generally deal with three categories of problems: problems stemming from interruptions of production income due to sickness, accident, premature death of the breadwinner or caused by retirement or unemployment; problems related to non-participation in the labour force such as those encountered by mothers who stay home with their children, children themselves, students, handicapped people and individuals who due to age can no longer enter the labour force; problems related to insufficiency of production income which are usually the problems of low wage earners. This thesis studies mainly the income security programs designed to correct the first two types of economic dependency. / Three main theoretical hypotheses emerge from the economic analysis of the evolution in historical time of income security mechanisms. First, the types of economic dependency which those programs try to deal with are generally collective problems of income distribution or, in other words, income transfers problems; they are not individual problems of saving, neither are they intertemporal income allocation problems. Second, in the field of income security, the institutions of the private sector do not have the economic power to efficiently implement the income security programs desired. Third, the income security collective strategies are deeply influenced by the collective values of Canadian society; therefore, the form that State intervention takes in the field of income security obeys the necessities and the constraints of these values. In addition to the influence of collective values, this thesis discusses the impact of macroeconomic stabilization policies on the evolution of income security programs. / The hypotheses presented in this thesis are original in comparison to the current literature. Indeed an important number of authors consider economic dependency as being principally an individual problem of intertemporal allocation of income and not a collective problem of income distribution. Few of them study the relative efficiency of different economic institutions in providing appropriate income security programs. And finally, many authors ignore the role of collective values.

This study attempts to extend the scope of existing analyses of unemployment in Jamaica by exploring empirically one aspect of the relation between demand and unemployment. / The central hypothesis is that the structure of consumer expenditures which result from a highly skewed income distribution pattern is a cause of continuing high levels of unemployment. / A static Leontieff-type input-output model is used to generate solutions for industry output levels and associated employment levels, for alternative expenditure patterns resulting from income redistribution. / The results confirm the hypothesis. It was found that although higher employment levels were generally associated with more equitable income distribution structures, employment expansion was also constrained by the absence of intersectoral linkages.