[pt] A atual literatura empírica sobre a entrada de bancos estrangeiros e seus efeitos nos mercados domésticos e diversos estudos de casos conduzidos em diferentes países demonstram que a entrada de bancos estrangeiros em mercados domésticos provoca impactos negativos na performance dos bancos nacionais. Basicamente, por força do aumento da estrutura de concorrência no mercado e por práticas bancárias superiores introduzidas pelos bancos estrangeiros, os bancos domésticos são obrigados a reduzir suas margens (spread) e níveis de rentabilidade, a aumentar a oferta de crédito, a melhorar sua eficiência operacional e a aumentar o risco de crédito, entendido pelo aumento das provisões para inadimplência. Utilizando dados bancários de 11 bancos privados nacionais brasileiros para períodos semestrais de dezembro/1994 a dezembro/2002 e conduzindo regressões em painel e regressões lineares multivariadas para os dados agregados da amostra, o estudo busca evidenciar a existência de uma relação estatisticamente significante entre as variáveis de desempenho e a entrada dos bancos estrangeiros. Contradizendo a evidência empírica apresentada pela literatura internacional, este trabalho demonstra que, no Brasil, a entrada dos bancos estrangeiros estimulada pela liberalização da economia e da legislação após o plano Real, teve pouca influência no desempenho dos bancos privados nacionais. Os resultados estatísticos sugerem que um aumento da participação de bancos estrangeiros acarreta maior rentabilidade, menor eficiência operacional e aumento do risco de crédito para os bancos privados nacionais. / [en] Current empirical literature concerning foreign bank entry and case studies conducted in different countries, shows that the foreign bank entry causes negative impact on their domestic competitors performance. Basically, due to the improvement of the competitive market structure and better banking practices introduced by foreign banks, the domestic competitors are compelled to reduce their level of profitability and net interest margin (spreads), enlarge their credit intermediation, improve their operational efficiency, and increase their amount of risk, resulting in higher loan loss provisioning. By using semestral data from 11 private Brazilian banks during the period of 1994 - 2002, and conducting panel regressions and linear multivariate regression for the aggregate data of the sample, this work aims at offering evidence of a statistic relationship between the extent of foreign entry and ownership in the Brazilian private banking performance. This work show that in Brazil, the foreign bank entry, stimulated by the economic liberalization of the Real Plan and reforms taken under the legislative framework, had little impact on the Brazilian private bank performance, which contradicts the empirical evidence in the literature. Estimation results suggest that an increase in the share of foreign banks leads to higher profitability, lower operational efficiency and higher loan loss provisioning of domestic private banks.

Cette thèse étudie les implications du commerce international sur l'innovation en considérant l'enjeu de l'interdépendance spatiale. En e et, les mécanismes par lesquels le commerce international affecte l'innovation reposent sur la mise en évidence de facteurs qui, parce qu'ils sont à l'origine de rendements croissants, représentent de véritables moteurs de la croissance. Or le processus d'accumulation de ces facteurs repose sur des effets dont l'intensité est contrainte par l'espace. D'abord, les flux commerciaux qui sont supposés transmettre la technologie entre les pays sont spatialement interdépendants. Ensuite, les résultats mis en avant dans littérature existante captent seulement l'effet direct des échanges commerciaux sur l'innovation. Toutefois il est possible qu'un pays bénéficie de la technologie d'un autre pays sans qu'un échange commercial ait lieu entre les deux pays. Il semble donc opportun de réexaminer la relation entre le commerce international et l'innovation dans un contexte d'interdépendance spatiale. A cet effet, nous nous sommes appuyés sur les modèles de croissance endogène pour dériver deux modèles structurels spatiaux permettant de rendre compte de l'interdépendance. L'analyse empirique de ces modèles fait ressortir qu'en plus des variables traditionnelles telles que les R&D et le capital humain, les externalités contribuent fortement à la hausse de productivité et que celles-ci sont particulièrement importantes pour les pays à faible revenu. De plus, La libéralisation commerciale, en augmentant la concurrence, favorise l'innovation dans les pays à revenu élevé. En revanche, elle entraine une baisse de celle-ci dans les pays à faible revenu. Ces résultats renforcent l'idée que, au moins dans le cas des pays avancés, l'ouverture commerciale accroît l'innovation et la croissance grâce à la concurrence. / This thesis studies the consequences for innovation of international trade allowing for spatial interdependence. Indeed, the mechanisms through which international trade affects innovation are based on highlighting factors that, because they are the source of increasing returns, represent real engines of the growth. Yet, the accumulation process of these factors depends on effects which are constraints in space .First, trade flows by which technology is supposed to transmit between countries are interdependent. Second, the results highlighted in existing literature capture only the direct effect of trade on innovation. However, it is possible that a country benefits technology from an another country without any trade between the two countries. It seems convenient to revise the relation between international trade and innovation in the context of spatial interdependence. Based on endogenous growth models, we derive two spatial structural models in order to take into account spatial interdependence. The empirical analysis of spatial models revealed that in addition to traditional variables such as R&D and human capital, externalities contribute strongly to productivity growth and these externalities are especially important for low-income countries. Regarding competition, the effects are mixed. Trade liberalization, by increasing competition, promotes innovation in developped countries. However, it reduces innovation in low-income countries.

The purpose of this thesis was to examine how liberalization and the introduction of pro-poor policies can be successful in post-conflict countries using the Rwanda coffee market as a case study. My research supports the notion that economic development, political stability and peace can be a result of liberalization when policies that are pro-poor and focus on the largest sector of the population are created. The study examines why and how Rwanda chose to liberalize their economy in the way they did by focusing on the intentions of the actors and the effects their actions have had on the coffee market and country as a whole. The findings suggest that Rwanda’s coffee market liberalization has been successful and has contributed to stability and economic development in Rwanda. The conclusion indicates that pro-poor liberalization policies with the assistance from a variety of actors and institutions can lead developing countries on the path to development in ways the international community has not seen before.

This paper uses an event study in combination with Granger causality tests to analyze the effects of capital control liberalizations in China. The AH Premium between the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges and the Shanghai and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges in addition to the total returns of the Shanghai Composite are all used to measure the effect of each event. The results are most significant in the Shenzhen-Hong Kong AH premium, but the overall market reaction to each liberalization event was minimal. The Granger causality tests studied relationships between the Shanghai Composite, the S&P 500, the FTSE 100, the Hang Seng, and the All-Ordinaries Index. Results showed the strongest Granger causal relationships between Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Australia. Overall, the Granger causality results are inconsistent with the theory that increased currency liberalization in China causes increased integration with other major global markets.

(None) Technical Summary of Thesis: The topic of my thesis is currency crisis. Currency crises have been a recurrent feature of the international economy from the invention of paper money. They are not confined to particular economies or specific region. They take place in developed, emerging, and developing countries and are spread all over the globe. Countries that experience currency crises face economic losses that can be huge and disruptive. However, the exacted toll is not only financial and economic, but also human, social, and political. It is clear that the currency crisis is a real threat to financial stability and economic prosperity. The main objective of this thesis is to analyze the determinants of currency crises for twenty OECD countries and South Africa from 1970 through 1998. It systematically examines the role of economic fundamentals and contagion in the origins of currency crises and empirically attempts to identify the channels through which the crises are being transmitted. It also examines the links between the incidence of currency crises and the choice of exchange rate regimes as well as the impact of capital market liberalization policies on the occurrence of currency crises. The first chapter identifies the episodes of currency crisis in our data set. Determining true crisis periods is a vital step in the empirical studies and has direct impact on the reliability of their estimations and the relevant policy implications. We define a period as a crisis episode when the Exchange Market Pressure (EMP) index, which consists of changes in exchange rates, reserves, and interest rates, exceeds a threshold. In order to minimize the concerns regarding the accuracy of identified crisis episodes, we apply extreme value theory, which is a more objective approach compared to other methods. In this chapter, we also select the reference country, which a country’s currency pressure index should be built around, in a more systematic way rather than by arbitrary choice or descriptive reasoning. The second chapter studies the probability of a currency exiting a tranquil state into a crisis state. There is an extensive literature on currency crises that empirically evaluate the roots and causes of the crises. Despite the interesting results of the current empirical literature, only very few of them account for the influence of time on the probability of crises. We use duration models that rigorously incorporate the time factor into the likelihood functions and allow us to investigate how the amount of time that a currency has already spent in the tranquil state affects the stability of a currency. Our findings show that high values of volatility of unemployment rates, inflation rates, contagion factors (which mostly work through trade channels), unemployment rates, real effective exchange rate, trade openness, and size of economy increases the hazard of a crisis. We make use of several robustness checks, including running our models on two different crisis episodes sets that are identified based on monthly and quarterly type spells. The third chapter examines the links between the incidence of currency crises and the choice of exchange rate regimes as well as the impact of capital market liberalization policies on the occurrence of currency crises. As in our previous paper, duration analysis is our methodology to study the probability of a currency crisis occurrence under different exchange rate regimes and capital mobility policies. The third chapter finds that there is a significant link between the choice of exchange rate regime and the incidence of currency crises in our sample. Nevertheless, the results are sensitive to the choice of the de facto exchange rate system. Moreover, in our sample, capital control policies appear to be helpful in preventing low duration currency crises. The results are robust to a wide variety of sample and models checks.

La libéralisation financière a été marquée dans de nombreux pays émergents par l’implantation massive de banques étrangères. A ce jour, les banques étrangères occupent une place dominante dans le secteur bancaire de ces pays et, cela soulève de nombreuses interrogations relatives aux effets sur la stabilité et le développement du système financier. L’objectif de cette thèse est donc d’étudier l’impact des banques étrangères sur l’efficacité du système financier et, de mettre en évidence le rôle de ces banques dans la survenance des crises et la transmission de chocs externes dans les pays émergents. Nous montrons ainsi que les banques étrangères contribuent à améliorer l’efficacité du système financier à travers la transmission de meilleures techniques d’évaluation et de gestion de risque. Cependant, elles sont apparues comme un vecteur de transmission de chocs externes. Cela nous amène, au regard de l’inadéquation du dispositif de surveillance prudentielle, à mettre en avant un cadre de coopération internationale dans la résolution des crises. Il s’agira donc de coordonner l’action collective en impliquant les autorités de régulation, les institutions financières internationales et les acteurs privés que sont notamment les banques de dimension systémique. / The financial liberalization in emerging countries has been marked by the growing rate of foreign banks presence. According to the increasing role of foreign banks in emerging markets, the aim of this thesis is to highlight the impacts on financial development and financial stability. It focuses mainly both on the implications of foreign banks competition on the efficiency of the financial system and on the fact that these banks can increase the financial crisis or convey external shocks. We show that foreign banks play a large part in improving financial efficiency through the best practices introduction in risk management. However, these banks have emerged as a vector of external shock transmission. This leads us, given the banking system regulation inadequacy, to promote a greater international cooperation in the crisis resolution based on national regulators, international financial institutions and multinational banks.

Liberalization and privatization of the electricity industry is one of the most important processes in the few last years. Even when the electricity market is fully open, substantial barriers to competition often remain. These barriers are refusal of access to the market, the lack of capacity in interconnectors and long-term contracts. The process of liberalization has shown that a third-party access to the network is a critical and important factor in ensuring a real and effective liberalization of the market. The process of liberalization has also supported new ways and forms of energy trading including financial contracts instead of purely physical contracts for the delivery of electricity. It is a question if the benefits of liberalization of the electricity industry compared with a regulated private monopoly or public monopoly were profitable. Someone could argue that the liberalization of electricity tends to bring benefit to monopoly structures and increase prices of electricity in industry. This work tries to present the pros and cons of liberalization in the electricity industry while taking in consideration the best means of making the liberatization as much profitable and useful as possible.

This diploma thesis is divided into three parts. The first chapter deals with theoretical aspects of transformation and its objectives. Furthermore, characteristics of the previous system, a centrally planed economy, and its specifics in comparison with a market economy are explained; positives and negatives of the starting situation are described, through different theoretical approaches of transformation. In the second chapter, the reader can find explanation of the transformation process and concrete changes such as privatization, company restructuring, privatization of banking sector, liberalization and the topic of entrepreneurial environment and restructuring. The end of this chapter focuses on reforms, namely fiscal reform, retirement reform and public health reform. The third chapter is aimed to review the results of the transformation process. The analysis was done first by means of macroeconomic indicators, second, using transformation results published by EBRD, in comparison with other countries.

In the first chapter natural, human and capital resources of Egyptian economy are characterized. In the second chapter the changes in economic policy after 1952 are described, from the era of Arabic socialism to the present period of economic transformation. The third chapter deals with the privatization process. In the fourth chapter deregulation of the economy is described, especially the land reform, the banking sector reform, monetary and fiscal policy. The fifth chapter deals with the process of opening of the econimy, thus liberalization of foreign trade and investmendd is described. The sixth and last chapter is focused on the structural changes in particular sectors of economy.

The aim of this study is to investigate the reasons of slow path of economic transformation in Belarus. In the first part is analyzed the general pattern of transition, characteristic for most of post-soviet countries. In the second part is described the path of transition in Belarus -- one of the least transformed countries in post-soviet region. In the study is introduced the analysis of initial conditions and first market reforms implemented on the initial stage of transition. Also, the author investigates the economic model, established in Belarus after market reforms had been suspended. In the study is discussed the possibility for continuation of economic transformation in Belarus in recent future. In order to summarize the key points of the study and draw the complex picture of Belarus in the world economy the SWOT analysis of Belarusian economy is introduced.