INTERNATIONAL
CONFERENCE ON GROWTH, DEVELOPMETN AND POVERTY (GDP2007),
Abstracts of Conference
Papers
Strategic and General Equilibrium Models in
Poverty Measurement Studies
Keshab Bhattarai,
Incentive compatibility in poverty alleviation game for the most efficient and just allocation of resources and maximisation of social welfare requires cooperation from both rich and poor households, governments and the global community. Non-cooperation among them only deepens poverty with socially, economically and morally unacceptable magnitudes of malnutrition, hunger-disease-illness, tensions and conflicts, illiteracy and lack of education and skills. Scientific analyses and systematic implementation of poverty reduction initiatives require strategic and multi-household general equilibrium models to compliment standard Booth-Rowntree, Sen-Atkinson and FGT or Jenkins-Lambert type absolute, relative, chronic or intensity measures of poverty in order to evaluate dynamic impacts actions taken for alleviation of poverty. Bad game results in poverty and good game results in prosperity. No analyses of poverty can be considered complete without evaluating income and substitution effects on welfare of these households based on the price mechanism and allocation of resources in the wider economy.
The Evolution of the Economic Thought about
Poverty Measurement
Celso Pereira Nunes,
This essay describes the evolution of the Economics of Poverty. It shows how the leading objectives of its authors changed over the decades. The description is roughly exhaustive from the end of the nineteenth-century to the “rediscovering poverty era” in the 1960s. After that, it concentrates in the fundamental ideas that constitute the existing theoretical framework of the poverty measurement, with an extended comment on the more relevant issues.
Reviewing the economic literature about poverty since the end of the nineteenth-century, we may find the discussion of theoretical and practical issues as the causes of poverty, the concept of poverty and how to measure poverty.
In Section I, major works written about poverty in the transition from the nineteenth- to the twentieth-century are presented, from Charles Booth to Benjamin Rowntree. In Section II, the rediscovery of poverty era is described and commented and in Section III the key works since 1965 on the poverty measurement are summarized and commented. Some concluding remarks on the evolution of the leading objectives of the authors in the final section try to point out the idea that these objectives varied a lot since the 1960s, being predominantly academic only since that decade.
Demographic Uncertainty and Welfare in a
Life-cycle Model under Alternative Public Pension Systems
Muhammad Saifur Rahman, Department of Economics,
In this paper, I analyzed consumption, aggregate savings,output and welfare implications of five different social security arragements whenever there is demographic uncertanity. Following Bohn(2002), I analyzed the effect of an uncetain population growth in an extended version of a modified Life-cycle model developed by Gertler(1999). Population growth dampens savings and output under all arrangements. Pay-as-you-go-Defined Benefit appears to fare better than all other alternatives, falling short of the private annuity market with no pension system. But social security in general increases social welfare, with Fully Funded systems faring the best. Thus there appears to be a clear tradeoff bewteen growth and social welfare. The social security system also reduces the volatility of the economy.
Population Growth and Local Home
Environment Externality in an Endogenous Growth Model with Two Engines of
Growth
Shirou Kuwahara,
Assistant Professor, Graduate
Katsunori Yamada, Research Fellow for the
Under the presumption that population grows in the real world, this paper presents an endogenous growth model which is useful to analyze the relationship between the population growth rate and the per capita GDP growth rate. We will consider the ``local home environment externality" conceptualized by Galor and Tsiddon (1997a). Then, aggregate human capital in our model can augment automatically with births of new agents, which effect has been neglected in the endogenous growth literature. The intensity of the externality is considered to reflect the society's attitude toward home education. If it is high, then the economy has cultural or institutional backgrounds in favor of home education. Depending on the intensity of the externality, the model will generate a negative relationship between the population growth rate and the per capita GDP growth rate, which is also present in the data. Furthermore, with our model that has multiple equilibrium paths, we obtain a paradoxical result that the economy with stronger externality may be trapped in a slowly growing path. With this outcome, we argue that policies that encourage home education are not always beneficial for economic growth.
Does Political Reservation for Minorities
Reduce Poverty? Evidence from
Nishith Prakash,
Affirmative action policies have been used in both
developed and developing countries to improve the well-being of disadvantaged
minority groups. Among the most radical
of these policies has been to mandate political representation for
minorities. For example, in
A general problem when estimating the effect of minority political representation on outcomes is that the representation variable is likely endogenous. For example, states that elect more minorities to office might also treat minorities better in schools and the labor market; consequently the estimated effect would not be the causal effect of minority political representation on the outcome. In this paper, I take advantage of the state-time variation in minority political representation generated by the aforementioned policy rule in the Indian Constitution and the timing of elections to address the endogeneity problem.
Using data on sixteen Indian states for the period 1960-1992, I find that increasing the share of seats reserved for ST significantly reduces poverty in both urban and rural areas. Increasing the share reserved for SC significantly reduces urban poverty but has no impact on rural poverty. Interestingly, it appears to be people just below the poverty line, not those far below it, who are benefiting. These findings survive a variety of robustness checks.
Trade and Income Inequality in SAARC: A
Spatial Analysis
Khandoker Shuvo Bakar, Institute of Statistical Research and Training
(ISRT).
This paper aims to study the spatial dependency of trade and per capita income among the countries of SAARC. Here, both trade and income inequality has been estimated for the SAARC countries over the years 1989 to 2003 using Theil’s index and has been decomposed indicating the least developed countries (LDCs) and non-LDCs of the region. It has been seen that the within group inequality dominates the between group inequality for both the cases. And the output of polarization index has pointed the change of within group inequality for the year 1995. In this analysis, spatial autocorrelation has also been measured and compared with the inequality pattern. For income negative and for trade strong positive spatial autocorrelation has observed, but in some particular years data has shown no spatial dependency for both the variables.
Capital Accumulation and Growth in
Prabirjit Sarkar
Visiting Fellow, CBR,
Professor of
This study examines whether there exists a long-term relationship between Indian share price movements and growth through capital accumulation over more than half a century period since 1951. Using the Autoregressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration developed by Pesaran and Shin, our study shows that no long-term relationship exists between the gross-fixed capital formation (total as well as private) as percentage of GDP and nominal or real share price. There is also no relationship between the growth rate and share prices (both nominal and real). There is also no relationship if we consider the growth rates in share price.
GLOBALIZATION, FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT
AND THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX: THE CASE OF
Safia Qamar
Minhaj, Roohi Azeem and Seema Siddiqua Hai, Department of
economics,
This paper seeks to elucidate how foreign direct
investment in
A Comparative Study Of The Channels Of Globaization In
Safia
Qamar Minahj and Seema Siddiqua Hai, Department of
Economics,
There are four key channels of
globalization viz trade openness, financial
liberalization, international migration and technological diffusion. The trade
dimension of globalization has perhaps been the most prominent and effective
channels over the last two decades. Empirical evidence suggests that growth in
trade in many countries has out paste the growth in out put. On the other hand,
the global financial system has under gone some rapid changes over the last few
decades. In some countries the positive impact of globalization is much more pronounce
than negative impact depending on the relative strength of the channels of
globalization. With globalization, increased integration of the world economy
provides tremendous opportunities for developing countries such as
Endogenous Financial Development and
Industrial Takeoff
Alex Trew,
There is a large and growing literature on the
relationship between financial development and economic growth. It suggests a
positive causal link running from finance to growth. We consider, in broad
terms, the existing historical evidence on this connection. We demonstrate that
constraints on investment finance occur primarily in the presence of fixed
costs. Investments in physical transport infrastructures are prime examples of
projects in which financial constraints can retard industrial growth.
Furthermore, an appreciation of spatial and dynamic elements is central:
Infrastructure development was privately financed by spatially concentrated
coalitions of modest investors. We contrast the institutional environment in
Implementation of
Seema Siddiqua Hai, Safia Qamar
Minhaj and Roohi Azeem, Department of Economics,
This paper investigates the issues, challenges and
implication of Basel II implementation for developing countries with a focus on
BARGAINING, COALITIONS, SIGNALLING AND
REPEATED GAMES FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND POVERTY ALLEVIATION
Keshab Bhattarai,
How economic agents with
conflicting interests can analyse gains from bargaining, coalition, signalling
and repeated games and how their pivotal positions influences the outcome of
the game is illustrated using numerical examples. Dynamic Poverty game is
proposed for alleviation of poverty that requires cooperation from tax payers,
transfer recipients and the democratic government and the international
community. These concepts are applied to analyse how the incorporation of
growth pact in the constitution can set a mechanism for cooperative solution
required for peaceful and prosperous
Welfare and Distributional Impacts of
Financial Liberalization in an Open Economy: Lessons from a Multi-Sectoral
Dynamic Model for
Economic Growth &Conditional
Convergence: Its Speed for Selected Regions for
1961—2001,
Somesh.K.Mathur,Lecturer-Department of
Economics, Jamia Millia Islamia (
The study gives the theoretical
justification for the per capita growth equations using Solovian
model(1956) and its factor accumulation assumptions.
The different forms of the per capita growth equation is used to test for 'conditional convergence' hypotheses
and also work out the speed of conditional convergence for EU, East Asian and
South Asian regions together from 1961-2001.
Conditional convergence is
prevalent among almost all pairs of regions in our sample except East Asian and
South Asian nations together. Speed of conditional convergence ranges from 0.2
% in an year to 22%. Countries that are poor relative to their own steady
state do tend to grow more rapidly. It does not mean that all countries in the
world are converging to the same steady state , only that they are converging to
their own steady states(conditional convergence)
Impact of Economic Growth on Achieving MDGs
Manoj Panda and A. Ganesh-Kumar,Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research,
The MDGs have taken centre stage in setting the global development agenda since 2000. The community of nations have specified a set of targets to be achieved by 2015. Interesting debate continues on the policy instruments to achieve these targets. An influential section believes that economic growth could serve well the purpose while others argue for emphasis on non-income factors. Against this background, this paper examines the factors that affect some of the MDG indicators relating to poverty, education, gender parity and health, and quantifies the extent to which economic growth alone can help in achieving the MDG targets. Income elasticity of the MDG indicators have been estimated using cross-country data from the Asia-Pacific region. Our income elasticity estimates suggest a less than proportionate response for all the indicators including measures of income poverty. We find substantial shortfall from the MDG target is likely to occur for the MDG indicators if the countries depend on only the economic growth process.
Groundwater Resource Development and Management for Urban Poverty Alleviation:
A Case of
Shreshna Basnet and Dr. Sagar Raj Sharma,
Human and Natural Resources Studies Centre,
For centuries the people in
Role of Private Sector in
The
purpose of this paper is to initiate a debate about the role of private sector
and foreign direct investment in conflict transformation. Development in Nepal
has miserably failed so far because of various factors, such as over dependence
on foreign aid, failure of donors to ensure the proper use of their funds and
effective coordination of their activities, centralisation in Kathmandu of both
government and private structures, widespread corruption and abuse of authority
by bureaucrats and politicians, and the exclusion of large sections of the
population from a role in devising policy and program development, to name a
few. This paper argues that instead of continuing to rely heavily on foreign
aid,
The paper thus argues that
private sector actors in
From Poverty to Personal Growth and Healthy Development
Ravshanbek Dalimov,
The article discusses both personal and social aspects of poverty, together with means to change the status of poor which consist of charity, skills training and entrepreneurship as well as social security benefits. Healthy development is provided in this case by through health insurance systems.
Economic growth and
development in developing countries has been a much debated theme. Now the
widespread belief is that higher economic growth rates in developing countries
would lead to better economic welfare. This is especially so after the early
1990s. The developing economies like
Institutional
Barrier, Learning Externality, and Catching Up, Yong Wang, Department of
Economics
This paper develops a parsimonious theoretical model to explain the mechanics of a developing country's catching-up behavior with endogenous institutional change. We characterize the optimal institutional adjustment scheme and how this would affect the growth experience both in the transitional dynamics and the long-run steady state. Our main results include:(1)Under perfect international credit market, the number of institution adjustment is finite and they only occur precisely when the learning barrier just becomes binding. It implies that the less developed economy keeps catching up with the developed economy continuously until no further institution adjustment is made. Permanent level difference may or may not exist on the balanced growth path, depending on the last endogenous institutional change. When the credit market is imperfect, the catching-up might occur intermittently and the institution adjustment is typically slower because of the financial constraint, which has both transient and permanent growth and level effects;(2)Both one-shot and piecemeal institution reforms could be optimal institutional adjustment schemes, depending on the initial conditions and the completeness of the credit market; (3)The size of institutional adjustment could also depend on whether the central government is politically strong enough and whether the reform is more pro-market.
The State of
Women constitute 47.5 percent of total international
migration flow in today’s world. However, representation of Bangladeshi female
migrants in the labour market is the thinnest among all the countries in