Chapter 1:
1. What do you hope to gain from a course in economic development (other than a good grade)?
Answer: Answers to this question can vary depending on the background of the student. Possible responses include: (1) a greater understanding of economic principles that are important to economic development; (2) why there are differences between countries in average economic welfare and its dispersion; (3) what it means to live in the developing world that encompasses more than two-thirds of the world's population; and (4) efforts to gain insights into a developing economy that the student knows well.
2. Why is studying economics so central to understanding the problems of developing countries?
Answer: Economics is the science of choice in allocating scarce resources to unlimited wants. Economics is central to understanding developing countries, since these countries have extensive needs with very scarce resources, necessitating difficult choices. As economics improves the making of choices in LDCs, their problems will be less severe. Economic analysis focuses on ways to improve the material well-being of the population, and the past experience of economies trying to improve economic performance.
3. What impact might rapid economic development have on the lifestyle of Balayya’s family?
Answer: Balayya's family is involved in farm labor. True economic development involves improving the economic position of the bottom one-fourth to one-half of the population. Development for the masses will improve Balayya’s family’s average economic welfare and increase the likelihood of migration to areas of India with better economic opportunities.
Kolkata’s marginally employed?
Answer: Economic development for India’s poorest will improve the standard of living of Kolkata’s marginally employed. Development should mean increased prosperity that spreads to the poor as well as increased educational, training, and employment opportunities; more tax revenue to improve transport, services for the homeless; and better cleaning and custodial services for Kolkata.
Software workers and capitalists?
Answer: Increasing development and globalization improves opportunities for information technology exports and for starting new information-technology (IT) firms and hiring IT workers. See also pp. 6-8.
4. What effect has globalization and outsourcing had on income and employment in North America? In India and China?
Answer: Pp. 6-10, with particular emphasis on pp. 6-7, and discussion surrounding Figures 1-1 and 6-9.
5. Would you expect the development goal for the Indian poor to be a lifestyle like that of the Smiths?
Answer: While many Indian poor would aspire to attain the material level of living of the Smiths (or the level of their more affluent neighbors or the Indian middle class), these poor are not likely to adopt the Smiths’ religious views, tastes, and values.
6. Why are economic theories about developing countries different from those based on Western experience? What assumptions are involved in each case?
Answer: Pp. 11-12.
Since LDCs differ from DCs in many ways, economic theories based on assumptions valid in DCs may not be applicable to LDCs. For example, unlike developed countries, developing economies frequently do not have a mobile and highly educated labor force, commercial farmers with sizable land holdings, large numbers of responsive entrepreneurs, a favorable climate for enterprise, a high level of technical knowledge, local ownership of industry, heavy reliance on direct taxes for revenue, a large number of export commodities, an average income substantially above subsistence, a well-developed capital market, or a high savings rate.
7. Give an example of how rigid adherence to Western economic theory or uncritical
examination of development statistics may hinder understanding the developing world.
Answer: Pp. 11-12.
An example: In the West, farmers are likely to adopt improved agricultural extension practices such as using higher yielding varieties of grain. In LDCs, where farm incomes may be at subsistence, farmers may not be willing to adopt these improved practices because the risks associated with failure would be disasterous for the farmer operating at the margin of subsistence. Thus innovations are often much more difficult to introduce into these societies.
Chapter 2:
1. Is economic growth possible without economic development? Economic development without economic growth?
Answer: Pp. 15-16.
2. What do you consider the most urgent goals for LDCs by 2015? Why are these goals important? What policy changes should LDCs undertake to increase the probability of attaining these goals?
Answer: No fixed answer but discussion of MDGs (pp. 16-17) or other goals discussed in Chapter 2 might help in providing an approach.
3. Give an example of a LDC that you think has had an especially good (poor) development record in the past two to three decades. Why did you choose this LDC?
Answer: No fixed answer but examples and discussion in Chapter 2, for example of Taiwan and South Korea, could provide material for the answer.
4. List three or four countries that have moved significantly upward or downward in the GNP per capita rankings in the last several decades. What factors have contributed to their movements?
A. Answer: Pp. 20-21 provide some examples.
Countries that have moved upward in GNP per capita rankings the last half century include Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Mexico, Turkey, and Thailand. Countries moving downward were Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Morocco, Zambia, Ghana, Iraq, and New Zealand. Students may have others not discussed in the book. Factors contributing to these changes vary widely and must be considered country by country.
5. How useful are generalizations about the third or developing world? Indicate ways of subclassifying the third world.
Answer: Pp. 20-25 discuss this.
Generalizations are difficult to make concerning third world countries because there is such a wide range of development represented. Generalizations may need to be based on sub-categories. One useful categorization, based on 2003 per-capita GNI (see map, inside back cover) is low-income economies (less than $1,000), lower-middle-income economies ($1,001-$3,000), and upper-middle-income economies ($3,001-$9,000). Countries can also be classified by region, PPP (pp. 30-33), HDI (pp. 35-39), freedom (pp. 45-46), and other measures.
6. Discuss the price-index problem that LDCs face in measuring economic growth.
Answer: The GNP price deflator is used to calculate growth rates over time. The results can vary greatly, depending on which weighted price index that is used. Whether a country uses early or late weights in devising a price index makes a substantial difference in determining how large the price deflator will be in adjusting GNP growth. See the illustration of Malaysia on pages 25-27 of the textbook for an example of the price-index problem.
7. According the World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2003, Canada’s 2001 GNI per capita ($21,930) was about 63 times higher than Kenya (with $350). Can we surmise that the average economic well-being in Canada was about 63 times the average economic well-being in Kenya?
Answer: No, it is not likely that well-being is 63 times greater in Canada than Kenya. First, since Canada is located in a temperate climate some of Canada's GNI is for items like heating, insulation, and warmer clothing that merely offset the disadvantages of cold weather and add to GNI without increasing satisfaction. Secondly, GNI for Kenya is probably understated since a greater proportion of goods are produced in the home for own consumption and never enter the market and is thus likely left out of GNP measurements. Third, GNI is understated for Kenya, where household size is substantially larger than in Canada. Fourth, GNI is overstated for Canada, because a number of items included in its national income are intermediate goods, reflecting the costs of producing and guarding income. Fifth, the exchange rate used to convert GNI in Kenyan shillings into Canadian dollars, if market clearing, is based on the relative prices of internationally traded goods (and not on purchasing power). On balance, the per-capita income differences between Canada and Kenya are vastly overstated (see pp. 27-34).
8. Nigeria’s 2001 GNP per capita was $290, more than one and one-half times that of neighboring Niger’s $180. What other assessments of socioeconomic welfare (other than GNP per capita in U.S. dollars at the prevailing exchange rates) could be used in comparing Nigeria and Niger? What are the advantages and disadvantages of these alternative assessments?
Answer: Nigeria’s per-capita GNP may be more than one and one-half times that of Niger’s, as the 1.5 multiple may understate Nigeria’s superiority vis-à-vis Niger in health care and education. GNP at purchasing power parity, PQLI, and HDI are alternative measures that may better compare these differences. See pp. 30-39 for further discussion of these alternative measures.
9. Compare basic needs attainment, HDI, PQLI, and the International Comparison Project’s Purchasing Power Parity to GNP per capita in U.S. dollars at existing exchange rates as measures of economic well-being.
Answer: Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) depends on using a series of simultaneous equations to solve PPP for 81 countries (and a shortcut estimating equation for 57 nonbenchmark countries with poorer data) and world average prices for 400-700 commodities. The indices for PQLI and HDI rely on several socio-economic variables: PQLI on infant mortality, life expectancy, and adult literacy rate and HDI on life expectancy at birth, a composite measure of education and literacy, and the logarithm of GDP in PPP dollars. The two are difficult to compare because each relies on different. The ICP converts a country's GDP into its own currency into international dollars by measuring the country's purchasing power relative to all other countries rather than using the exchange rate. While GNP (PPP) may most accurately reveal relative material well-being, the figures are subject to large margins of error (pp. 33-34). See pp. 30-39 for more discussion.
10. In what ways are conventional basic-needs measures inadequate in assessing the material welfare of the poorest 20 percent of a developing country’s population?
Answer: “Basic-needs” measures, such as calorie supply per head, literacy rates, primary enrollment rates, life expectancy at birth, infant mortality rates, and housing quality (see p. 42), are aggregate measures. These indicators need to be supplemented by data on distribution by income class, say by quintiles. Still basic needs measures of the whole population may provide hints as to the welfare of the poorest 20 percent. If calorie supply is less than requirements, it is likely than the poorest portion of the population has the most hunger. If infant mortality is high (say 100 dying in the first 12 months per 1,000 births), we can surmise that the position of the poorest 20 percent is dire. Or if, say, only 50 percent of the percentage has access to potable water, you can surmise that few, if any, of the poorest 20 percent has access. (See pp. 39-43).
11. Are economic welfare and political freedom complementary or competing goals?
Answer: They tend to be complementary. Democratic rights and liberties are correlated with economic and food security (see Chapter 7 on food in India and China). For Sen, development implies freedom, overcoming unfreedoms such as hunger, famine, ignorance, an unsustainable economic life, unemployment, barriers to economic fulfillment by women or minority communities, premature death, violation of political freedom and basic liberty, threats to the environment, and little access to health, sanitation, or clean water. (See pp. 43-48).
12. Choose a country, for example, your own or one you know well. What have been the major costs and benefits of economic growth in this country?
Answer: No fixed answer, but pp. 44-48 help provide an approach.
While the United States has made great strides in increasing average material welfare, costs may include pollution of the environment, depletion of resources, rootlessness, time away from family, disintegration of the family unit, increased worker anxiety and insecurity, monotonous workplaces, and dog-eat-dog contention.
real output of material goods and services but many would say that this has come with great social costs and some would say at great cost to society's values. The benefits of more material goods and services must be compared to the accompanying costs of pollution of the environment, depletion of certain resources, time away from family, increased worker anxiety, and even disintegration of the family unit.
Chapter 3:
1. Discuss and assess Diamond’s evolutionary biological approach to development.
Answer: Pp. 53-54.
2. Indicate the broad outlines of world leaders in national GDP per capita during the medieval and modern periods. How do we explain the reasons for changes in world leadership?
Answer: Pp. 54-57.
3. What are the characteristics of modern economic growth? Why was modern economic growth largely confined to the West (Western Europe, the United States, and Canada) before the 20th century?
Answer: Pp. 56-61. Rapid and sustained increases in per-capita GNP brought about by capitalism, characterized by large capital accumulation and application of vast scientific and technical knowledge to production. Capitalism arose in the West, aided in economic transformation and modernization by a decline of feudalism, the breakdown of church authority, strong nation-states supporting free trade, a liberal ideology tailor-made for the bourgeoisie, a price revolution that speeded capital accumulation, advances in science and technology, and a spirit of rationalism.
4. How important were noneconomic factors in contributing to modern capitalist development in the West?
Answer: Noneconomic factors played a major role in the development of capitalism. While capital and technology are essential, factors such as demography, education, work ethic and individualism, intellectual change, effective bureaucratic and political leadership, relations between private owners and the workers, a facilitating legal framework, and incentives for innovation are important as well. See pp. 61-68, with particular emphasis on pp. 61-62.
5. How does the relative gap between the West and Afro-Asian LDCs today compare to the gap a century and a quarter or half ago? How do we explain this difference?
Answer: GNP per capita for the DCs in the first decade of the 21st century is roughly twelve times that of Afro-Asian low-income economies, if compared using international dollars using purchasing power parity rates. The gap was not so great 130 to 150 years ago since people could not have survived on one-twelfth the per capita income of the West in the late 19th century. Moreover, DC economic growth has been much more rapid during the past 130-140 years. See also pp. 57, 88-90.
6. Which countries outside the West have had the most development success in the last century? Are these non-Western development models useful for today’s LDCs?
Answer: Japan was extremely successful using "guided capitalism," in which the state played a major role in providing infrastructure and investment assistance. Asian tigers, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, were also successful. LDCs can selectively learn from these East Asian countries: some major ingredients of their successes included high homogenous standards (especially in science) of primary and secondary education, able government officials that planned policies to improve private-sector productivity, infrastructure development, substantial technological borrowing and modification, exchange-rate policies that lacked discrimination against exports, and (in Japan and Taiwan) emphases on improving the skills of small- and medium-scale industrialists. See also pp. 61-68, 73-74.
7. Evaluate Russia-the Soviet Union as a model for today’s LDCs.
Answer: The Soviet model of development achieved rapid growth through capital accumulation, structural change, and increased literacy, 1928 to 1948. However, this rapid growth came at the expense of stagnant consumption, slow food production growth, and the deaths of about 5 million people during forcible collectivization. The collapse of the Soviet Union suggests that this model is not very relevant for today's LDCs. See also pp. 68-73.
8. Compare the economic growth of today’s LDCs before and after World War II.
Answer: LDC economic growth was much more rapid after World War II than before. Estimates indicate that India’s real growth in per-capita income, 1900-1947, was only about 0.2 percent yearly compared to 1.9 percent annually, 1950-1992. See also pp. 79-86.
9. Indicate in some detail how sustained economic growth in North America has changed the material level of living from about 100 to 150 years ago to today.
Answer: The U.S. real per capita GNP growth of 1.9% annually multiplies income sevenfold over a century and nineteenfold for one and one-half centuries. During this time the average material level of living increased greatly for the typical household. See pp. 77-79 for more detail.
10. Has average income in the rich and poor countries converged since 1980? In the past 100 to 150 years? Has the relative income of poor and rich people converged since 1980? In the past 100 to 150 years?
Answer: Although average income in both the LDCs and DCs has increased since 1980, LDC growth was no faster than that of DCs’. However, if you use population weights, which accentuates the growth of China and India, the incomes of poor people grow more rapidly than those of rich people (see pp. 88-91, especially Figures 3-5 and 3-6).
GNP per capita for the DCs in the first decade of the 21st century is roughly twelve times that of Afro-Asian low-income economies, if compared using international dollars using purchasing power parity rates. The gap was not so great 130 to 150 years ago since people could not have survived on one-twelfth the per capita income of the West in the late 19th century. The average income in rich and poor countries has diverged in the past 100 to 150 years. There is no evidence as to whether the relative income of poor and rich people has converged or diverged in the past 100 to 150 years. See also pp. 57, 88-91.
Chapter 4:
1. What are some common characteristics of LDCs? Which of these characteristics are causes and which accompaniments of underdevelopment?
Answer: Characteristics are: political instability (cause); high percentage of labor in agriculture (accompaniment); high percentage of output from agriculture (accompaniment); low levels of capital and technology (cause); low savings rate (cause and accompaniment); high percentage of exports as primary products (accompaniment); rapid population growth (cause); low literacy and school enrollment rates (cause and accompaniment); unskilled labor force (cause and accompaniment), dualism (accompaniment), and poorly developed institutions (cause and accompaniment). For many characteristics, you can make arguments to support both cause and accompaniment. See also pp. 95-108.
2. How might today's LDCs differ from those of the 1950s?
Answer: More of today's LDC have gained independence and have their own political system. The dual economy still exists in low-income economies, but increasingly the modern sector is domestically owned and managed. Real GNP per capita is much higher today than in 1950.
Today’s middle-income economies have better developed economic and political institutions, a higher proportion of output and the labor force in industry and services, less dualism, higher levels of technology, less dependence on primary commodities, slower population growth, higher literacy and school enrollment rates, a more skilled labor force, and probably higher savings rates than most LDCs in the 1950s.
3. How might a list of common characteristics of low-income countries vary from that of LDCs as a whole?
Answer: LDCs as a whole have better developed economic and political institutions, a higher proportion of output and the labor force in industry and services, less dualism, higher levels of technology, less dependence on primary commodities, slower population growth, higher literacy and school enrollment rates, a more skilled labor force, and higher savings rates than low-income economies.
4. How do production and labor force shares in agriculture, industry, and services change as GNP per capita increases? Have production and labor force proportions for low- and high-income economies changed from 1977 (Figure 4-1) to the present?
Answer: As GNP per capita increases, the share of industry and services in production and the labor force increases, while the share of agriculture falls. However, LDCs’ (especially middle-income economies) have a higher share of industry and services and a lower share of agriculture at present than they did in 1977.
5. What is a dual economy?
Answer: A dual economy is one in which a labor-intensive, subsistence, peasant agricultural sector exists side by side with a capital-intensive enclave, consisting of modern manufacturing and processing operations, mineral extraction, and plantations agriculture. The modern sector produces for the market, uses reproducible capital and new technology, and hires labor commercially, (where marginal productivity is at least as much as the wage). According to Lewis (1954:139-191), the dual economy grows only when the modern sector increases its output share relative to the traditional sector. and a growing technologically improved modern sector operating side by side. See also pp. 103-104.
Are all LDCs characterized by economic dualism?
Answer: Virtually all low-income countries and many middle-income countries are characterized by economic dualism.
6. Will the skill composition of the labor force change as rapidly in LDCs as it did in the past in DCs?
Answer: Yes, as LDCs adopt DC technology, the skill composition of the labor force is likely to grow as rapidly in present-day LDCs as it did in the past in DCs.
7. What are the major characteristics of economic and political institutions in low-income economies?
Answer: Pp. 107-119.
What are the major institutional changes that take place with economic development?
Answer: The institutional insufficiencies indicated on pp. 107-119 are less likely to be present.
Are these institutional changes causes or mere correlations of growth? Or is growth a cause of institutional change?
Answer: The strength of the student’s argument concerning causality or correlations is important in grading this question. Whether growth causes changes in institutions or vice versa is not settled. It is likely that growth and institutional changes are interacting variables.
Chapter 5:
1. Is Ricardian classical economic theory applicable to LDCs?
Answer: Some Ricardian principles are still relevant for today’s LDCs: the law of diminishing returns, the stress on savings, free trade, freedom from government restrictions, and (for some LDCs) the concern about the scarcity of cultivable land. However, Ricardo did not realize how rapid technological progress could contribute to unprecedented economic growth and reduce the risk of stagnation. Furthermore, his iron law of wages did not forsee the extent to which population growth could be limited, at least in the West and Japan, through voluntary birth control. See also pp. 124-126.
2. How valid is the assumption that the development of LDCs will parallel the earlier stages of today’s DCs?
Answer: The beginning of the last paragraph on p. 130 through the first full paragraph on p. 131 helps critique the assumption of parallel development.
3. Choose one developed country (or one LDC that Rostow says has already experienced takeoff). How well does Rostow’s stage theory explain that country’s economic growth?
Answer: While the answer is not fixed, the student should focus on whether the country experiences the changes indicated in the preconditions stage (p. 128) and the takeoff (pp. 128-129). A more ambitious student may wish to consult either the 1961 or 1971 edition of Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, for a particular country and examine Rostow’s analysis. Asking a student to undertake this analysis is possible only for an exercise outside of class of if the test is an open-book test.
4. Which historical theory – Marx’s or Rostow’s – is more useful in explaining Western economic development? Contemporary LDC development?
Answer: Pp. 126-131. There is no fixed answer. The grade should depend on the strength of the analysis and not on whether the student favors Marx or Rostow. Many of one of the author’s undergraduate students are more favorable toward Rostow’s work than the text is.
5. Are some of today’s LDCs closer to Marx’s feudal stage than his capitalist stage?
Answer: Yes. Students can make the argument that some low-income African and Central American countries are closer to the feudal stage (although Frank would disagree). Marx thought that the Asian mode of production was backward.
What might a Marxist recommend for a LDC in the feudal stage?
Answer: Many interpret Marx as supporting development to capitalism before a workers’ revolution.
Would a Leninist or Baranist prescription for a feudal LDC be any different from Marx’s?
Answer: Yes. Lenin supported an additional Marxist stage, state capitalism, between feudalism and capitalism. An elitist group who was more conscious of worker exploitation, the Communist Party, had to be the vanguard of the working class, educating and providing propaganda for this class to see the need for revolt. Baran accepted most of Lenin’s view and, like Lenin, believed in a revolution by an international working class.
6. How might Marxian economic analysis (like Mao’s or Bettelheim’s) threaten political elites in socialist countries?
Answer: P. 127, the last paragraph, provides a start for examining this threat.
7. How valid is Baran’s theory in explaining contemporary underdevelopment in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? Are revolution and a Soviet-type government essential for removing this underdevelopment?
8. How valid is Baran’s theory in explaining the weaknesses of New-Deal-type regimes in LDCs?
Answer: There is no fixed answer to these questions. Probably few students in the West agree with Baran’s theory (pp. 143-144) and even fewer would agree with the Soviet approach after 1989-1991.
9. How does Andre Gunder Frank differ from Karl Marx in judging Western capitalism’s influence in Asia, Africa, and Latin America?
Answer: Marx thought that capitalism was a progressive force relative to feudalism, while Frank (pp. 145-146) thinks that capitalism contributes to underdevelopment.
10. For which country has dependence on Western capitalist economies been most costly? For which country has dependence on Western capitalist economies been most beneficial? On the basis of arguments about these two countries, how persuasive is Frank’s dependency theory?
Answer: There is no fixed answer to these questions but pp. 144-148 provides options.
11. What are some potential LDC vicious circles? How plausible are these as barriers to development?
Answer: Pp. 131-132.
12. How are wages determined in the subsistence and capitalist sectors in the Lewis model?
Answer: Pp. 138-140.
13. What is Lewis’s explanation for the expansion of the industrial capitalist sector?
Answer: Pp. 138-139.
Why do critics think that the Lewis model overstates rural-urban migration and industrial expansion?
Answer: “Critique on p. 140.
14. How well does the Lewis-Fei-Ranis model explain Japan’s economic growth in the early part of the 20th century?
Answer: Pp. 141-142.
15. How important are supply and demand indivisibilities in influencing LDC investment strategies?
Answer: Pp. 133-134.
16. How well does coordination failure or its overcoming explain the economic development of LDCs? Give examples.
Answer: Pp. 137-138, in the context of the debate on pp. 132-136.
17. What is the neoclassical theory of economic development?
Answer: Pp. 149-153.
Theory of economic growth?
Answer: Pp. 153-155
What are the policy implications of the neoclassical theory of development and growth?
Answer: Neoclassical approach to development: pp. 150-152; neoclassical theory of growth:p. 153, emphasis on savings and capital formation.
How effective have neoclassical policy prescriptions been for stimulating economic growth in developing countries?
Answer: There is no fixed answer to this question. The grade depends on the strength of the student’s argument.
18. How effective was Mankiw, Romer, and Weil’s modification in increasing the plausibility of neoclassical growth theory?
Answer: Pp. 154-155. Adding human capital, which explains 80 percent of the variation between rich and poor countries, does give plausible values for the neoclassical growth model. Mankiw et al.’s model means that, with similar technology and rates of capital and labor growths, income growth should converge, but much more slowly than in Solow’s model (Equation 5-1).
19. What were the weaknesses of the neoclassical theory of growth and development that gave rise to the new endogenous growth theory? How does the new growth theory address the neoclassical weaknesses? What are the strengths and weaknesses of new growth theory?
Answer: If the same technology were available globally, skilled people embodying human capital would not move from LDCs, where human capital is scarce, to DCs, where human capital is abundant, as these people do now (Lucas). Paul Romer believes that if technology is endogenous, explained within the model, economists can elucidate growth where the neoclassical model fails. When the level of technology varies, you can explain more growth, as DCs have higher levels than LDCs. Pp. 155-156. Weaknesses are discussed from the last two lines of p. 156 through the middle of the first full paragraph of p. 157.
20. Choose a country or world region. Which economic development theory best explains development in that country or region?
Answer: There is no fixed answer to this question. The grade depends on the strength of the student’s argument.
Chapter 6:
1. What is the meaning of $1/day and $2/day poverty?
Answer: Pp. 171-173.
What are the differences between the World Bank, Surjit Bhalla, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin in their views of poverty and inequality? Why do they have different figures on $1/day and $2/day poverty?
Answer: Pp. 181-186.
World Bank economists use country household surveys to estimate $1/day and $2/day poverty. Bhalla criticizes World Bank economists for basing consumption inequality estimates on an average taken from household surveys, whose consumption spending was substantially underestimated, rather than the higher average consumption based on national-accounts data. The last paragraph of p. 183 indicates what Bhalla views as the absurdity of the results when using surveys. Bhalla uses a multiplier, expenditures in national accounts/expenditures in the survey to obtain average consumption (p. 184).
Bhalla computes a global individual income distribution, showing that income inequality fell from 1980 to 2000, despite the large numbers of increases in intra-country inequality. The main reason for reduced individual inequality is the shift of many people from highly-populated Asian countries (such as China and India) from the world’s lower classes to the middle classes (see Figure 6-9). The World Bank’s Milanovic excludes China, with one-fifth of the world’s population but with large margins of error on the data, from his sample. If we use Bhalla’s figures, LDCs have already achieved U.N. Millennium Development Goals of reduced hunger and poverty (Chapter 2).
Sala-i-Martin’s method for getting 100 1-percentile sets rather than five quintile sets is explained on p. 182, paragraph 1.
World Bank economist Branko Milanovic charges Sala-i-Martin with having too few data points and a lack of clarity about whether his source uses consumption or income, or individual or household, distribution (World Bank economist Ravallion makes the same charge against Bhalla). Moreover, according to Milanovic, if Sala-i-Martin had included the former Soviet Union, former Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria in his sample, income inequality might have increased rather than falling over time. However, if Milanovic had included China’s data, global inequality would not have increased but would have fallen. Moreover, the standard errors for Milanovic’s Gini are so high that they are consistent with no change or a reduction in inequality.
Also see Zettelmeyer’s summary on p. 185, and Ravallion’s comment on p. 184, note 10.
2. What are the various dimensions of poverty other than low incomes?
Answer: Quotation from Narayan et al. on pp. 167-168.
What is meant by absolute poverty?
Answer: P. 171, last full paragraph through p. 173, first full paragraph.
To what extent is poverty culturally relative?
Answer: P. 171, second and third paragraphs, and p. 173, the paragraph after Pritchett’s quotation.
What are some characteristics of absolute poverty?
Answer: P. 194.
How close have poverty definitions been tied to food availability?
Answer: P. 171, last full paragraph through p. 173, first full paragraph.
3. How much poverty is there in the world? In the developing world? By region?
Answer: Table 6-1, p. 174, or other evidence on pp. 173-175.
4. How have poverty rates changed from 1820 to the present?
Answer: Table 6-5, p. 176, and pp. 185, last partial paragraph through the end of the paragraph on p. 186.
5. Assess the reliability and validity of LDC statistics on poverty and income inequality.
Answer: Pp. 165-167.
6. Which LDCs have the lowest poverty rates? The highest poverty rates?
Answer: Pp. 173-176.
What are the reasons for differences in poverty rates?
Answer: P. 165; Figure 6-1, p. 166; pp. 86-88; inside back cover; and inside front cover.
7. Is poverty synonymous with low well-being?
Answer: Pp. 176-178, first full paragraph.
8. What does Sen mean by the Gini approach, headcount approach, and income-gap approach to poverty?
Answer: Headcount approach, p. 176; income-gap approach, p. 176; Gini approach, p. 179, first full paragraph, with elaboration on pp. 179-181.
What are the advantages of using all three approaches to depict poverty as opposed to using only the headcount approach?
Answer: P. 178, second full paragraph and p. 179, first full paragraph.
9. What has happened to global income inequality since 1970?
Answer: Pp. 182-186.
10. Design a program for gathering information on poverty and income distribution for low-income countries (or a particular low-income country), indicate data and measures you would stress, and explain how this information can be used to influence government policy.
Answer:There is no fixed answer.
Gathering information: pp. 166-167; second full paragraph of p. 208: Identifying and reaching the poor to enable their geographical targeting or targeting by population group (for example, expectant or nursing mothers) requires detailed poverty mapping, with data on poverty assessment and “basic needs” indicators at local levels. Few national surveys are adequate for “guid[ing] poverty alleviation efforts aimed at attaching poverty at local levels.” (San Martin 2003:173).
Data and measures: pp. 171-173, 178-181.
Examples of information and government policy: pp. 202-212.
11. How do Irma Adelman and Cynthia Taft Morris show how economic growth in a dual economy explains the Kuznets curve?
Answer: Pp. 186-188.
12. Does the rising segment of the inverted U-shaped curve imply that the poor suffer from economic growth?
Answer: No. The rising segment of the inverted U-shaped curve indicate that income shares (not necessarily income) of the poor and other low-income groups decline.
13. Why are cross-national income distribution data for different per-capita income levels at a given time inadequate for generalizing about income distribution changes with economic development over time?
Answer: Time series data for individual countries are scarce and unreliable. Moreover, many LDCs have not yet arrived at a late enough stage of development to test the declining portion of the upside-down U curve. The only data available are for cross-sectional data at a given time (as those by Adelman and Morris discussed on pp. 186-187), not necessarily indicative of economic development trends over time. Thus, whereas the historical growth of early industrializing Europe suggest an inverted U, the evidence for today’s LDCs is too mixed and inconclusive to confirm the Kuznets curve.
14. Which policies do you think are most effective in reducing poverty and income inequality in developing countries?
Answer: Pp. 202-210, 245-264. To avoid rote memorization, I would advise instructors to ask more specific questions for examinations: What policies related to capital and credit (human capital, employment, health and nutrition, agricultural development, regional development) are most effective in reducing poverty and income inequality in developing countries?
15. Discuss why LDC women have higher poverty rates than men. What LDC policies would reduce female poverty rates?
Answer: Pp. 191-193.
16. Is there a tradeoff between LDC policies seeking to reduce income inequality and those trying to stimulate growth? Does the tradeoff vary between different LDCs?
Answer: Poor data may make it difficult to generalize about the tradeoff between income inequality and growth in LDCs. Earlier economists, especially those associated with planning in Pakistan, were convinced that there was a tradeoff, that is fast growth required sacrificing income distribution objectives. However, since Persson and Tabellini’s empirical analysis in 1994, more economists support the argument that inequality is harmful to growth.
The tradeoff is likely to vary from one LDC to another.
How to assess a student’s answer to this question depends on the quality of argument, not whether the answer is “yes” or “no.”
17. What conditions do you think are necessary for economic inequalities to contribute to war and political violence?
Answer: Pp. 212-214. Low per-capita income, predatory rule, a condition of relative deprivation, and a weak or failing state with extensive rent seeking, along with economic inequality, may contribute to war and political violence. Research on this is not adequate to indicate whether these variables are necessary or sufficient.
Chapter 7:
1.Give arguments in favor of LDCs concentrating their antipoverty programs in rural areas.
Answer: In LDCs, 63 percent of 5.3 billion people and 70 percent of $1/day poor live in rural areas. In LDCs, the agricultural population is growing, in many instances pressing on a limited arable land base. Moreover, the rural poor become urban poor as they migrate to densely populated cities in their search for employment. Moreover, 60 percent of the labor force in low-income countries is employed in agriculture (see p. 220).
2. In what ways does agriculture contribute to economic growth?
Answer: Agriculture contributes to economic growth through domestic and export surpluses that can be tapped for industrial development through taxation, foreign exchange abundance, outflows of capital and labor, and falling farm prices. As agricultural product and factor markets become better integrated by links with the rest of the economy, farm income expansion augments the market for industrial products.
3. Why is agricultural productivity in DCs so much higher than in LDCs?
Answer: Agricultural productivity in the developed countries has improved greatly over time because of an infusion of capital and improved technology. LDCs lack the high levels of capital accumulation and technical knowledge that contribute to the high rates of agricultural worker productivity in DCs.
4. How does a peasant economy differ from that of a commercial farm economy?
Answer: Peasant farming is primarily subsistence farming. The major goal of the peasant farmer is not to maximize income as in commercial farming but to maximize the family's probability of survival. Because of its concern for avoiding failure, a family operating at subsistence finds it is difficult to take risks and adopt new innovations.
5. What do you expect the trend in foodgrain output per capita and food consumption per capita to be in LDCs in the next decade? What LDC regions are most vulnerable in the next decade? What LDC regions are most invulnerable in the next decade?
Answer: While we cannot be certain whether foodgrain (cereals) output and consumption per capita will grow in the future (pp. 284-286, including Figure 8-9), food output and consumption per capita should increase. Several LDC regions (sub-Saharan Africa, West Asia/North Africa, South Asia, and Southeast and East Asia – see Table 7-2, p. 236) are expected to increase their cereals deficit (cereals consumption minus production) in the next one to two decades. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most vulnerable region. The least vulnerable regions are the United States, Canada the European Union 15, Australia, and New Zealand. The least vulnerable LDC regions are the former Soviet Union and Latin America.
6. Explain and compare India’s progress since the early 1950s in increasing average food output and reducing hunger to China’s progress.
Answer: Growth rates for food production in both China and India are positive, though generally slower than for other LDCs before the late 1970s, and more rapid than other LDCs after the late 1970s. Through the 1980s China's average level of food output per person was higher than India's. See Fig. 7-2 in the text for grain production comparison.
Compared to the Chinese, more Indians go to bed hungry each night and lead lives ravaged by regular deprivation. In a normal year, China’s poor were much better fed than India’s. Yet China has had more famines than India, largely because China gets less pressure to change disastrous policies from crusading newspapers or effective political opposition (pp. 233-235).
7. Explain sub-Saharan Africa’s negative growth in food output per person between the early 1960s and the late 1990s.
Answer: Sub-Saharan Africa is the only world region where food output per capita fell from the early 1960s to the late 1990s. since 1950 has not increased its production like other countries. Since 1960, foodgrain output has not increased much in excess of about 50 million tons while population has increased; thus a negative per capita growth rate. Some problems in Africa’s agricultural sector have resulted from adverse colonial policies, poor postcolonial agricultural policies and institutions (price disincentives, a lack of competitive markets, the absence of credit markets, the high risk of drought), and the neglect of the agricultural sector by the African countries' governments whose short-term political advantage is to intervene in the market to improve prices and incomes for urban classes (see pp. 230-232).
8. What factors contribute to the high incidence of rural poverty in LDCs?
Answer: Low capital per worker, lack of technology, low educational and skill levels, a lack of rural infrastructure, the brain drain to urban areas, food price policies, below-market foreign exchange rates, governmental urban bias, land concentration, insecure property rights, poor farm credit markets, and a lack of research on LDC ecological zones.
9. What factors contribute to the high incidence of rural poverty among single female heads of households?
Answer: Households headed by women comprise 12 percent of the rural poor and are often among the poorest of the poor. Many LDC societies discriminate against women. In some LDCs, women lack the legal right to own land. Moreover, women have fewer opportunities for schooling, lack physical mobility, and often work more than fourteen hours a day with household chores, growing food crops, and working in the labor force at low wages. These disadvantages are especially severe among single women.
10.Indicate the forms of urban bias in LDCs. Give examples of policies of urban bias (or rural bias) in your own country or another one you know well. Has such a policy bias hampered development?
Answer: Despite a majority of the LDC population in rural areas, governments allocate most of their resources to the cities. An example would be government allocating funds to steel mills instead of water pumps and tube wells. Pp. 243-244 give several examples of urban bias.
As indicated in the answer to question 2, agriculture contributes to economic growth generally through domestic savings, export surplus that can be transferred to industry, foreign exchange abundance, outflows of capital and labor, and falling farm prices. A bias against the large rural sector adversely affects the economy as a whole.
11. What policies are most effective in increasing rural income and reducing rural poverty? What strategies are needed to prevent rural development policies from increasing rural poverty through reduced agricultural terms of trade?
Answer. The exact policies will depend upon the specific conditions in the country. Some policies would be secure property rights, land reform and redistribution, revised land tenure rules, developing labor-intensive capital equipment, establishing rural credit agencies, agricultural research centers that work with farmers, institutes to develop and adapt technology for small farmers, an extension service integrated with development agencies and government ministries that provide suitable and timely inputs to farmers, to name a few things. To increase incomes of the rural poor, production-oriented programs need to be combined with policies to improve relative agricultural prices and rural income distribution (pp. 245-259).
12. Is Soviet and Chinese collectivism (similar to that before 1975) practicable in LDCs? Compare and explain China’s agricultural progress in the Maoist period (1949–76) to that of the period after the 1979 agricultural reforms.
Answer: Soviet and Chinese collectivism in agriculture is not likely to be practicable in most LDCs. It is no longer practiced even in China and the former Soviet Union. LDCs are under pressure to provide more food for their growing populations. They see the evidence that these collective systems did not provide the incentives to produce the output. Hence it is unlikely that they would adopt such a system.
In reforms beginning in 1979, China decontrolled (and increased) prices for farm commodities, virtually eliminated their compulsory deliveries to the state, reduced multitiered pricing, relaxed interregional farm trade restrictions, encouraged rural markets, allowed direct sales of farm goods to urban consumers, and decollectivized agriculture, instituting individual household management of farm plots under long-term contracts with collectives and allowing farmers to choose cropping patterns and nonfarm activities. After 1977-1979, especially during the first decade or so, China’s growth in food and other agricultural output per capita increased rapidly.
13. Identify an LDC whose productivity could be increased by land reform and indicate the type of reform you would advocate.
Answer. Pp. 246-249. In countries with severely concentrated land holdings, such as many in Latin America, redistributing land to small farmers usually increases LDC agricultural output and productivity. See the discussion of research by Berry and Cline in full paragraphs 2 and 3, p. 247.
Students may recommend land redistribution or modest land and tenure reform, such as revised land tenure rules discussed at the bottom of p. 248 and the top of p. 249. Here the quality of the argument is important in assessing student answers.
Chapter 8:
1. What factors have contributed to a rising LDC population growth rate since 1950 compared to previous periods of the same length? Why has the LDC population growth rate decelerated in recent decades?
Answer: During most of the period after1950, death rates plummeted due to improvements in health, nutrition, medicine, sanitation, transportation, communication, and production, while birth rates, supported by values and ideologies and less influenced by economic modernization, remained high.
While population growth from 1950 to 2000 has been rapid compared to other 50-year periods, within this half century population growth has decelerated decade by decade since its peak in 1960 (Figure 8-4, p. 275). Birth rates have declined from more effective contraceptives and more vigorous family planning programs but also the increased cost of children, enhanced mobility, higher aspirations, and changing values and social structure associated with urbanization, education, and economic development.
2. Explain the demographic transition theory. At what stages in the theory are LDCs? Why are they in different stages?
Answer. The demographic transition theory is centered on the period of demographic transition, a period of rapid population growth occurring between a pre-industrial, stable population characterized by high fertility and mortality rates and nearly equal birth and death rates in a late modern period. The fast growth takes place in the early transitional stage, when fertility rates remain high but mortality rates decline.
With the exception of some countries of sub-Saharan Africa, which have experienced recent increases in mortality from HIV/AIDS, most LDCs are in stage 3 of the demographic transition, the stage of declining fertility. Except for countries of the former Soviet Union, virtually no low-income or middle-income country is in stage 4, the stage of stationary population.
3. Compare and contrast the historical population growth patterns of DCs and today’s LDCs. Why are the patterns different?
Answer: Today's LDCs have experienced much higher population growth rates than the developed countries. Currently LDCs' population growth is 1.5% annually (but 2.0% yearly 1980 to 2005) compared to less than 1 % for the developed countries. This higher growth in LDCs is due to a sharper drop in mortality rates because today's LDCs have been able to take advantage of advances in food production, new pesticides, improved nutrition, better personal hygiene, medical innovations, and immunizations in a short time--many of which were not available to the developed countries during their early demographic transition. (Here again, sub-Saharan Africa’s recent experience with HIV/AIDS is proving to be an exception.)
4. What, if any, is the statistical relationship between birth rate and GNP per capita? Between birth rate and income distribution? What are the reasons for these relationships?
Answer. Countries with high GNP per capita tend to have lower birth rates. Modernization, including increased per capita income, education, and urbanization, reduces birth rates.
Nations with more even income distribution also tend to have lower birth rates. Income redistribution to lower classes increases the percentage of the population above the poverty level. Increased economic security and higher income for the poor mean having children is not the only way of securing one’s old age. Higher absolute incomes and redistribution policies increase lower-class literacy, mobility, and urbanization, factors reducing birth rates. Furthermore, with allowances for time lags, low birth rates increase income equality by decreasing unemployment and increasing per capita expenditure on training and education.
5. Why would population continue to grow for several decades after it reaches a replacement-level fertility?
Answer: Because of the young age structure in LDCs, their populations will continue to grow even after the average woman of childbearing age bears only a daughter to replace herself.
6. What are some of the costs of a high fertility rate and rapid population growth?
Answer: Diminishing returns to natural resources, increased urbanization and congestion, rapid labor force growth, growing unemployment, and high dependency burdens are some of the major costs of high fertility and rapid population growth.
7. How well does Malthusian population theory explain Western population growth? Contemporary LDC population growth?
Answer: Malthus’ population theory does not explain Western population growth. Malthus was wrong in predicting that population growth would outstrip food supply. He failed to foresee the technological change, capital accumulation, and voluntary birth control that would enable food to grow more rapidly than population.
Neo-Malthusians such as Lester Brown (pp. 285-286), who emphasize the lack of growth in foodgrain output per person in recent years, think that the Malthusian specter may have relevance for LDCs. However, with economic growth, consumption shifts from grains to luxury food like meat, milk, and eggs. Thus, most economists think that food supply is likely to growth more rapidly than population in LDCs (see p. 286).
8. What do you expect to happen to food production per capita (especially in LDCs) in the early decades of the 21st century?
Answer: Figure 8-9, p. 285, indicates that the world’s foodgrain output per person is no longer increasing. However, food output per person continues to increase, reflecting a substitution of other foods for foodgrain with economic growth. Still there is reason to be concerned about the LDC population-food balance in the future.
9. Discuss and evaluate views of economic optimists such as Simon who argue that LDC governments do not need a policy to limit population growth.
Answer: Simon argues that the level of technology is enhanced by population. More people increase the stock of knowledge through additional learning gains compounded by greater competition and total demand spurring "necessity as the mother for invention.” Division of labor and economies of large-scale production increase as markets expand. As population size rises, both the supply of and demand for inventions increase, thereby increasing productivity and economic growth. Because population growth spurs economic growth, Simon requires no government interference and is consistent with a laissez-faire population policy.
Simon’s assumption that technological progress arises without cost contradicts the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the world is a closed system with ever-increasing entropy or unavailable energy. Moreover, Simon’s model yields the intended results because they are built into the assumptions. Simon’s premise is that “the level of technology that is combined with labor and capital in the production function must be influenced by population directly or indirectly.”
10. Which policies are more important for reducing fertility: family-planning programs or socioeconomic development?
Answer: Birth control devices offered by family planning agencies will only be accepted if the social and economic circumstances of the population (income distribution, health, nutrition, education, female rights, and urban development) are such that reduced fertility seems to be advantageous. LDCs serious about reducing fertility need both family planning programs and policies promoting socioeconomic development and increased income equality.
Chapter 9:
1. What inputs determine the level of national product in a given year? Are these inputs stocks or flows?
Answer: capital, labor, natural resources, technology, and entrepreneurship. These inputs are flows into the production process in any given period.
2. What supply and demand factors for industrial labor explain rising LDC unemployment rates?
Answer: Supply factors include population growth and rural-urban migration. Demand is derived from the demand for (and growth of) industrial output. Factor price distortions and the nature of technology (how appropriate technology is) [see Table 9-2, p. 314] affect both the supply and demand sides. Increasing industrial unemployment is caused by the labor force growing faster than job opportunities (or supply growing faster than demand).
3. How widespread is disguised unemployment in LDCs?
Answer: Disguised unemployment, if defined as zero revenue product from a marginal hour of work, is not very plausible, either in industry or agriculture. Surely, as Viner argues, there is virtually always a possibility of substantial labor-intensive agricultural work. Empirical studies showing LDC output in agriculture remained constant or increased with reduced labor lacked evidence that capital formation and the level of technology remained constant. Obviously labor’s marginal productivity can be positive – even if output expands with less labor – if capital and technology increase.
4. Explain rural-urban migration in LDCs.
Answer: The simplest explanation, by Arthur Lewis, is that people migrate to urban areas when wages there exceed rural wages. The Harris-Todaro model suggests that migrants make decisions to migrate based on wages and the probability that they can obtain employment, assuming that migrants respond to urban-rural differences in expected rather than actual earnings.
5. What factors contribute to high urban unemployment in LDCs? Why are macroeconomic theories based on Western experience inadequate in explaining this high unemployment?
Answer: Both rural-urban migration and the rapid population growth contribute to urban unemployment in LDCs.
Keynesian unemployment from deficient aggregate demand is not important in LDCs because of the slow response in output to demand increases, labor supply responses to new employment opportunities, limited scope for changes in fiscal policy, and possible tradeoffs between employment and output resulting from inappropriate technology.
6. What policies can LDC governments undertake to reduce the unemployment rate?
Answer: Programs to reduce fertility; encourage rural development and amenities; substitute labor-intensive production techniques for capital-intensive approaches; substitute products that use labor more intensively; redistribute income to the poor; increase official purchases from small-scale, labor-intensive firms; generate new technology locally; adapt existing technology; curtail wages in the organized sector; and resist pressures for a too-rapid expansion and subsidy of upper-level education.
7. Explain why rural-urban migration persists in the face of substantial urban unemployment (for example, 15 percent or more). How would the Harris-Todaro model explain this situation? Evaluate the Harris-Todaro model.
Answer: The Harris-Todaro model indicates that migrants to urban areas make decisions to migrate based on wages and the probability that they can obtain employment. Harris and Todaro assume migrants respond to urban-rural differences in expected earnings (wage times the probability of employment) rather than actual earnings.
Harris and Todaro’s model, while more nuanced than the simple explanation of relative wages, fails to incorporate the urban informal sector into their analysis. The informal sector absorbs a substantial proportion of migrants to urban areas.
8. What is the urban informal sector? How does the informal sector labor market affect (or how is it affected by) labor markets in the urban formal and rural sectors?
Answer: The urban informal sector consists of small-scale individual, family, or other firms with less than ten workers, with wages below official minimum wages, with labor-intensive production and few capital, skills, and entry barriers. The sector is often not recorded in official statistics. The informal sector's labor supply is affected primarily by wages and population growth in the rural sector. Moreover, if urban formal sector labor demand is low, then there will be more labor flow into the urban informal sector.
9. What causes unemployment among the educated in LDCs? What educational policies will reduce this unemployment?
Answer: Unemployment among the educated in LDCs occurs because the educated have unrealistic earnings expectations or job preferences or because wage adjustment is slow or perverse. Policies should focus on reforming the educational system to achieve a balance between LDC educational output and labor needs. Strategies include: reducing subsidies and growth of the educational budget for secondary and higher education; increasing the flexibility of pay scales to changes in supply and demand; reducing inequalities and discrimination in education and employment; and modifying job rationing by educational certification.
10. What is Lewis’s explanation for rural-urban migration? Why do critics think that the Lewis model overstates rural-urban migration?
Answer: Lewis' simple explanation was that people will migrate to the urban sector when wages exceed those in the rural sector. Critics argue that the labor market is more complex, in that migrants consider the probability of obtaining employment in the urban sector as well as the expected lifetime earnings differential.
Chapter 10:
1. What impact has the increased premium on skilled labor had on attitudes toward and the relative wage for physical work in DCs?
Answer: The relative wage for and esteem of physical labor has fallen since the 19th century. Skilled labor and capital have increasingly replaced unskilled labor.
2. Would you expect the returns to a dollar of investment in education to vary from those in industrial plant, machinery, and equipment? Would noneconomic educational benefits affect the decision under perfect competition to equalize the expected marginal rate of return per dollar in each investment?
Answer: In a competitive marketplace, one would expect that the private returns on a dollar invested to equalize except in cases where there are substantial external benefits or costs. For education, there are substantial external benefits that must be taken into consideration. Also, education has both consumer-good and investment-good components. The consumer-good properties are those that enrich life, and thus people may be willing to pay for schooling of this kind even if the economic rate of return is zero or negative.
3. Does empirical evidence on the rates of return to education show that LDCs should put a priority on primary education relative to secondary and university education? Would you expect the relative returns to primary education, on the one hand, and secondary and postsecondary education, on the other hand, to change as economic development takes place?
Answer: Economists who analyze the relative rates of returns to investment to primary education and secondary education in LDCs disagree on whether LDCs should put greater priority on primary education. Psacharopoulos, Woodhall, and Patrinos, who find that the higher average returns are from primary education, argue for more emphasis on primary education. Knight, Sabot, and Hovey, however, question this emphasis in a study that shows that the marginal rates of returns to the cohort entering into the labor market were lower for primary education. Obviously more research is needed here. Yes, as development proceeds, you would expect that returns for higher education would increase.
4. To what extent is education a screening device for jobs rather than a way of increasing productivity in LDCs? How might the importance of screening and enhancing productivity vary by educational and skill level, sector, or world region in the developing world?
Answer: Educational qualifications are sometimes used as a screening devise especially for the higher paying jobs. However, even in these kinds of jobs, in the longer run it will be productivity, literacy, and numeracy that will command the higher wage premiums. It is more likely that this is the case at higher education levels especially in LDCs; however, again, in the longer run, greater output will be expected for greater pay in all countries.
5. How does LDC government investment in educational expansion affect income distribution?
Answer: In LDCs the expansion of primary education redistributes benefits from the rich to the poor, while the growth of secondary and higher education redistributes income from the poor to the rich.
6. What are some of the ways that an LDC can increase its rate of returns to investment in secondary and higher education?
Answer: Probably the most effective way would be to pay less of the expenses for higher education. Most LDCs subsidize college education almost in its entirety. Reallocating these expenditures elsewhere would be wise. Another way would be to assist women more, since there is some evidence that returns to education of women are higher. Also, reduce the cost of training skilled people by using more career in-service or on-the-job training. Furthermore, it may also be possible to simply reduce the number of university specializations, relying instead on foreign universities for specialized training in fields where few students and expensive equipment leads to excessive cost per person. Finally, distance learning through teleconferencing and computers can dramatically reduce the cost of continuing education and secondary and higher education, including teacher training (pp. 344-345).
7. What advice would you give to the top official in the Department of Education in a LDC who is designing a long-run program of education, training, and extension in his country? (You may either focus on LDCs in general, a particular LDC world region, or a particular LDC.)
Answer: The guiding principle should be keeping wages adjusted closely to productivity, something which often eluded LDC governments in the past, particularly in the public sector. The official should keep in mind that studies show that educating girls has a high payoff in improving nutrition, reducing fertility and child mortality, and increasing labor force productivity. On-the-job training tends to balance demand for, and supply of, training. In addition extension agents and training at short-term vocational or technical institutions and electronic distance learning can help people improve their skills without appreciably disrupting production.
8. How might government wage policies contribute to unemployment and underutilization of labor among the educated?
Answer: In many LDCs, the supply and demand for high-level personnel could be equalized if wages were adjusted to productivity. This shift in the wage structure can spur job shifts among the presently employed as well as encourage changes in spending for education and training that will better match needs, for example, more on-the-job training Perhaps better job information provided by the government could help.
9. How can LDCs reduce the brain drain?
Answer: First it must be recognized that the market for scientific, professional, and technical training is an international one. However, the following things may help to reduce the brain drain in LDCs: award scholarships and training grants only within the country, provide scholarships for study abroad only for areas of study the home country needs, send the students to another LDC for their study, develop joint research programs between institutions in the LDCs and developed countries with a clause that the research be done in the LDC, guarantee employment in the home LDC, and finally eliminate discriminatory policies and barriers to free inquiry to encourage highly educated nationals to return.
10. How do you explain cross-national differences in labor productivity?
Answer: Assuming similar capital and technology, cross-national differences in labor productivity are sometimes a result of different socialization and motivation of the worker. Personality, attitudes, motivation, and behavior acquired through child rearing and social interaction may simply result in a different work ethic and different abilities, thus resulting in productivity differences. Health and physical conditions can also be important.
However, sometimes cross-national differences are based on myth, as illustrated by colonial false perception of a backward bending individual supply curve for labor and the Western view of Asian aversion toward manual work (p. 351).
11. Why does Africa have such a high incidence of HIVAIDS?
Answer: Africa has the highest incidence of HIV/AIDS among adults and children. However, UNAIDS, the global fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, has been “cash-strapped,” with inadequate DC pledges, 2005–07.
Women are especially vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, comprising 58 percent of HIV-positive adults in the sub-Sahara, primarily because they are highly dependent on partners for economic security, and are often powerless to negotiate relationships based on abstinence or condom use. Furthermore, some are coerced into unprotected sex or run the risk of infection by a husband in a society where multiple partners for men are accepted.
Africa’s increased demand for health services is hampered by the falling number of trained medical providers, many from AIDS.
In Botswana, ignorance about HIV/AIDS,, taboo about acknowledging it, and discrimination against carriers, helped kindle the AIDS epidemic.
AIDS has perhaps caused more suffering and damage to the social fabric in already heavily burdened countries than any pathogen since the bubonic plague of the 14th century. Most people living with AIDS in DCs who benefit from chemotherapy and antiretroviral drugs can resume normal life. In Africa and other poor LDCs, with weakened health systems and lack of access to generic antiretroviral drugs, HIV, however, is still a death sentence. In Africa, only 1 percent of those adults with HIVAIDS have access to lifesaving antiretroviral therapy (WHO 2003).
Even if DCs and their companies permit these countries to buy cheaper generic drugs, the lack of an effective health delivery system in many countries may prevent widespread effective therapy. The cost and complexity of AZT (Azidothymidine) and other therapies limit their uses in poor countries (Lamptey et al. 2002).
Africa lacks integrated AIDS prevention and care, including correct and culturally appropriate information and existing prevention tools.
12. What investments can an LDC government make to increase the health and reduce the incidence of disease in the LDC? Examine these investments in the light of the opportunity cost for other investments, including those in social capital.
Answer: Life expectancy is probably the best single indicator of national health levels. Poor nutrition and bad health contribute not only to physical suffering and mental anguish, but also to low labor productivity. Thus, doing things to improve health generally will increase productivity and the return to that investment. This return will be as high as in any other area of social capital since it so closely affects productivity. Without health, the other social capital investments will not be fully realized.
Chapter 11:
[Note that p. 362 cites Nafziger’s supplement (2006b) which discusses questions 1-5.]
1. What measures can LDC governments take to increase net capital formation as a percentage of national income?
Answer: LDCs can increase saving rates by exploitation of unused capital capacity, moral suasion, increased collection of personal income, corporation, and property taxes, taxes on luxuries, sales taxes, development of financial intermediaries, increased investment opportunities, redistribution of income to people or sectors with high saving or tax rates, increased local financing of social investment, inflationary financing, restrictions on earnings in foreign currency, and indigenizing local ownership.
19. How useful is the Lewis model in explaining early growth in capital formation in developing countries?
Answer: It is useful since it relies on increasing capital formation as a percent of national income as the engine for growth. Lewis' model makes the central problem of growth and development understanding how a nation moves from saving and investing 4 or 5 % of income to 12 to 15 % of income.
3. How adequate is the market for making saving decisions in LDCs?
Answer: The major sources of domestic saving are households, corporations, and the government. Many poor countries have a substantial but unexploited capacity to save. However, if left to the market, the tendency will be to increase consumption at the expense of savings. Thus in early stages of development LDCs may want to force some savings to enable it to achieve a higher growth rate.
4. Is there much potential for using previously idle resources to increase LDC capital formation rates?
Answer: Although it would seem as if there is considerable potential to convert idle resources into capital formation, in practice it has not proven very beneficial. Labor with low marginal productivity in agriculture cannot be easily utilized cheaply: increasing capital utilization is difficult, and the success of capital imports depends on increasing future capacity. Thus, increasing saving usually requires diverting resources from consumption.
5. How can LDCs improve the tax system to increase saving?
Answer: In many LDCs where literacy is low and administrative capacity of the government is limited, it is difficult to increase savings through taxes. However, improving the tax system will increase taxes. Improvement can come in the direct tax area. Direct taxes, especially on the affluent individuals and enterprises, can increase tax revenue. Taxes can also be levied on luxuries. Sales or turnover taxes as used in the Soviet Union can also be a way of increasing tax revenue in LDCs.
6. What is the relative importance of capital formation and technical progress as sources of economic growth? In the West? In LDCs?
Answer: Studies of Western and other developed countries indicate that the increase in the productivity of each worker per unit of capital is a more important source of growth than the addition in capital per worker. However, research on the sources of growth in LDCs provides evidence that the contribution of capital per worker is more important to economic growth than that of worker productivity per unit of capital.
7. Why is capital accumulation more important as a source of growth in LDCs than in DCs? Why is technical progress less important?
Answer: Since capital is more scarce in LDCs, the return to capital will be higher and thus contribute more to the growth process. Technical progress (combinations of research, development, invention, and innovation) is less important as LDCs tend to be technology adapters rather than innovators. In DCs, which provide more technological leadership than LDCs, technology is a major factor contributing to growth. Capital is more abundant in DCs so that the return to capital will be lower.
8. What contributes to growth in output per worker-hour besides increases in capital per worker-hour?
Answer: Advances in knowledge, improved allocation of resources, greater education and training, learning by experience, organizational improvement, economies of scale, resource shifts, reduction in the age of capital, decreases in the time lag in applying knowledge, and product variety.
9. How do economists conceptualize technical knowledge? What effect does cost have in technology search?
Answer: Technical knowledge is the use of advances in knowledge, greater education and training, learning by experience, organizational improvement, economies of scale, and resource shifts all resulting in increased productivity. Costs are almost always more than just search cost in that there are many implicit steps to maximizing productivity in using the technology; thus there are continual costs to maximize its use.
10. Can growth be conceptualized as a process of increase in inputs?
Answer: Economists contending that output is explained by increases in input attribute the growth in total factor productivity to research, education, and other forms of human capital. Mankiw, Romer, and Weil’s (1992) empirical evidence indicates that the overwhelming share of economic growth is explained by increases in inputs: human capital, physical capital, and labor.
From one perspective, capital includes anything that yields a stream of income over time. Investment is net addition to material, human, and intellectual capital. Improvements in people’s health, discipline, skill, and education; transfers of labor to more productive activities; and the discovery and application of knowledge constitute human and intellectual capital. According to Harry Johnson (1976), economic development, then, may be viewed as a generalized process of capital accumulation.
In the final analysis, increases in inputs, while important, are incomplete explanations for growth. One must also include advances in knowledge, greater education and training, learning by experience, organizational improvement, economies of scale, and resource shifts.
11. How is the price of knowledge determined?
Answer: The price of knowledge, determined in the wide range between the cost to the seller of producing knowledge and the cost to the buyer of doing without, depends on the respective resources, knowledge, alternatives, and bargaining strengths of both parties. Selling knowledge, like other public goods, does not reduce its availability to the seller but does decrease the seller’s monopoly rents
12. What implications does learning by doing have for LDC domestic and international technological policies?
Answer: Since technical change is viewed as a prolonged learning process based on experience and problem-solving, domestic and international policies should recognize this fact. The learning curve should be an important factor in decision-making. Each successive piece of capital equipment is more productive, since learning advances are embodied in new machines. Learning takes place not only in research, educational, and training institutions, but also through using new capital goods.
13. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of technology followership?
Answer: The most obvious advantage is small costs associated with research and development. Followership also may not require deep levels of knowledge. Disadvantages are that followers will not reap the benefits that first users often receive.
14. What criterion would you recommend that a planner use in allocating investible resources among different projects and sectors in a less developed economy?
15. What is social benefit-cost analysis? Explain how it is used to rank alternative investment projects.
Answer: Suppose society has a given amount of resources to invest to raise output. The objective is to allocate these limited resources to achieve the largest possible increase in the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services. A standard approach, social benefit-cost analysis, a comprehensive investment criterion, states that you maximize the net social income (social benefits minus social costs) associated with a dollar of investment.
The net present value (V) of the stream of benefits and costs is calculated as
(11-1)
where B is social benefits, C is social costs, r is the social discount rate (the interest rate set by planners), t is time, and T is the life of the investment project.
Interest on capital reflects a discount of future income relative to present income, because more capital invested now means society produces a higher income in the future. Thus, even where there is no risk or inflation, a dollar’s worth of future income is never worth so much as today’s dollar. Future values are always discounted, and the more distant the payoff, the greater the discount.
You invest in projects that maximize the discounted net social benefits per unit of capital invested. Equation 11-1 above shows its calculation. If several projects are being considered, calculate the net present value of each project and invest in those with the highest return per dollar of capital invested.
16. What are the differences between social and private benefit-cost calculations?
Answer: As indicated in the answer to #14, for social benefit-cost calculation, the net present value (V) of the stream of benefits and costs is calculated as
(11-1)
where B is social benefits, C is social costs, r is the social discount rate (the interest rate set by planners), t is time, and T is the life of the investment project. When Equation 11-1 is used for private benefit-cost calculation, B becomes benefits and C costs incurred by the firm from the project, and r becomes the market rate of interest that the firm pays on the capital market. Private investors want to maximize the commercial profitability of the investment. By contrast, social calculation considers not only the internal rate of return to a given investment project but also its effect on the profitability of other production units and on consumers.
17. What is the maximum labor absorption investment criterion? What are its flaws?
Answer: Since labor is plentiful in LDCs relative to capital, the maximum labor absorption investment criterion indicates that LDCs should maximize the use of labor-intensive methods relative to capital-intensive methods. Flaws are that labor-intensive techniques may not be useable because of fixed capital/labor ratios, or labor-intensive techniques may not be available; sometimes there are high costs of adapting and modifying existing labor technologies; administrative and managerial resources needed to implement labor-intensive techniques may be scarce.
18. What are the attractions of capital-intensive techniques in capital scarce LDCs?
Answer: In practice many LDCs use capital-intensive techniques. Business people often want to use the most advanced design without knowing that it may not be the most profitable, i.e. the engineering mentality. Yet businesspeople may find that modifying existing technologies is more expensive than using them without alteration. Sometimes the ratio of capital to labor may be unalterable; at other times capital-intensive methods may be cheaper than similar labor-intensive methods (more productive); capital-intensive methods may reduce the need for highly skilled workers; and sometimes factor-price distortions may make capital cheaper than its equilibrium price.
19. How would Chongqing (China) municipal authorities decide whether to build a bridge across the Yangtze River?
Answer: The municipal authorities should consider externalities when they decide whether to build a bridge of a given design. Officials can include capital and operating costs together when they are incurred (the Mishan approach) and enter all payments and external diseconomies as costs and all gross receipts and external economies as benefits. Thus, we invest if annual net benefits (B - C), which replace V in Equation 11-1, are at least zero.
Equation 11-1b
Part of the annual gross benefit of the bridge is the total receipts (say from tolls) expected in each year (for example, $1 per user times the number of users). External benefits include the difference between $1 and the most people are prepared to pay for alternative transport (ferry, roundabout vehicle transport) and the time, comfort, and safety benefits to users from less congestion. Environmental benefits minus costs (net changes in congestion, pollution, damaging the soil and ecology) from the bridge compared to the alternative (the ferry) also need to be calculated.
Chongqing city should invest if B – C is at least zero.
[Instructors should accept an answer based on calculations of V in an equation similar to 11-1, p. 379.]
20. How do planners choose what discount rate to apply to investment projects?
Answer: Little and Mirrlees indicates that the discount rate should be set high enough to equate new capital formation with the supply of domestic savings and capital imports available. In practice they suggest the trial use of three rates--high, medium, and low--to sort out projects that are obviously good and obviously bad. The marginal ones can be put off until the planners see how large the investment program will be and whether any better projects come along to displace the marginal ones.
21. What are shadow prices? Give some examples. What is a planning alternative to the use of shadow prices? Evaluate this alternative.
Answer: Shadow prices are those that are adjusted to take account of the differences between social cost-benefit and private cost-benefit calculations. This means that shadow prices take into consideration external economies and diseconomies, indivisibilities, monopolies, and price distortions. These prices aid the planner in adjusting returns away from commercial profitability to social profitability. Examples are the benefits of education, competitive prices less than monopoly prices, and the social costs of pollution. Computing shadow prices is usually a cumbersome and time-consuming task. Setting factor and foreign exchange prices closer to equilibrium rates may be more effective in improving resource allocation. This approach is easier and probably less costly.
20. How much effect have computers, electronics, and information technology had in increasing productivity, especially in LDCs? Give examples. How great is the digital divide between DCs and LDCs?
Answer: effect on increasing productivity: History indicates a substantial time lag for major innovations. Like all enabling and general purpose technological innovations, the computer started as a crude specific-purpose technology, taking decades to be improved, embodied in reorganized workplaces, and diffused throughout the economy. The more demanding the technology is, the longer the learning curve (Lipsey). The effect on TFP lagged several decades behind the inventions of such innovations as the steam engine, railway, and electric motor. ICT (information and communications technology) also took several decades to affect macroeconomic productivity. In the 1980s, economists studying the sources of growth noticed a productivity paradox, observing no positive relationship between ICT investments and productivity. Indeed Robert Solow quipped in 1987 that “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
Crafts (2001), however, estimates that the total contribution of ICT to GDP per-capita growth from ICT capital in the United States was 0.69 percentage points in 1974–90, 0.79 percentage points in 1991–95, and 1.86 percentage points in 1996–2000. Moreover, the increased TFP from non-ICT sectors from ICT-facilitated work reorganization and knowledge spillovers means the contribution of ICT was understated. Jorgenson found that all G7 economies, not just the United States, enjoyed an IT investment that boosted growth in the late 1990s.
By the late 1990s and the first years of the 21st century we see ICT undertaking a socioeconomic transformation on par with the Industrial Revolution, at least in DCs. In LDCs, the low share of ICT in aggregate national investment obscures the high returns of the few enterprises adopting ICT.
Answer: examples: Paul David gives examples of three directions in which ICT benefited productivity. First, an increasing number of purpose-built and task-specific IT, such as supermarket scanners and other data logging devices, must become available. Second, networking capabilities and the emergence of a networked environment underpins a re-configuration of work organization. Third, the development of IT eventually introduces an entirely new class of organization-wide data processing applications.
Mobile phones, based on satellite technology, do not require the massive infrastructure investment that mainline telephones do. In Senegal, allowing local entrepreneurs to offer telecommunications services, with private telecenters with a telephone and perhaps a fax machine, has increased public access (World Bank 2001). Some ICT innovations affect economies on a small scale. Grameen Telecom in Bangladesh operates village pay phones that lease cellular telephones to rural women and other bank members, who use the phone to provide services and earn money. These phones lower the cost of information gathering, contributing to “lower prices for poultry feed, more stable diesel prices, and less spoilage of perishable goods due to more precise shipment dates. . . . Telephone users include both rich and poor, but poor people make more calls for economic reasons.” (World Bank 2001). Village cellular phone technology gives Bangladesh women, including illiterate traders, more bargaining power.
Through the Virtural Souk, an internet-based marketplace, artisans in the Middle East and North Africa have direct access to world markets.
Answer: digital divide: With ICT established as a contributor to DC growth, some economists began to ask about ICT’s impact on the development of poor countries. Pohjola (2001) asks: “Could IT provide poor countries with the short-cut to prosperity by allowing them to bypass some phases of development in the conventional, long-lasting and belt-tightening process of structural change from an agrarian to an industrial and, ultimately, to a knowledge-based services economy?” Low-cost ICT improves allocative efficiency by choosing input-output combinations to minimize cost at prevailing factor prices, augments technical efficiency through cutting costs by better access to both factor and product markets, and facilitates economies of larger-scale production by breaking labor and capital constraints. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the two least computerized world regions (World Bank 2003), have been hampered by a deficiency of infrastructure, including a lack of telephone mainlines, a long waiting list for subscribing to phones, expensive local telephone calls, and few mobile phones, personal computers, and Internet hosts (Matambalya). However, India, China, and other poor countries have expanded mobile or internet phone consumption, hoping eventually to leapfrog Western landline telephones (Ramstad and Brown 2004).
Sachs (2000) contends: “Today’s world is divided not by ideology but by technology,” the digital divide between rich and poor. Fifteen percent of the world’s population, most of the OECD countries (including South Korea) plus Taiwan, are technological innovators, identified as those countries with 10 or more patents per million population. About 50 percent of the world, with at least 2 percent of GDP being high-tech exports, are technological adopters. Adopters include northern Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile, Tunisia, South Africa, Israel, India (except the Ganges valley states), Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, coastal China, the Baltic states, Russia (in a narrow strip near St. Petersberg), plus OECD countries New Zealand, Spain, Greece (northeastern), Poland, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria. The rest of the world is technologically excluded, according to Sachs.
In 2001, the proportion of people with computers was 416.3 per 1,000 in high-income economies, 35.4 in middle-income economies and 6.1 in low-income countries (World Bank 2003). Among LDC regions, Latin America and the Caribbean leads with 59.3 personal computers per 1,000 people, while at the bottom are sub-Saharan Africa, with 9.9, and South Asia, with 5.3, per 1,000. In 2001, Japan spent more on information and communications technology (ICT) per capita, $3,256, than any other country, with the United States second with $2,923, Denmark third with $2,912, and Sweden fourth with $2,804. Among those listed, low-income economies such as Indonesia (17), India (19), and Vietnam (26), spent least on ICT per capita.
Mobile phones, based on satellite technology, do not require the massive infrastructure investment that mainline telephones do. In Senegal, allowing local entrepreneurs to offer telecommunications services, with private telecenters with a telephone and perhaps a fax machine, has increased public access (World Bank 2001). Moreover, once government allows competitive markets for mobile providers, these firms soon outstrip public-sector telecommunications firms previously considered “natural monopolies,” as in Africa.
In 1998, almost half ICT imports by OECD countries were from non-OECD countries, primarily in Asia (OECD 2000). A number of LDCs have high ratios of high technology (products with high R&D intensity, such as in aerospace, computers, pharmaceuticals, scientific instruments, and electrical machinery) exports (much from foreign investment) to total manufactured exports. 2001 ratios include the Philippines 70 percent (Intel, Canon, Fujitsu, Ankor, Olympus Optical), Malaysia 57 percent (semiconductors, robotics, advanced electronics, medical equipment, optoelectronics, software engineering, biotechnology, aerospace), Costa Rica (Intel, Lucent, Hitachi, and Panasonic) 36 percent, Thailand 31 percent, Mexico 22 percent, China 20 percent, and Brazil 18 percent (World Bank 2003h:302–305).
Bangladesh cellular phone technology and the Middle Eastern Virtual Souk have empowered artisans and petty traders, indicating that some LDC poor are reducing the digital divide. Moreover, the internet, with its low entry barriers, is providing alternative sources of information, overcoming the restrictions of the national and international press, radio, and television (U.N. Development Program 2002). Better communication increases the incomes and information of poor and middle-class people, reducing the digital divide.
Chapter 12:
1. What is Schumpeter’s theory of economic development? What is the role of the entrepreneur in this theory? How applicable is Schumpeter’s concept of the entrepreneur to developing countries?
Answer: Schumpeter links innovation to the entrepreneurer, maintaining that the source of private profits is successful innovation and that innovation brings about economic growth. The role of the entrepreneurs is to carry out new economic combinations by introducing new products, introducing new production functions that decrease inputs needed to produce a given output, opening new markets, exploiting new sources of materials, and reorganizing an industry. In LDCs, Schumpeter's concept of the entrepreneurer is somewhat limited, in that many entrepreneurs are traders whose main innovations are opening new markets. LDCs need not unduly emphasize developing new combinations, since some technology can be borrowed or adapted from developed countries.
2. Which steps in the process of developing technical advances are essential for LDCs? Which steps in the process can they skip in full or in part?
Answer: Technical advance involves (1) the development of pure science, (2) invention, (3) innovation, (4) financing the innovation, and (5) the innovation's acceptance. LDCs can skip stages 1 and 2 and sometimes even stage 3, so that scarce, high-level personnel can be devoted to adapting those discoveries already made.
12. How valid is Baumol’s view that the oligopolistic competition to innovate can explain capitalism’s recent “growth miracle”?
Answer: Baumol argues that pressures for innovations under oligopoly, with a few giant firms dominating the market, have provided incentives for unprecedented growth in the last century or so. While the student can find support for this argument, others, using a Schumpeterian approach, might argue that oligopolistic competition may contribute to the fall of capitalism (pp. 294-295).
4. What is meant by the entrepreneur as gap-filler? Why is this entrepreneurial concept more relevant to LDCs than DCs?
Answer: The entrepreneurer differs from a manager of a firm, who runs the business on established lines. S/he must be able to fill gaps, meaning that s/he provides help in all areas of operation such as completing inputs and making up for market deficiencies. The gap-filler concept is especially relevant to LDCs, where entrepreneurs may have to fill the gaps by providing some basic skills themselves, such as marketing, purchasing, dealing with government, human relations, supplier relations, customer relations, financial management, production management, and technological management – skills that are in short supply in the market.
5. What are the functions of the entrepreneur in LDCs? How might these functions differ from those of the entrepreneur in DCs?
Answer: A list of these functions is (1) seeing market opportunities, (2) gaining command over resources, (3) marketing the product, (4) purchasing inputs, (5) dealing with the public bureaucracy, (6) managing human relations, (7) managing customer and supplier relations, (8) managing finances, (9) managing production, (10) acquiring and overseeing plant assembly, (11) minimizing cost, (12) upgrading processes and product quality, and (13) introducing new production techniques and products. In developed countries, many of these functions can be accomplished by hiring personnel, while in LDCs it may not as possible to hire skilled people and therefore the entrepreneurer serves as a gap filler for many of these functions.
6. What are the advantages and disadvantages of family enterprises in LDCs?
Answer: Advantages are the ability to mobilize large amounts of resources, take quick, unified decisions, put trustworthy people into management positions, and constrain irresponsibility. Its disadvantages include a conservative approach to taking risks, innovating, and delegating authority, reluctance to hire professional managers, and paternalism in labor relations.
7.What are some of the noneconomic factors affecting entrepreneurship in LDCs?
Answer: Psychological urge to achieve, child rearing, whether a society is democratic or authoritarian, the nature of the bureaucracy, social origins, and cultural factors. Cultural differences (religious, ethnic, and linguistic) regarding motivation, work, and the role of women in society all affect the supply of entrepreneurs.
8. What are the socioeconomic factors that affect the supply of industrial entrepreneurs in mixed and capitalist LDCs?
Answer: The successful entrepreneur tended to have an urban background, be educated through high school, have an occupational and family status substantially higher than the population as a whole. In essence, a higher socioeconomic status leading to greater opportunities.
9. Are marginal individuals more innovative than nonmarginal individuals as entrepreneurs?
Answer: Marginal individuals’ values differ greatly from the majority of the population. Whether these individuals are more innovative is unclear. Hagen confirms Weber's view that a disproportional number of religious nonconformists in the English industrial revolution were innovative entrepreneurs. Other studies disagree. Because no one has conducted a systematic worldwide study, we simply cannot say whether marginal individuals are more innovative.
10. Is the concept of entrepreneurship applicable to socialist economies?
Answer: Yes, even China and the former Soviet Union have had enterprise startups and innovations. However, innovation faces many obstacles in these socialist economies. Nevertheless, there have been very successful entrepreneurs in socialist economies, especially from China’s post-Maoist individual economy.
Chapter 13:
1.Indicate in broad outline the movements of real world crude petroleum prices in the last quarter of a century. What impact have these prices had on oil-importing LDCs?
Answer: Since the early 1970s oil prices first quadrupled in 1973-74, doubled in the early 1980s, and increased substantially in 2005. The impact of these price increases on oil-importing LDCs was to worsen the balance-of-trade deficits, debt burdens, and inflation rates which together slowed the growth rates of these countries. The most adverse effect of these price increases was the fourfold increase in crude petroleum over four months in 1973 and 1974. Since 1974, price increases have also hurt oil-importing LDCs, although these countries have made adjustments that reduce the shock of these price rises. Of course, during periods such as the later 1980s and early 1990s when real oil prices fell, oil importers enjoyed temporary windfalls.
2. Assume you are asked as an economic practitioner to analyze a patient with Dutch disease. Analyze the causes of the disease, describe the patient’s symptoms, and prescribe an antidote to improve the patient’s health. Also do the same for reverse Dutch disease.
Answer: Dutch disease is a pathology resulting from the way a booming resource export retards the growth of other sectors through unfavorable effects on the foreign-exchange rate and the costs of factors of production. Government can minimize the negative effects of Dutch disease by investing in the lagging traded-goods sector before the natural resource is exhausted, so that the rest of the economy can capture the potential benefits of the export boom.
The shock from reverse Dutch disease from an oil (or other resource) price bust
Dutch disease is even more severe. Investing in the lagging traded-goods sector during the boom and smoothing out consumption spending over the business cycle can reduce the devestation from this reverse disease.
3. What is meant by “sustainable development”? What implications should sustainable development have for investment criteria?
Answer: Sustainable development refers to maintaining the productivity of natural, produced, and human assets from generation to generation. It implies progress that meets the needs of the present without compromising future generations’ ability to meet their needs.
The economist’s investment choice, based on maximizing present value, assumes that current generations hold all rights to assets and should efficiently exploit them. But markets do not necessarily provide for equity between generations. Most depleted mineral and biological wealth, especially biodiversity, is all but impossible to recapture after it is destroyed, thus reducing natural assets in the future. Using conventional investment criteria, in which benefits and costs are discounted at a substantial positive rate of interest, automatically closes off the future. If discounted at 15 percent annually, the present value of a dollar five years from now is $0.50, 16 years from now $0.11, and 33 years from now only $0.01. Surely this is absurd.
A possible rule of the thumb that considers the preferences of future generations would be one where assets – natural, produced, and human capital – in each time period or generation must be at least as productive as that in the preceding period of generation. Each generation would be obligated to pass on to the next generation a mix of assets that provides the potential for equal or greater flows of income.
This means legislation to protect individual species, set aside land for parks and reserves, and establish social conservation agencies to institutionalize protection of the rights of future generations.
[The instructor should be aware of views by economists such as Larry Summers, who believes that you can use conventional investment criteria if you compute environmental spillovers (external costs and benefits) accurately.]
4. What are the market imperfections that contribute to environmental degradation?
Answer: Externalities (discrepancies between private and social valuation of resources), the overuse of open access resources, irreversibility, inadequate property rights definitions, and high transactions costs are market imperfections that contribute to environmental degradation.
5. What is meant by Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons”? Identify environmental problems associated with this tragedy.
Answer: "Tragedy of the commons" implies that just as the herders' cattle overgraze a pasture open to all, so do businesses and individuals overpollute atmosphere and overuse biosphere free to all to use.
Hardin’s tragedy takes something – trees, grass, or fish – out of the commons. The reverse, also a tragedy, is pollution, which puts chemical, radioactive, or heat wastes or sewage into the water, and noxious and dangerous fumes into the air. For the firm, the cost of discharging wastes is much less than purifying wastes before releasing it. Without a clear definition of ownership and user rights and responsibilities, an economy “fouls its own nest” (Hardin 1968).
6. Theodore Panayotou contends that “Ultimately, excessive environmental damage can be traced to ‘bad’ economics stemming from misguided government policies and distorted markets.” Discuss what Panayotou means by this statement, how accurate his view is, and what the policy implication of this view is. Give examples of misguided government policies and distorted markets, and the reasons for these policies and markets.
Answer: Panayotou (1993) argues that environmental degradation originates from “bad” economics: market distortions, defective economic policies, and inadequate property rights definitions, and not from immorality. Market and policy failures mean a disassociation of scarcity and prices, benefits and costs, rights and responsibilities, and actions and consequences. People maximize profits by shifting costs onto others; and appropriate common and public property resources without compensation. Market failures are institutional failures partly attributable to the nature of certain resources and partly to the failure of the government to establish fundamental conditions for efficient markets and use instruments to bring costs and benefits that institutions fail to internalize into the domain of the market. Policy failures are cases of misguided government intervention in fairly well-functioning markets or unsuccessful attempts to mitigate market failure which results in worse outcomes. However, society’s goals cannot be eliminating environmental deterioration altogether but, rather, accounting for all costs from diminished quantity and quality and lost diversity of natural resources, considering the productivity and sustainability of alternative resource uses, and insisting that environmental costs are borne by those who generate them. Growth must be derived from increased efficiency and innovation rather than by shifting environmental costs onto others.
Numerous examples are listed on pp. 425-426.
7. How do pollution levels vary with economic growth?
Answer: Most pollutants, such as hazardous suspended particulate matter (SPM), sulphur dioxide, and airborne lead, increase with GDP per capita until you get to the level of middle-income countries, and decrease beyond these levels. Because pollution is a social cost and is often external to market transactions of the private firm, pollution tends to increase with industrialization and economic growth. When government compels polluters to internalize these costs, pollution falls or at least slows down. With greater affluence, a society can afford to emphasize cleaning up pollution rather than economic growth.
8. What decision-making rule minimizes social cost when pollution is involved? Assess the position that optimal level of pollution emission is zero.
Answer: The rule corresponding to the efficient level of emission or minimal social cost is where marginal damage equals marginal abatement cost (p. 431).
Zero pollution would not be optimal since it corresponds to marginal abatement costs in excess of marginal damages, such that marginal net costs are in excess of minimal social cost. Increasing the damage people suffer from pollution needs to be weighed against the opportunity cost of resources that could be used in other ways.
9. Discuss and assess the methods for estimating the monetary values of pollution discharge and ecological degradation.
Answer: The method most used is to assess marginal abatement costs (MAC) relative to marginal damage costs (MD). The efficient level of pollution emission or minimal social cost is where MD = MAC. To achieve minimal social cost (MAC = MD), the government's pollution control board might charge individuals (such as automobile consumers) or firms a price that approximates the marginal social cost or damage of pollution.
10. How does geography affect economic development in the tropics? What measures are needed to overcome these adverse effects?
Answer: Economic underdevelopment in the tropics is partly a matter of geography. There is no winter to exterminate weeds and insect pests. Parasitic diseases are endemic and weaken the health and productivity of people. The heat and torrential rains damage the soils, removing needed organic matter, microorganisms, and minerals. Tropical countries generally will not provide global public goods, such as the atmosphere or biosphere, in sufficient quantity, since many benefits spill over to other countries. Rich countries have an interest in providing funds to preserve tropical global common-property resources. However, because they may earn higher returns from free riding, users of global common- property resources rarely agree to commit resources to manage global resources in the interest of all. As with the international nuclear nonproliferation treaty, we might expect the united action by users to be unstable. Still, we can hope that a number of countries may collude to sign an international agreement to fund these global public goods.
11. Discuss the concept of global public goods, give examples of those that have environmental implications, and indicate the implications of global public goods for international funding programs. In your analysis, focus especially on global public goods in tropical countries.
Answer: Global public goods are those available for all nations to use, such as the atmosphere and biosphere, goods that nations cannot exclude other nations from the benefits of their conservation or from the costs of their degradation. These goods are subject to nonrivalry and nonexclusion in consumption.
In tropical regions of West Africa, the ecology of the desert and the rain forest are examples which have implications for the rest of the world. The tropical rain forest may reduce the drought in the sub-Saharan part of Africa. Since there are externalities involved here, other regions of the world may benefit from helping to fund programs that minimize the damage to the rain forests and the desert.
12. What program would you design for global optimal greenhouse-gas abatement?
13. Assess the arguments for and against the use of international tradable emission permits in abating global greenhouse gases.
Answer: The consensus of the scientific community is that greenhouse gases are harmful. The efficient level of pollution emission or minimal social cost is where marginal damages are equal to marginal abatement costs.
The principle of least-cost emission reduction rests on the scientific fact that a ton of carbon emitted anywhere on the globe contributes equally to global greenhouse gases. Once countries negotiate emission rights, an efficient apporach is to use international tradable emission permits to achieve the least marginal cost per unit of abatement. A change from a regulatory system to transferable discharge permits should provide incentives for emitters to adopt new control techniques to reduce emissions at lower cost, as they can sell excess permits. Polluters can adjust any way they please, through amelioration (including migration and shifting land use and industry patterns), abatement (such as reflecting more incoming sunlight back into space), prevention (investing in emission control), or paying the carbon tax.Emitters facing steep control costs will purchase permits from emitters having less costly options, thereby subsidizing the more efficient control of emissions by low-cost emitters ((Poterba 1993; Schelling 1993; Tietenberg 1993).
14. Discuss the role of green markets, green taxes, and green aid in reducing market imperfections concerning the environment and resource use. Discuss the possibility of using green markets, green taxes, and green aid in multilateral agreements.
Answer: The “green markets” approach, which envisions a tax on fossil fuel proportional to the carbon emitted when the fuel is burned, relies on market-based incentives that spur people to reduce emissions at least cost rather than on direct regulations, such as the Rio-Kyoto approach, that engenders inefficiencies. Government decision makers, adjusting for market imperfections, should try to tax or fine emitters so they bear the costs they transmit to others. Government should adopt the rule for minimal social cost, in which marginal abatement cost equals marginal damage. Polluters can adjust any way they please, through amelioration (including migration and shifting land use and industry patterns), abatement (such as reflecting more incoming sunlight back into space), prevention (investing in emission control), or paying the carbon tax (Poterba 1993; Schelling 1993).
The carbon tax shifts the supply curve to the left, increasing the price and reducing consumption. The taxes would increase the prices of virtually all goods and services but would substitute for other taxes. The total tax burden would be the same but would shift the burden away from income toward environmentally damaging activities, reducing environmental degradation. The carbon tax is an efficient tax, improving the functioning of the market by adjusting prices to better reflect an activity’s true cost.
Multilateral agreements: Humankind generally has an interest in providing funds to preserve tropical global common-property resources, such as the atmosphere. DCs need to focus on agreements to reduce global public bads associated with deforestation in tropical regions. These countries might regard their spending as investment in ecosystems that influence the productivity of the common resources of humanity. Such agreements would benefit the world as a whole but would particularly benefit tropical countries in reducing their environmental degradation and adverse climate change.
Still, international environmental agreements to fund and regulate global public goods have had a mixed record. The institutions for implementation, enforcement, and financing the International Convention on Climate Change (ICCC), which required national inventories on greenhouse gas emissions, have had only limited success, partly because of the lack of funding and difficulties in agreeing how to divide the funding.
No single nation acting alone can stabilize greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, unilateral national policies do not achieve the least-cost method of reducing emissions. Moreover, international competition to attract industry through less stringent emissions standards may undermine environmental policy-making. Thus, a supranational approach is essential. However, coordinated international action is difficult to achieve (Poterba 1993).
Some economists thinks it is unlikely that users of a global common property resource (such as air and water) would agree to manage the resource even though it is in the interest of all to cooperate in reducing use of the resource. Although all users benefit, each user will earn even higher returns by free riding on the virtuous behavior of the remaining cooperators. Global optimality requires global cooperation, yet the incentives facing individual countries work in the opposite direction. As with the international nuclear nonproliferation treaty, we might expect the united action by users to be unstable. The world lacks an international government that can dictate the environmental policies of individual states.
Still, a number of countries may collude to sign an international environmental agreement even when a number of countries do not cooperate. Countries may agree to pursue the global optimality strategy if all other countries in previous periods abide by this strategy. Also, countries can punish those that refuse to abide by import embargoes or other sanctions. Concerns about fairness can reduce the free-rider problem. Furthermore, a noncooperator may find it advantageous to join the agreement if strengthening it increases others’ abatement levels in excess of the abatement costs the country incurs. Pulling out of a treaty may result in less abatement by other countries, so that the cost of pulling out exceeds the benefits (Barrett 1993).
15. How severely will a shortage of natural resources limit economic growth in the next half-century, especially in LDCs?
Answer: Daly contends that humans directly use or destroy about 25 percent of the earth’s net primary productivity (NPP), the total amount of solar energy converted into biochemical energy through the photosynthesis of plants minus the energy these plants use for their own life (Postel). At present population growth, humankind’s proportion of NPP doubles in 54 years; another doubling means humanity’s share of NPP is 100 percent, which is not possible. Indeed, Daly thinks humankind’s share of NPP is already unsustainable. Daly’s arguments indicate that it is impossible for the entire world’s population to enjoy U.S. consumption levels.
Daly and other pessimists understate the power of technological change in overcoming diminishing returns to natural resources. Moreover, pessimists tend to underestimate reserves, often thinking that proven reserves, which are an assessment of the working inventory of resources that industry is confident is available during a middle-run planning horizon, represent the reserves that can ultimately be recovered.
[A student that can master the explanation of Georgescu-Roegen’s entropy and the economic process, discussed on pp. 451-451, can provide an alternative powerful argument for limits to growth.]
16. Indicate the adjustments the World Bank makes to arrive at adjusted net savings.
Answer: The World Bank has subtracted resource depletion and environmental degradation from gross savings to get changes in wealth (adjusted net savings) as an indicator of sustainability. The Bank subtracts capital consumption (depreciation), carbon dioxide damage, and energy, mineral, and net forest depletion from gross domestic savings and adds education expenditure to get adjusted net savings.
17. Indicate the adjustments made to compute the Genuine Price Indicator (GPI). How do these adjustments affect measures of net economic welfare? Evaluate GPI as a measure of economic welfare as an alternative to gross product per capita.
Answer: GPI per capita is more comprehensive than gross product per capita. GPI considers average consumption, the flow of consumer services, income distribution, sustainable investment, housework and nonmarket transactions, changes in leisure time, the cost of unemployment and underemployment, the lifespan of consumer durable and infrastructure, defensive (commuting, automobile accident) costs, air and water pollution, resource depletion, and long-term environmental damage, including greenhouse gas emission and ozone depletion. As a result of these adjustments, GPI in the United States declines substantially from 1976 to 2002. As a measure of net economic welfare, GPI needs more research on both conceptualization and measurement. Its goal is a good one, but data still does not exist for some of the necessary environmental measurements.
Chapter 14:
1. What prevents LDC use of monetary, fiscal, and incomes policies from attaining goals of output and employment growth, and price stability?
Answer: In LDCs, the banking system and financial markets and tax structure are often not well developed and are therefore less useful as a stabilization tool. Central banks in LDCs generally have less effect on expenditures and output than in developed countries because of an externally dependent banking system, a poorly developed securities market, the limited scope of bank loans, the low percentage of demand deposits divided by the total money supply, and the relative insensitivity of investment and employment to monetary policies. With respect to fiscal policy, LDCs are less effective than DCs in stabilizing employment and prices as tax receipts as a share of GNP in LDCs are typically smaller than in DCs; LDCs rely more on indirect taxes, thus having less control than DCs over the amount of taxes; and prices and unemployment are not so sensitive to fiscal policy in LDCs as in DCs because of major supply limitations, the effect of creating urban jobs on people leaving rural areas; the presence of factor price distortions or unsuitable technology; and the setting of unrealistically high wages for educated workers.
2. Why are taxes as a percentage of GNP generally lower for LDCs than for DCs?
Answer: Taxes as a percentage of GNP are generally lower in LDCs than in developed countries because there is less demand for social goods and other public services in poor countries and less capacity to levy and pay taxes.
3. What are the goals of LDC tax policy? What obstacles do LDCs encounter in reaching their tax policy goals?
Answer: The goals of LDC tax policy are to mobilize resources for public expenditure; stabilize income and prices, improve income distribution, encourage efficient use of resources; and increase capital and entrepreneurship. However, few LDCs rely much on the progressive income tax and other direct taxes that may achieve these goals because these goals may not be administratively or politically feasible.
4. Why are direct taxes as a percentage of GDP generally lower, and indirect taxes as a percentage of GDP, generally higher, for LDCs than DCs? Why is heavy reliance on indirect taxes as sources of revenue often disadvantageous to LDCs?
Answer: Direct taxes are more difficult to administer, and thus less are collected in LDCs than in the developed countries. Conversely, indirect taxes are easier to collect and become very important in most LDCs. Because indirect taxes are less visible, there is a tendency for LDC government to put too much stress on these taxes. One example of over-reliance on indirect taxes was the use of marketing boards in Nigeria in agriculture. Nigeria, once a major exporter of groundnuts and cotton, became an importer because of these taxes and their disincentive for farmers.
5. Indicate the benefits and difficulties associated with using value-added taxes in developing countries.
Answer: The benefits are simplicity, uniformity, the generation of buoyant revenues (from high income elasticity), and the lowering of other tax rates throughout the system.
But VAT faces administrative problems, especially among the numerous retailers in low-income countries. The cost of compelling compliance among these retailers, who may pay for their purchases out of the till and keep no records of cash transactions, are substantial relative to the tax collected. LDCs also face pressures for multiple rates (lower rates on essential goods like food, higher rates on luxury goods, differential geographical rates) and exemptions (for small traders, for services, and for activities in the public interest such as postal services, hospitals, medical and dental care, schools, cultural activities, and noncommercial radio and television).
Despite the distorting effect on capital, enterprise, and resource allocation, many low-income countries may have to levy taxes simpler to administer such as corporate taxes; taxes on international trade, where goods pass through a limited number of ports and border crossings; taxes on sales by manufacturers, where numbers are fewer and control is easier; or taxes on luxuries. For many of these countries lack the capability to administer, collect, audit, monitor, and hear appeals from value-added taxpayers and evaders (Tait; Weidenbaum and Christian).
6. What tax measures can LDCs take to reduce income inequality? To increase capital and enterprise?
Answer: Income inequality can be reduced by relying on progressive personal income taxes, because it takes a larger proportion of income from people in upper-income brackets and a smaller proportion from people in lower-income brackets. Moreover, excise taxes or high import tariffs on luxury items redistribute income from higher-income to lower-income groups.
Sales, excise, and value added taxes have a more favorable effect on efficiency and spurring capital and enterprise (Tanzi and Zee 2000). The income tax gives rise to a distortion (on savings) that is absent from the consumption tax.
7. What, if any, is the tradeoff between tax policies that reduce income and wealth concentration and those that increase capital formation?
Answer: LDC governments can mobilize saving through direct taxes (on personal income, corporate profits, and property), taxes on luxury items, and sales and value-added taxes. These taxes result in a higher rate of capital formation if government has a higher investment rate than the people taxed. Moreover, the state can use taxes and subsidies to redistribute output to sectors with high growth potential and to individuals with a high propensity to save.
8. Why is health, social security, and welfare spending as a percentage of GDP less in LDCs than DCs? Why is health, social security, and welfare spending as a percentage of total government spending less in LDCs than DCs?
Answer: It is partly a result of the fact that in LDCs where a large part of the population is poor, welfare and social security payments to bring everyone above the poverty line would not only undermine work incentives but would also be prohibitively expensive. Moreover, infrastructure and education are important investments, creating external economies in early stages of development.
9. Why are military expenditures as a percentage of GDP high in low-income countries?
Answer: Studies show the association of good governance with income per capita. Failed or predatory states are associated with low-income countries that are more dependent on the military to remain in power.
10. Why did the LDC inflation rate increase from the 1960s to the 1980s? Why did the LDC inflation rate fall from the 1980s to the 1990s?
Answer: The high rates of inflation experienced in many LDCs in the 1970s and 1980s was due to many causes such as poor world harvests, instability in the international economy, higher wage rates, increasing oil prices, structural problems, and a lack of monetary restraint. With the breakdown in the fixed exchange rate system, there were large exchange rate depreciations which caused rapidly increasing prices in many LDCs.
Many lessons have been learned as a result of these experiences in the 1970s and 1980s. Consequently one would not have expected the inflation of the 1990s to be as great. Also the developed countries are experiencing greater stability and less inflation in the 1990s which has helped minimize the LDC inflation. Finally, the drop in inflation from 1992 to 2003 can be partly attributed to increased competition from globalization.
11. What causes LDC inflation? Which causes are most important? How might LDCs reduce inflation?
Answer: There are many causes such as cost push inflation from the market power of businesses and unions, ratchet inflation from rigid prices downward, structural inflation from slow export growth and inelastic food supply, and once-started inflationary expectations. Policies to moderate inflation include market-clearing exchange rates, wage-price controls, antimonopoly measures, land reform, structural change from agriculture to industry, contractionary monetary and fiscal policy, and improved income distribution. Part of the problem is that many LDCs lack the administrative and political strength to undertake many of these policies.
12, Why was inflation so rapid in Latin America in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s?
Answer: Latin America experienced the highest rates of inflation of any LDCs during this period of time. Reasons include cost push, ratchet, and structural factors, especially related to foreign exchange earnings, lack of monetary discipline, and inflationary expectations. It is likely that combinations of each of these played a role in the high inflation rates. Structural economists add import substitution, decline in terms of trade, inelastic agricultural supplies to the list but orthodox economists are skeptical (pp. 482-483).
13. In what way might inflation avert civil war or political violence?
Answer: Hyperinflation in Chile was explained as a struggle or even a civil war between certain segments of the population. Inflation can avert this sometimes, it is argued, because inflation is a kind of invisible tax that redistributes income from one segment to another. For example, by granting inflationary wage increases, a political strike may be averted. Ultimately, however, some segment of society gets a larger share of the pie, and some other segment gets less.
14. How important are monetary factors in contributing to LDC inflation?
Answer: In some countries monetary factors, namely the lack of monetary discipline and the tendency to liberally expand money supply, have been a major cause of inflation in LDCs, especially in high inflationary periods. This monetary expansion contributes to inflation, while rapid inflation wipes out the real value of tax revenues, increasing budget deficits and accelerating money growth, thus strengthening the link between financing the budget and the growth of money.
15. What are the costs and benefits of inflation?
Answer: Inflation can promote economic development in the following ways: (1) the treasury can print money, or the banking system can expand credit so that a modernizing government can raise funds in excess of tax revenues, (2) governments can use inflationary credit to redistribute income from wage earners who save little to capitalists with high rates of productive capital formation, and (3) inflationary pressure pushes the economy toward full employment and more fully utilizes labor and other resources. Costs of inflation include: (1) government redistribution from high savers through inflationary financing may work only during the early inflationary stages, (2) inflation imposes a tax on the holders of money, as savers lose and debtors win, (3) inflation distorts business behavior, especially investment behavior, since any rational calculation of profits is undermined, \ (4) inflation, especially if it is discontinuous and uneven, weakens the creation of credit and capital markets, (5) income distribution is usually less uniform during inflationary times, and (6) inflation increases the prices of domestic goods relative to foreign goods, decreasing the competitiveness of domestic goods internationally and usually reducing the balance of trade (exports minus imports). Empirical evidence by Bruno and Easterly indicate no negative correlation between inflation and economic growth for inflation rates under 40 percent annually.
16. What is the role of the foreign-exchange rate in stabilizing inflation?
Answer: The increased price of foreign inputs to domestic production provides a stimulus to cost-push inflationary pressures. Hyperinflation may be triggered by a balance-of-payments crisis and the resulting currency collapse. The increased price of foreign inputs to domestic production provides a stimulus to cost-push inflationary pressures.
Providing external loans so the country has ample reserves for imports is one way to provide assurance for the foreign-exchange and capital markets, and increase the likelihood the reserves do not have to be used. Fixing the price of foreign exchange without overvaluation for two to three months can reduce inflation inertia. Fischer (2001) thinks that there are few instances of successful disinflation from triple-digit inflation without using an exchange rate anchor. An alterantive, however, may be to use inflation targeting with a floating exchange rate to anchor prices while attaining independence of monetary policy.
17. What is the empirical relationship between inflation and growth?
Answer: Thirlwall, Barton, Tun Wai, and Dorrance find that, among LDCs, growth declines when annual inflation exceeds 10 percent.
Fischer finds that, during the 1980s, low inflation and small deficits were not essential for high growth rates even over long periods but high inflation (40 percent or more yearly) is not consistent with sustained growth. Inflation, by reducing capital accumulation and productivity growth, is negatively correlated with economic growth.
Since the early 1990s, macroeconomic policies and performance in LDCs have improved markedly. Inflation has been more stable than previously. The international economy has been less volatile and central bankers and monetary policy makers have improved tools and knowledge for stabilizing output and prices. Moreover, a reduction in direct state ownership of banks and the introduction of explicit deposit insurance have improved the effectiveness of monetary policy in stabilizing the macroeconomy (Cecchetti and Krause 2001).
This improved proficiency is reflected in studies examining LDCs’ control of inflation. Bruno and Easterly (1998) show no negative correlation between inflation and economic growth for inflation rates under 40 percent annually; the negative relationship between inflation and growth holds only for high-inflationary economies.
18. Compare the monetary, fiscal, and incomes policies to use in high-inflation countries to policies to use in countries with low inflation.
Answer: Stabilizing high inflation requires budgetary and monetary control, increasing tax yields, external support (to reduce supply-side limitations), structural (supply-side, many middle- to long-run) reforms, and incomes policies to reduce inflationary inertia. Providing external loans so the country has ample reserves for imports is one way to provide assurance for the foreign-exchange and capital markets, and increase the likelihood the reserves do not have to be used. Incomes policies, such as freezing exchange rates, wages, and prices for a few months can effectively supplement domestic budget cuts. Relying on demand management (contractionary monetary and fiscal policies) alone without incomes policies will create an extraordinary depression. Dornbusch (1993) suggests fixing the price of foreign exchange without overvaluation for two to three months (to reduce inflation inertia), then eventually using a crawling peg, which depreciates home currency continuously so the exchange rate facilitates external competitiveness. Fischer (2001) thinks that there are few instances of successful disinflation from triple-digit inflation without using an exchange rate anchor.
Low inflation countries would not have to implement draconian monetary, fiscal, and incomes policies.
19. Explain the political and economic reasons for frequent LDC government financial repression and the effects it has on economic development. Indicate policies for LDC financial liberalization and ways in which they could affect inflation and real growth.
Answer: Frequently, the motive for LDC financial restriction is to encourage financial institutions and instruments from which the government can expropriate seigniorage (or extract resources from the financial system in return for controlling currency issue and credit expansion). Under inflationary conditions, the state uses reserve requirements and obligatory holdings of government bonds to tap savings at low or negative real interest rates. Authorities suppress private bond and equity markets through transactions taxes, special taxes on income from capital, and inconducive laws to claim seigniorage from private holders’ assets. The state imposes interest rate ceilings to stifle private sector competition in fund raising. Imposing these ceilings, foreign exchange controls, high reserve requirements, and restrictions on private capital markets increases the flow of domestic resources to the public sector without higher taxes or interest rates, or the flight of capital overseas.
Under financial repression, banks engage in nonprice rationing of loans, facing pressure for loans to those with political connections but otherwise allocate credit according to transaction costs, all of which leave no opportunity for charging a premium for risky (and sometimes innovative) projects. Overall, these policies also encourage capital-intensive projects and discourage capital investment. The LDC financially repressive regimes, uncompetitive markets, and banking bureaucracies not disciplined by market and profit tests may encourage adopting inefficient lending criteria. The high arrears, delinquency, and default of many LDC (especially official) banks and development lending institutions result from (1) failure to tie lending to productive investment; (2) neglect of marketing; (3) delayed loan disbursement and unrealistic repayment schedules; (4) misapplication of loans; (5) ineffective supervision; (6) apathy of bank management in recovering loans; and (7) irresponsible and undisciplined borrowers, including many who (for cultural reasons or misunderstanding government’s role) fail to distinguish loans from grants.
Combating financial repression, which is as much political as it is economic, can reduce inflation. Financial liberalization necessitates abolishing ceilings on interest rates (or at least raising them to competitive levels), introducing market incentives for bank managers, encouraging private stock and bond markets, and lowering reserve requirements. At higher (market-clearing) interest rates, banks make more credit available to productive enterprises, increasing the economy’s capacity and relieving inflationary pressures. Trade liberalization, which (often) threatens politically influential import-competing industrialists, increases product competition and reduces import prices, reducing input prices and cost-push inflation.
But liberalization also requires greater restrictions by the monetary and fiscal authorities. The central bank and finance ministry must regulate the growth of banks and other enterprises that grant credit, create checkable deposits, and provide cash on demand. An independent board should replace government industrial departments in managing foreign exchange, in order to restrict the excessive bidding for foreign currency by enterprises desperate to find a nondepreciating liquid financial asset to hold during high inflation. The central government must limit spending, maintaining a balanced budget, especially in the transition to a liberal market economy. As the private sector increases in size relative to the state sector, the fiscal authorities need to maintain their collection of turnover and excess profits taxes on state enterprises until the transition to a new tax system that raises revenue from both private and government firms. In the early 1990s, Russia’s failure to restrict the creation of “wildcat” banks and unregulated quasi-bank intermediaries, to restrain the holding of foreign-exchange liquid assets, to collect revenues, and to limit state spending contributed to inflation rates in excess of 700 percent annually from early 1992 to late 1993.
Still, mild financial repression – specifically repression of interest rates and contest-based credit allocation – contributed to rapid growth in Japan (both before and after World War II), South Korea, and Taiwan. But each of these economies had competent and politically-insulated bankers and government loan bureaucrats to select and monitor projects, and apply export performance as a major yardstick for allocating credit. Few other LDCs have the institutional competence to ration credit based on performance; usually, the public accuses financial officers who allocate funds at below-market rates of nepotism, communalism, and other forms of favoritism.
Moreover, reducing financial and price repression can, in the short run, spur inflation. Financial liberalization, through abolishing ceilings on interest rates, encouraging private stock and bond markets, creating other new financial intermediaries, lowering reserve requirements, and decontrolling exchange rates, means government loses part of its captive inflation tax base (Dornbusch 1993).
20. What effect might financial liberalization have on individual firms in LDCs?
Answer: Financial liberalization in LDCs, meaning combating financial repression by decreasing distortions in interest rates, foreign exchange rates, and other financial prices, can reduce inflation and spur economic growth. This comes about by decreasing the oligopolistic power of some firms and increasing the competitiveness of others. Thus there can be considerable impact on the individual firms. One problem is that those with the most political influence are often those with the oligopolistic power and thus may resist government measures to engage in financial liberalization.
Financial liberalization can result in the entry or expansion of firms previously blocked and eliminating many inefficient firms formerly protected through monopoly rents from a licensing regime. The major advantage of liberalization is to reduce the number of firms that survive from monopoly rents and to increase the number of firms that survive as a result of innovation and efficiency.
21. What explains financial markets performing poorly in channeling funds to productive investment opportunities?
Answer: The financial system lacks the capability of making judgments about investment opportunities from asymmetric information, such that lenders have poor information about potential returns of and risks associated with investment projects. Lending is subject to adverse selection, in which potential bad credit risks are most eager to take out loans, even at higher rates of interest, and moral hazard, in which the lender or members of the international community bears most of the loss if the project fails (Mishkin 1999).
With adverse selection, informed lenders may avoid lending at high interest rates, because they lack information on the quality of borrowers who might be less likely to repay the loan.
Chapter 15:
1.Using national income equations, explain an inflow of capital from abroad in terms of expenditures-income, investment-saving, and import-export relationships. Indicate the relationships between expenditures and income, investment and saving, and imports and exports for a country paying back a foreign loan. Does repaying the loan have to be burdensome?
Answer: Use the following symbols: Y for national income, C for consumption, I for domestic investment, X for exports, M for imports, S for savings, E for expenditure equal to C + I, F for capital imports.
A capital inflow from abroad is the result of imports exceeding exports in a nation. For example:
1. Y = C + I + (X - M); also Y = C + S
2. thus C + I + (X - M) = C + S
3. thus I + (X - M) = S, or
4. now I = S + (M - X)
if M > X, the country has a deficit in its balance on goods, services and income
5. thus M - X = F (capital imports) [F is how a country finances a deficit; moreover the current and capital accounts equal 0]
6. thus, I = S + F (substituting F for M - X)
#5 indicates M– = F; #6 I – S = F; substitute E for C + I in #1, resulting in E – Y = F
Capital imports (F) allow a country to spend more than it produces (E>Y), invest more than it saves (I>S), and import more than it exports (M>X). Eventually the borrowing country must service the foreign debt. Paying back the loan requires a country to produce more than it spends, save more than it invests, and export more than it imports. Doing this need not be onerous, however, because investment in the economy’s increased capacity should facilitate the economic growth and export surplus to service the debt.
2. What is globalization? What are the similarities and differences between globalization, 1870–1913, and that after 1950? How much has the world’s people gained from globalization? What about LDCs? Which groups are the major winners and which the main losers?
Answer: meaning of globalization: Globalization is the expansion of economic activities across nation-states, including deepening economic integration, increasing economic openness, and growing economic interdependence among countries in the international economy (Nayyar 1997). Alterantive: globalization involves the increasing international integration of markets for goods, services, and capital, pressuring societies to alter their traditional practices to be competitive in the world economy (Rodrik 1998).
Similarities & differences: Similarities between the two periods include increases in export/GDP, capital flows, and technological change; trade then financial liberalization, the dominance of economic liberalism, the power of a hegemon or dominant economic power (early in Britain and later in the United States, other OECD economies, the World Bank, and the IMF), the dominance of the British pound (£) early and the U.S. dollar later, and scale economies (with new forms of industrial organization). Differences between the two periods included higher tariffs early, more non-tariff barriers late, strong externalization of services later, few foreign exchange flows early, greater capital flows/GNP early, more rapid expansion of international banking later, the dominance of intersectoral trade early, high labor flows (immigration/GNP) early, the disproportionate share of intra-industry trade (especially manufactures) later, and the increasing share of international trade that is intrafirm trade, that is, between affiliates of the same multinational corporation (Nayyar 1997).
Although liberal trade and capital flows benefit the world generally in the long run, globalization does reduce the autonomy of the nation-state economically and politically. Still, the state plays an important role in creating conditions for the development of specialized services, investment in education, industrial policy, establishment of institutions, facilitation and governance of markets, macromanagement of the economy, and minimization of social costs essential for globalization to contribute to the development of industrial capitalism (Nayyar 1997:17–18).
Gains, winners, & losers: The gains of globalization were uneven across country, region, and class, and contributed to greater marginalization for some peripheral economies (such as sub-Saharan Africa). Empirical studies are mixed concerning whether external openness affects income growth among the poorest 40 percent of LDCs adversely. Both liberals and their critics question whether free flows of portfolio capital, a component of globalization, benefits LDCs, especially in the short run.
Rodrik contends that earnings of unskilled workers in DCs may be hurt by competition with foreign workers. Moreover, even some relatively prosperous groups in DCs may be hurt by globalization; DC middle classes are facing a deceleration in income growth, more competition from foreign (especially Asian) skills, and lowered expectations for a better life.
3. To what extent does the Brandt Commission’s view of DC and LDC interdependence conflict with Frank’s view of LDC dependence?
Answer: The views conflict. The Brandt Commission stresses that interdependence creates a mutual interest by both North and South in globalization and reform of the world economic order. Frank argues that LDCs, as economic satellites of DCs, benefit from reducing their dependence on DCs. The policy implications are for LDCs to withdraw from the world capitalist system, reducing trade, aid, investment, and technology from DCs.
4. How can foreign aid, capital, and technology stimulate economic growth? How could the roles of foreign aid, capital, and technology vary at different stages of development?
Answer: Foreign aid, capital, skills, and technology enable increased capital formation, productivity, and output. A young and growing debtor nation may need to receive large amounts of aid, capital, and technology while a mature nation will need less and should be able to repay for the early inflow of funds.
5. What are Chenery and Strout’s two gaps? How do foreign aid and capital reduce these two gaps? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the two-gap analysis?
Answer: The two gaps are the investment-limited gap and the trade-limited gap, both of which are stages where foreign aid and capital can reduce the gap that limits growth. If there is an investment gap, then the import of capital will remove this limitation. If there is a trade gap, then imports of capital equal to the foreign exchange gap will remove the limitation that trade places on growth.
The Chenery-Strout approach only approximates reality in many LDCs. It tends to focus on an aggregate approach and does not look at specific needs that foreign funds can meet. Finally, its emphasis on external development limitations diverts attention from internal economic factors that are often important constraints on growth. Nevertheless, the Chenery-Strout approach is useful in analyzing foreign capital requirements in a number of LDCs.
6. What are sources for financing an international balance on goods and services deficit? Which was the most important source for LDCs in the 1990s?
Answer: Aid, remittances, loans, and investment from abroad finance a LDC's balance on goods and services deficit. The major source in the late 1990s (especially after 1993) and early years of the 21st century was foreign direct investment flows. Before the Asian crisis in 1997, commercial bank loans were important sources of capital from abroad. Portfolio flows were important between 1993 and 1997 but declined abruptly after the 1997 crisis (see p. 509).
7. How effective has DC aid been in promoting LDC development? How effective has food aid been?
Answer: Aid is effective if DCs select recipients with well-developed institutions and policies and oriented toward development and economic reform, and avoid support for corrupt and predatory governments. Additionally, aid may cushion external shocks, build indigenous skills, and produce global public goods, such as polio and smallpox vaccinations, family planning programs, specie and tropical rainforest preservation, and greenhouse gas abatement. Yet research finds that, in the aggregate, aid is not associated with economic growth. While aid has frequently been essential to many LDCs in reducing savings and foreign exchange gaps, at other times aid has exceeded an LDC’s capacity to absorb it. Moreover, many poor countries, such as Bangladesh, Malawi, and Ethiopia, are hampered by a high dependence on aid. Aid can delay self-reliance, postpone essential internal reform, or support interests opposed to income distribution. Easterly contends that billions of aid dollars have been squandered on poorly designed programs or in countries lacking economic reform and good governance. At other times, aid places burdens on scarce local management skills and fail to emphasize recipients’ learning by doing. LDC officials fail to learn until they are involved in programs that enable them to make their own decisions. Furthermore, aid is often not coherent, is accompanied by high external conditions, and is volatile and unpredictable.
Food aid has declined in real terms since the late 1960s. Even so, food aid plays a vital role in saving human lives during famine or crisis and if distributed selectively, reduces malnutrition. Unfortunately, poor transport, storage, administrative services, distribution networks, and overall economic infrastructure hinder the success of food aid programs, but the concept itself is not at fault. Furthermore, dependence on emergency food aid is less than that from continuing commercially imported food.
Food aid programs need improvement. The World Bank recommends programs safeguarding food security (especially for highly vulnerable people such as lactating women and children under five years), investing in projects that promote growth and directly benefit the poorest people, improving food price stabilization) and integrating food aid with other aid programs and national institutions and plans, whereas domestic governments should stress the redistribution of income to relieve afflicted people.
OECD countries need to restore the real value of food aid to the levels of the 1970s and 1980s, with a priority to least-developed countries. Donors should emphasize cash assistance for commercial food import rather than program food aid, as the latter involves high transactions costs.
Food aid from export subsidies or used to develop export markets may hurt local producers by lowering prices and changing diets. Moreover, the focus for agricultural aid needs to be on long-term food research and technology in developing countries, only a small fraction of global agricultural spending in LDCs.
8. What are the costs and benefits for donor countries giving aid to LDCs? Do the costs outweigh the benefits? Choose one donor country. What are the costs and benefits for this country giving aid? Do the costs outweigh the benefits?
Answer: Foreign aid is usually in the national self-interest of the granting country. Economic aid, like military assistance, is often used for strategic purposes--to strengthen LDC allies, to shore up the donor's defense installations, to improve donor access to strategic materials, to ensure export markets, and to keep LDCs in line politically. Thus often the benefits to the donor outweigh the costs. In the case of the United States, much of non-humanitarian aid has been for one of the reasons listed above. Thus the benefits to the U.S. have outweighed the costs. (There is no fixed answer for benefits and costs to the United States or other donors.)
9. What is the trend for OECD aid as a percentage of GNP in the last two decades?
Answer: The trend in OECD aid as a percentage of GNP is downward. In 1980, the figure was 0.37 before declining to 0.35 percent in 1985, but rebounding to 0.39 percent in 1986, but falling to 0.34 percent in 1988 and 0.33 percent during all three years, 1990–92, before declining to 0.30 percent in 1993 and 0.22 percent in 2001. \
10. Compare economic aid to low- and middle-income countries since the 1980s? How do you explain changes in allocation over time?
Answer: While real concessional aid to LDCs fell from 1980 to the early 21st century, the share of low-income countries (LICs) in total aid fell from about 50 percent in the early 1980s and 73 percent in 1992–93 to only 30 percent in 2000–01. Although international agencies emphasize aid to low-income countries, their share of aid has been low, suggesting that alleviating the poverty of the poorest countries is not a high priority.
In 1992–93, 37 percent of the aid went to sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the largest number of least-developed countries; 27 percent to Asia; 13 percent to Latin America, with only one least-developed country; and 23 percent to the Middle East, with no least-developed countries. However, by 1999–2000, Europe’s (mostly transitional countries’) share increased to 13 percent, while sub-Saharan Africa fell to 33 percent, Latin America 21 percent, Asia 26 percent, and the Middle East 7 percent (OECD).
Low-income countries received $10 official development assistance per capita in 2001, and middle-income countries $8 (World Bank). Aid to low-income countries (excluding India) was 18 percent of their gross investment and 4.3 percent of GNI in 2002. This percentage of GNI is 11 times as high as the proportions for both India and middle-income countries.
Since the early 1990s, low-income countries’ shares of aid have declined as a result of the emphasis by the European Union and the United States on support to the Central and Eastern European (including the former Soviet) states in transition. For strategic reasons, the United States has emphasized aid to Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Indonesia. The “war on drugs” has been a major rationale for U.S. aid to Colombia and Peru.
11. How important was multilateral aid as a percentage of total economic aid in the last two decades?
Answer: In 2001, 36 percent of OECD development assistance ($18.5 billion) went to multilateral agencies, those involving several donor countries. For the United States, in 1997 20.0 percent of ODA went to these agencies (United States Congressional Budget Office 1997; European Union 2004). The leading multilateral aid agency was the International Development Association (IDA, the World Bank’s concessional window, primarily for low-income countries). Other leading agencies (by rank order) were the Commission of the European Communities (CEC, for aid primarily to the European Community’s former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific), the World Food Program; the U.N. Development Program; the U.N. High Commission for Refugees; the Asian Development Fund; UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund); the IMF soft-loan window; the African Development Fund; and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (OECD 2002b).
Aid administered in this manner is sometimes criticized because the donor loses control of the actual granting of the aid.
12.What can LDCs do to increase direct foreign investment in their countries?
Answer: Developing countries, particularly LLDCs, need favorable policies to increase foreign direct investment. LDCs can receive help from the World Bank’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) to attract foreign investment.
LDCs can conclude bilateral investment treaties (BITs) with other countries for the protection and promotion of foreign investment, and enter into double taxation treaties to avoid taxation in both the LDC and the headquarters’ country. Having market-friendly policies, undertaking market and legal reforms (including enacting legislation favorable to FDI), and beginning a privatization program for inefficient state enterprises also can help facilitate foreign investment.
Developing countries need to undertake major institutional changes, not only to facilitate foreign and domestic investment but to provide the scaffolding for other economic policies that increase a country’s attractiveness for foreign private domestic capital flows. Institutional changes include well-developed infrastructure (transport, communication, electric power, and water supply), a good educational system, improved governance (with reduced corruption), political rights, public sector efficiency, reduced regulatory burdens, protection of property rights, enforcement of law, macroeconomic stability, strong monetary and fiscal institutions, a statistical system, an effective and nonpartisan civil and police service, a legal and judicial system that can provide security for trademarks and contracts, a civil society independent of the state, and a capital, land, and exchange markets.
Reduced trade barriers can increase LDCs’ lure of DCs to international outsourcing. With this and other changes in institutions, a number of low-income countries could begin participating in the new international division of labor created by outsourcing by high-income OECD countries.
13. What are the costs and benefits to LDCs of MNC investment? How has the balance between costs and benefits changed recently?
Answer: Multinational corporations are responsible for most private direct investment. The benefits to LDCs can be more capital, new technology (and sometimes research and development), training of domestic managers and technicians, management skills, tax revenues, new products, financing of a balance of payments gap, acquiring specialized goods essential for domestic production, creating forward and backward linkages, providing contacts with overseas banks and markets, and increased specialization, efficiency, and income.
Problems include MNCs maximizing the profits of the parent company at the expense of subsidiaries, limiting technology transfer and sharing of industrial secrets to local personnel of the subsidiary, restricting exports, compelling subsidiaries to purchase intermediate parts and capital goods from the parent, and setting intrafirm (but international) transfer prices to shift taxes from the host country. Costs may include increased industrial and technological concentration, competition to local entrepreneurship and investment, introduction of inappropriate products and technology, increased unemployment rates from unsuitable technology, higher income inequalities by generating jobs and patronage that primarily benefit the richest portion of the population, adverse influence on government policy, diversion of local skilled people from entrepreneurship or the civil service, diversion of capital from local funds, repatriation of large funds after initial capital inflow, and increased technological dependence on foreign sources, resulting in less technological innovation by local workers.
14. What was the trend in the ratio of official aid relative to commercial loans to LDCs in the last three to four decades? How important is multilateral lending as a source of nonconcessional loans?
Answer: For LDCs, the ratio of official aid to commercial loans declined for a decade and a half after 1970: from 1.40 in 1970 to 0.66 in 1973 to 0.55 in 1975 to 0.36 in 1978 to 0.23 in 1984. Subsequently, the ratio of official aid to commercial loans rose from 0.23 in 1984 to 0.33 in 1987 to 0.47 in 1990 and 0.43 in 1994 to 0.95 in 2002. The increasing trend after the mid-1980s mostly reflected the fall in private lending rather than substantial growth in concessional assistance.
Multilateral loans are an important source of nonconcessional loans. The World Bank provides about 10 percent of total resource flows to LDCs. The IMF is the lender of last resort to LDCs. Multilateral regional banks are also lenders to LDCs.
15. How important has the World Bank been as a source of funds for LDCs? How important has the IMF been as a source of funds for LDCs? Do you think there should be any changes in World Bank and IMF programs and conditions?
Answer: Today virtually all financial disbursements from the World Bank are to LDCs, and the IMF is the lender of last resort for LDCs with international payments crises. The World Bank provides about 10 percent of the total net resources to LDCs. In addition, the World Bank has used its technical and planning expertise to upgrade projects to meet banking standards. Although the World Bank and IMF have been criticized for insisting on drastic measures in short periods for LDC to make structural adjustments, these institutions can't jeopardize their financial base. Often even the LDCs vote for certain of these measures. However, these institutions must try not to impose unnecessary burdens on low-income countries that make it more difficult to attain basic needs.
Chapter 16:
1. Discuss the nature and origins of the LDCs’ external debt problem. What impact has the debt crisis had on LDC development? On DCs?
Answer: A country's total external debt includes the stock of debt owed to nonresident governments, businesses, and institutions and repayable in foreign currency, goods, or services. This includes both short-term debt, long-term debt and IMF credit. The origins of the debt are many, including chronic international balance on goods and services deficits, global shock such as an oil price increase, a decline in the ratio of official aid to commercial loans, increased real interest rates, inefficiency, poor national economic management, overvalued domestic currencies, and capital flight. Large external debt has a negative impact upon LDC development because LDCs can't service the debt and thus lose future credit; it slows down capital formation and improved technological development and thus economic growth in general. Some of the developed countries and developed countries' banks suffered in that they had to write off some of the debt and/or reschedule it, reducing returns for some banks. Indeed a complete writeoff of LDC debts by U.S. banks in the early 1980s would have wiped out many major U.S. commercial banks, which had more exposure to LDC debt than banks in any other country. By the 1990s, these major banks had reduced their exposure to LDC borrowers, so that LDC defaults endanger neither bank credit ratings and stock prices nor the stability of the U.S. banking system.
2. Define total external debt, debt service, and debt-service ratio? How useful is each of these indicators as a measure of the debt burden?
Answer: Total external debt includes the stock of debt owed to nonresident govenrments, businesses, and institutions and repayable in foreign currency, goods, or services. Total debt includes short-term debt, long-term debt, and use of IMF credit. Debt service is the interest and principal payments due in a given year on long-term debt. The debt-service ratio is the debt service in a given year divided by that year's exports of goods and services.
The debt-service ratio shows the ability of a country to repay its debt. A debt-service ration of more than 50 percent means that at least half of annual export revenues must be devoted to paying interest and principle on debt, an unsustainable level that can contribute to default without debt writeoffs or forgiveness. Figures on debt service are useful only primarily as a percentage of export revenues. Total external debt (EDT) figures may be meaningful as an indicator of debt burden if expressed as a percentage of GNI. However, according to the World Bank definition, to be a severely indebted country means that either of two key ratios is above critical levels: present value of debt service to GNP (80 percent) and present value of debt service to exports (220 percent). In 2005, 48 countries were classified as severely indebted countries.
3. Who are the major LDC debtors? Explain the reasons for the discrepancies between the leading LDC debtors and LDCs with the greatest debt burdens.
Answer: In 2001, the leaders (in rank order) were Brazil, China, Mexico, Russia, Argentina, Indonesia, Turkey, India, and Thailand, all except India middle-income countries. Only Indonesia, Argentina, and Brazil are severely indebted. Severely indebted low-income countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone have debt burdens more difficult to bear than major debtors such as China, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, India, and Thailand.
Yet, ironically for these five countries plus South Korea (a high-income country since 1994 not listed), a high rank among LDC debtors indicated a high credit rating among commercial banks. Korea’s debt service ratio was only 7 percent, compared to the following for slow growers: 38 percent for Bolivia, 22 percent for Ecuador,19 percent for Ethiopia, 14 percent for Honduras, 35 percent for Kazakhstan, 23 percent for Mauritania, 37 percent for Nicaragua, 23 percent for Peru, and 25 percent for Vietnam (World Bank). A large debt need not be a problem so long as foreign creditors believe an economy can roll over the debt or borrow enough to cover debt service and imports.
Although no leading debtors were from sub-Saharan Africa, its external debt was probably as burdensome as any other world region. From 1980 through 2002, more than three-fourths of the 45 countries in the IMF African Department negotiated debt relief agreements with creditors (World Bank). Many African countries have low earnings and very little capacity to pay.
4. What is capital flight? What relevance does it have for the debt problem? What can source and haven countries do to reduce capital flight?
Answer: Capital flight is resident capital outflow, equal to current account balance, net foreign direct investment, and changes in reserves and debt (World Bank).
Relevance: Many bankers and economists feel it is futile to lend more funds to LDCs if a large portion flows back through capital flight. Capital flight intensifies foreign exchange shortages and damages the collective interest of those that buy foreign assets.
What can countries do: Capital flight is difficult to reverse. Source countries need robust growth, market-clearing exchange rates and other prices, an outward trade orientation, dependable positive real interest rates, fiscal reform (including lower taxes on capital gains), taxes on foreign assets as high as domestic assets, more efficient state enterprises, other market liberalization, supply-oriented adjustment measures, a resolution of the debt problem, and incorruptible government officials (Williamson and Lessard). Haven countries can lower interest rates and cease tax discrimination favoring nonresident investment income, whereas their banks can refuse to accept funds from major LDC debtor countries.
As a last resort, LDCs may have to use exchange controls, which limit domestic residents’ purchase of foreign currency, to limit the exodus of new savings.
5. To what extent does the IMF play the role of the lender of last resort? To what extent does the IMF follow Walter Bagehot’s rule?
Answer: Bagehot’s standard for intervening in a financial crisis is that the lender of last resort should lend freely, at a penalty rate, on the basis of collateral that is marketable in the ordinary course of business when there is no panic. This lender’s role, according to Fischer, is to offer an assurance of credit, given under certain limited conditions, which will stop a financial panic from spreading – or better still, stop it from even getting started. However, this lender to avoid market participants from taking excessive risks, should maintain constructive ambiguity about when it will seek to stabilize a crisis.
The IMF often plays the role of a lender of last resort, but Fischer thinks that the IMF needs tools such as a precautionary line of credit from private creditors and Kruger thinks borrowers need the option of a payments standstill and foreign creditors need protection against borrower default by borrowers inserting collective action clauses into new bonds and loans.
6.What are the causes of financial crises, such as the Asian crises?
Answer: Financial markets channel funds to those with productive investment opportunities poorly when banks have a high percentage of bad (nonperforming) loans, bad credit risks are disproportionately eager to take out loans, loan officers lack information in assessing expanded lending, banks bear most of the loss when the project of the borrowers fail, uncertainty about bank failure and government policy increases, borrowers’ collateral falls from currency devaluation, and interest rates increase sharply. These problems bring about asymmetries or disparities in information in which lenders have poorer information than borrowers about the potential returns and risk associated with investment projects. These asymmetries or disparities were present in the financial crises of the 1990s, when partially informed lenders steered away from making loans at higher interest rates, because they had inadequate information about borrower quality and may have feared that those willing to borrow at high interest were more likely not to pay back the loan. Screening was imperfect, especially during liberalization with new banks or with old banks formerly dependent on known state enterprises or members of the same keiretsu-like conglomerate expanding to new borrowers. Banks lack the expertise to evaluate risk, whereas weak bank supervision contributes to a failure to screen and monitor new loans enough (Mishkin).
Initial conditions in the year before the crises in the 1990s’ financial crises indicate that capital inflows/GDP, bank nonperforming loan ratios, and current account deficits were high; credit growth was fast; and domestic currency, set at a constant nominal rate for several years, had experienced a real appreciation.
7.Assess the views of fundamentalists versus the Columbia school in their explanation for the Asian financial crisis and how to resolve it.
Answer: Fundamentalists, such as Goldstein, Noland, Liu, S. Robinson, Wang, Summers, and Rogoff see the crisis resulting from the following: (1) financial sector weakness, including inadequate supervision (2) high bad-debt ratios, (3) large current-account deficits, (4) fixed exchange rates, (5) overvalued currencies, (6) contagion of financial disturbances causing portfolio investors to reassess Asian investments, (7) increased risky behavior, including failure to hedge future transactions, by bankers and international investors, and (7) moral hazard from previous international bailouts, as in Mexico in 1994. The overextension of domestic credit by Asian banks based on excessive foreign borrowing at short maturities contributed to the panic of both domestic bankers and international investors. Fundamentalists want the IMF to lend to crisis-stricken countries on condition that they undertake fundamental structural reforms in banking.
Columbia school economists Stiglitz and Sachs agree with much of the fundamentalists’ analysis of the causes of the crisis but differ on the prescription. Fundamentalists want the IMF to lend to crisis-stricken countries on condition that they undertake fundamental structural reforms in banking.
Stiglitz thinks it is unrealistic for the IMF to loan short-term, expecting reforms that can only be attained in the middle- to long-run. For an LDC to establish the legal and institutional preconditions for effective banking supervision, licensing, and regulation and operational independence takes time and resources.
Fundamentalists believe that the herd behavior of Western portfolio investors, such as pension and mutual funds, transmitted the crisis from one Asian country to another, and then to Russia and Latin America. Stiglitz, by contrast, accepts a Keynesian explanation for contagion of the crisis, viz., that the “belt tightening” imposed by the IMF reduced incomes and imports that successively weakened neighboring countries, and through the reduced demand for oil, spread to Russia. Stiglitz believes that the purpose of the IMF, consistent with its initial conception, is to undertake global collective action to ameliorate market failure, supporting global economic stability by spurring growth and reducing unemployment. Stiglitz regrets that the World Bank shifted its emphasis to structural adjustment loans dependent on IMF approval and conditions.
Stiglitz, together with Jong-Il You, denounces IMF polices of premature capital market liberalization contributing to financial crises and being poorly equipped to deal with panic-driven crises. Stiglitz also criticizes the IMF for their lack of exchange rate flexibility
8.What changes, if any, need to be made to the international financial architecture to spur growth and reduce poverty?
Answer: One change is for the IMF and other multilateral lending agencies to reduce insistence on immediate capital-account liberalization. More fundamentally, Asia and other LDC regions, just as the West, need regional financial institutions, such as a bank for international settlements, a regional monetary facility for mutual assistance and regional intervention support, an Asian or other regional monetary fund, regional standby funding arrangements to support IMF programs, regional agreements to borrow, and enhanced regional surveillance arrangements among central banks.
The Nayyar-Stiglitz proposal, based on Keynes’ view in 1944, is for an international institution (the IMF or its equivalent) focusing on global macroeconomic management, putting the burden for correcting external imbalances on surplus, not deficit, countries.
The Meltzer Commission recommended that multilateral and regional lending and development agencies write off all debts of the highly indebted poor countries (HIPCs) that implement effective development policies; that access to IMF credit be automatic and immediate to countries meeting a priori requirements without additional conditions or negotiations; and that in a world on a flexible exchange system, the IMF should only loan for short-term liquidity.
If the IMF, central bankers, and treasury officials oppose radical change, Eichengreen proposes marginal changes, such as LDCs’ adopting Chilean-type taxes and controls on short-term capital inflows and exchange-rate flexibility. He also would “bail in” (expand losses to) private foreign investors and banks, reducing the burden to debtors and borrowers.
9.What changes are needed in sovereign debt restructuring?
Answer: Because LDCs are sovereign so that foreign creditors lack the rights they have in their own domestic courts, they must have other protections against borrower default, such as reducing the borrower’s future access to world credit markets. Nevertheless, sometimes debt is unsustainable, necessitating debt restructuring before the country can resume growth (Krueger).
Krueger’s keys to debt restructuring are giving debtors a payment standstill from creditors while negotiating, and giving creditors assurances that the debtor will negotiate in good faith and pursue policies that protect asset values and restore growth. She supported inserting collective action clauses (CACs) into new bonds and loans. In 2003, New York state law enabled most emerging market sovereign bonds to include CAC clauses.
Another component of sovereign debt restructuring is a Debt Reduction Consortium (DRC) that could amalgamate consultative groups (CG) chaired by the World Bank, the Paris Club, London Club, and roundtables chaired by the U.N. Development Program. Debt relief needs to shift its focus from the Paris Club, a venue for LDCs to renegotiate debts with official creditors, to another organization, such as the CG, which relies on concerted action, in which all creditors owed a debt participatee jointly on a prorated basis, an approach beneficial to creditors in the long run, as creditor participants pay the cost of debt reduction, while all creditors share the benefits. (Answer may elaborate on this from the argument on p. 575-, 2nd full paragraph through end of 2nd full paragraph on p. 576).
10.What plan should the international community adopt to resolve the debt crisis? In your answer, consider plans similar to the Brady Plan, debt exchanges, the HIPC initiative, and other options, as well as the roles of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and DCs.
Answer: Debt reduction is the restructuring of debt to reduce expected present discounted value of the commercial debtor’s contractual obligations. The general commercial debt writeoffs, write-downs, and reductions (encompassing other than the largest debtors) envisioned under the 1989 Brady Plan, still in effect in 2004, failed because of the lack of multilateral coordination. Bilateral arrangements are subject to free-rider problems, where nonparticipating banks benefit from increased creditworthiness and value of debt holdings. Banks are willing to reduce LDC debt, but only if their competitors do likewise (Sachs).
The solution lies in concerted debt reduction, in which all banks owed a debt participate jointly on a prorated basis. For debt relief, just as in U.S. bankruptcy, settlements, concerted efforts are more effective than individual deals by creditors with debtors, and rebuilding of debtor productive capacity more effective than legalistic solutions.
Debt reduction can improve creditor welfare, as a large debt overhang can worsen debtor economic performance, and diminish the creditor’s expected returns. Just as in bankruptcy, decentralized market processes rarely result in efficient debt reduction, because each individual creditor is motivated to press for full payment on its claims, even if collective creditor interests are served by reducing the debt burden. The bankruptcy settlement cuts through the problem of inherent collective inaction and enforces a concerted settlement on creditors. Bankruptcy proceedings (under U.S. law) force individual creditors to give up some legal claims, reducing the contractual obligations of debtors, and thus preserving debtor capacity to function effectively and thereby service as much of the debt as possible. The debt overhang prevents countries from returning to the loan market; the most effective way to revive lending is to reduce the debtor’s debt-servicing burden. We should apply the lesson of bankruptcy to sovereign debt overhang, even though debtor LDCs face a liquidity rather than a solvency problem. A major objective in debt reorganization is to reverse investment and productivity declines resulting from poor creditworthiness. Debt reduction may be the only feasible alternative, as banks, lacking incentives, are becoming increasingly resistant to new-money packages, and debtors lack incentives to undertake tough reforms designed to increase debt-servicing payments abroad. DCs can best support moderate political leaders by reducing debt so that debtor countries have an incentive to undergo reform and offer long-term benefits to their publics.
Before 1989, major creditors undertook insufficient joint action to attain success in debt reduction. From 1989 to 1993, to avoid damaging precedents for other LDC debtors, creditors generally worked out debt-reduction packages with selected large debtors, such as Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, and Nigeria. After the mid- to late 1990s, with falling commercial lending, joint action was limited.
The inherent barrier to voluntary schemes with small debtors is that the nonparticipating creditor who holds on to its original claims (which will rise in value) will be better off than those participating in collective debt reduction. Creditor participants pay the cost of debt reduction, while all creditors share the benefits.
Highly-indebted poor countries (HIPCs) owe almost their entire debt to official bilateral or multilateral creditors rather than commercial creditors, and so need a different approach. HIPC creditors may be able to reduce poverty by decreasing the HIPC’s high debt-service ratio. The HIPCs’ 1985–94 scheduled debt-service ratio was 64.0 percent, with the ratio actually paid 22.2 percent (UNCTAD), meaning that more than one-fifth of annual export receipts was used to pay debt servicing. Reducing the debt overhang not only removes a major barrier to investment, but also increases the adjustment time horizon, so that political elites, many of whom have inherited their debt burden from previous regimes, have time to plan more stable structural changes.
The World Bank/IMF HIPC initiative, begun in 1997, usually required successful adjustment programs for three to six years, after which Paris Club official creditors would provide relief through rescheduling up to 80 percent of the present value of official debt (UNCTAD). The Bank and Fund, in principle, maintained the conditions (sound macroeconomic policies and improved governance) for debt writeoffs, to avoid a vicious circle in which HIPCs would return to get newly acquired debt forgiven.
In response to critics, who complained that the time for adjustment was too long, the Bank and Fund announced an enhanced HIPC initiative in 1999 to reduce the requisite adjustment to three years before relief. Still, by the end of 2000, the IMF and Bank, with a flurry of activity, under pressure from Jubilee 2000, had provided (or was scheduled to provide) concessional funds, based on profits from lending and the sales of gold, to begin the three-year process of reducing the debt of 22 HIPCs. However, because the G8 failed to commit to front loading debt write-downs, the immediate effect in decreasing actual debt-service payments, once the debtor meets conditions, is small. Moreover, reducing debt payments in later years will depend on uncertain private and government donations to HIPC funds.
By early 2004, 10 countries had completed adjustment under the enhanced initiative. At the same time, 17 countries reached an interim period in adjustment and macroeconomic stabilization. As of early 2004, 11 HIPCs, still to be considered before the HIPC initiative expired at the end of the year, were 12 other least developed countries. Many in the last two categories may lack the political stability and bureaucratic capacity to undertake the World Bank/IMF’s required program.
The DCs’ and the international financial institutions’ continuation of writing down debt, liberalizing trade, and increasing aid to counter external shocks, could spur HIPC leaders to undertake further long-term political and economic reforms, at least in some countries, if not to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Congo (Kinshasa), and Côte d’Ivoire, where political conflict or blatant corruption precludes even minimally effective capital utilization.
The immediate cost to DCs of a program similar to Jubilee 2000 for nonpredatory states is negligible. Efforts to “wipe the slate clean” for selected HIPCs could free political leaders, especially in Africa, of their inherited debts, and provide some breathing space to enable them to focus on long-range planning and investment to improve the general welfare and reduce their vulnerability to deadly political violence.11
What effect did the HIPC initiative have? HIPCs continued their trend of falling debt service ratios. Countries that first completed adjustment under the enhanced HIPC debt initiative relief reduced their total debt service substantially, freeing resources to increase education and health spending.
See also Brady Plan (pp. 579-580) and debt exchanges (pp. 580-583).
The international community gains from systematic debt relief plans as LDCs are major trading partners. This may entail writing-off debt, writing-down debt, debt exchanges, or rescheduling the debt payments in a way conducive to enabling the LDCs to survive and grow economically.
11. What impact has incurring major external debt by LDCs had on global and country income distribution? What impact have attempts to reduce the debt crisis had on income distribution?
Answer: Debt crises have forced many countries to curtail poverty programs. In 1985, Tanzanian President Julius K. Nyerere asked, “Must we starve our children to pay our debt?” UNICEF (1989) found that child malnutrition increased and primary school enrollment rates declined in the 1980s in many least-developed countries as external debt constraints cut spending on services most needed by the poor. Additionally, some Latin America countries, dominant among severely indebted middle-income countries, experienced deterioration in social indicators during the 1980s. The deterioration of these indicators may have been accompanied by increased income inequality.
The debt and financial crises in Mexico, Russia, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, Argentina, Thailand, Indonesia, and Korea in 1994-2001 increased poverty. After Indonesia’s financial crisis, 1997-98, its national poverty rate rose from 16 percent in 1996 to 27 percent in 1999 (World Bank). In Argentina, in 2001 more than 15,000 workers, unemployed, and youth marched December 2002 in a “national march against hunger.” In 2002, seven of ten Argentine children “suffer from a serious lack of food” (Vann). The number earning their living scavenging trash doubled in two years to 2002. Despite the lack of systematic studies of changes in income distribution, the increases in poverty indicated were probably accompanied by increasing income inequality.
The IMF and World Bank stress income distribution and basic needs in their publications but have few systematic studies of the effects of adjustment on poverty and income inequality and few programs to ensure that adjusting countries protect the income and social services of the poor. Bank and Fund adjustment programs in response to debt crisis may need to support income transfers for the poor, as most LDCs lack the resources to support these transfers. For example, in the poorest African countries, where the majority of the population lives close to subsistence, welfare payments to bring the population above the poverty line would undermine work incentives and be prohibitively expensive. The World Bank’s Social Dimensions of Adjustment Projects (SDA), rarely used by adjusting countries, could be a step toward compensating the poor for losses from adjustment programs from external crises.
There are few empirical studies of the impact of debt reduction and structural adjustment on income distribution. We can speculate that the repayment of debt means that the poor, which are least likely to be represented in the government, will be the first to suffer, and political elites the last.
Antipoverty projects rarely pay off for multilateral banks, which need to lend at bankers’ standards to maintain funds. To enhance funds for poverty reduction requires additional moneys by the United States and other DCs to the concessional windows of the World Bank and IMF.
Chapter 17:
1. What are the major arguments for and against tariffs in LDCs? in DCs?
Answer: Arguments for protection include protection for infant industry, increasing returns to scale, external economies, technological borrowing, changes in factor endowment, revenue sources, improved terms of trade, improved employment and balance of payments, antidumping, and national defense. Arguments against protection are based on comparative advantage and cost. For developed countries, the arguments are basically the same. (Pp. 592-663 provide the details of the argument.) The infant-industry, revenue, and national defense arguments are the most often cited. However, as shown in the text because of the lack of validity of the infant-industry and revenue arguments, the case for free trade is even more powerful in the developed countries than for LDCs.
2. Present the four arguments for tariffs you consider strongest and then indicate their weaknesses.
Answer: Several argument listed in #1 would qualify. The infant-industry argument is often cited. This argument supports protecting industries that are just getting started until they are established. Once they have established a market, they can take advantage of economies of scale. The problem is that if both countries attempt to protect the same product, then economies of scale will not be achieved and the world loses specialization gains. Another argument concerns achieving external economies by protecting a certain industry. The government may feel protection is warranted because of the benefits the rest of the economy gains. The problem here is that political leaders use this argument to support their own pet projects. Another argument is for national defense. A nation would not want to be put into a position of buying defense equipment from an enemy; thus it is argued that protection is essential to maintain its own productive capacity. This argument has merit. Nevertheless, if another nation truly has a comparative advantage in producing this equipment, it would make sense to purchase this equipment in nonwar times because the world gains from the specialization. Another argument is to protect domestic employment and the balance of payments. Protection diverts demand from imports to domestic goods, so that the balance on goods and services, aggregate demand, and employment increase. A problem here is that the economic injury to other countries may provoke retaliation from those nations, and thus the whole world loses from less specialization. Furthermore, the effects of import restrictions and increased prices spread throughout the economy, so that domestic- and export-oriented production and employment decline.
Other arguments and rejoinders to them are on pp. 596-603. Points should be base on how the student makes the arguments.
3. Discuss the adequacy of using a model with three factors – land, labor, and capital – in determining comparative advantage. How would we extend the Heckscher-Ohlin model to explain LDC comparative advantage more realistically?
Answer: Although the theory can be made more realistic by using variable factor proportions, increasing costs, and transport costs, these changed assumptions complicate the exposition but still support the principle of free trade according to a country's comparative advantage. Heckscher-Ohlin show that a nations gains from trade by exporting the commodity whose production requires the intensive use of the country's relatively abundant (and cheap) factor of production and importing the good whose production requires the intensive use of the relatively scarce factor.
4. Discuss whether a capital poor LDC would better import capital-intensive goods from abroad, attract capital from abroad, subsidize and spur production shifting comparative advantage to these goods, or use liberalized policies for capital and other factor markets.
Answer: A capital-poor LDC would most likely be better off by importing capital-intensive goods. Attracting capital from abroad takes time and is expensive and time-consuming to affect production. Subsidizing and spurring production in capital-intensive goods would be an expensive way to shift comparative costs. Wouldn’t it be preferable to let private entrepreneurs who forsee the advantage of structural change to capital-intensive development to make appropriate investments? Why should government subsidize or protect an enterprise that loses in the long run? Liberalizing policies for capital and other factor markets might work in the long run, but might contribute to financial and currency crises in the short run.
5. Do LDCs face historically deteriorating terms of trade?
Answer: Yes, probably, at least until the mid-1980s to early 1990s when LDCs export patterns shifted from primary to manufactured products. Ardeni and Wright extend Prebisch-Singer and Spraos data to show falling commodity terms of trade for primary products from 1876-80 through 1988. For nonoil LDCs, World Bank figures indicate that from 1948 to 2001, the price of nonoil commodities declined relative to exports of manufactures.
Moreover, Kindleberger showed in 1956 that LDCs are especially vulnerable to declining terms of trade because they cannot easily resources to accord with shifting patterns of comparative advantage. Primary-product export concentration, the dependence of LDC primary exports on foreign multinational corporations for processing, marketing, and financing, and limitations on the expansion of processing indicate the LDCs’ inability to shift resources with changing demand and technologies.
6.What are the major arguments for DC protection against LDCs? How valid are these arguments?
Answer: The answer to #1 discusses DC arguments for protection. Most of the major arguments for protection, such as the infant industry and revenue arguments, have little validity for DCs. However, there are arguments against free trade to improve DC unskilled labor wages and income distribution, to reduce LDC use of child labor, and to prohibit polluting processes in LDCs.
Improving income distribution is a serious argument for protection. The Stolper-Saumuelson (SS) theorem used Heckscher-Ohlin factor proportions theory to examine the implications of free trade for the wage of unskilled labor (the scarce factor) relative to skilled labor (the abundant factor). Won’t free trade raise the skill premium (skilled labor wage/unskilled labor wage), supporting an argument for tariffs to increase the relative wage of the unskilled labor and reduce income inequality?
The steady increase in U.S. and U.K. wage inequality from the late 1970s through the 1990s revived interest in SS as a long-run tendency. Economists found that expanded physical capital was complementary to skilled labor but competitive with unskilled labor. Moreover, empirical economists began testing whether increased U.S. wage inequality during this period resulted from growing trade liberalization. Lacking wage data that provided a pure test of skilled and unskilled wages, economists used wages of nonproduction versus production workers, college graduates versus high school dropouts, skill intensity of imports, decline in the relative wage of unskilled-intense (textile, apparel, and leather) manufacturing, and sector-by-sector comparisons as proxy tests for finding the causes of the skill wage premium (Cline).
Most tests from the early 1990s found that skill-biased technological progress (information technology, biotechnology, R&D spending) was the major factor increasing wage inequality. The relative demand for skilled labor increased even more rapidly than the continuing enskilling of labor supply, largely a result of an increase in the proportion of college graduates in the labor force during the two decades. These same tests found that the reduced relative demand for unskilled-labor-intensive products resulting from expanded skill-intensive exports and unskilled-intensive imports had little, if any, adverse effect on wage inequality (Cline 1997). Krugman provided strong support by arguing that as most U.S. trade is with other DCs, a substantial share of which is intra-industry trade, differences in skill intensity would have little relevance for trade.
Many later analyses questioned these findings. Cline (1997) rejected the assumptions in the prevailing literature of a relatively small difference between the factor intensity of commodities, and a high elasticity of substitution for labor (that is, Cline believed that trade and the skilled wage premium were more sensitive to changes in the ratio of skilled to unskilled labor).
For Adrian Wood (1994), increasing the assumed differences between the factor intensity of commodities is not enough. He assumes that LDCs have a higher unskilled-labor intensity than DCs in producing the same commodity. In fact, DC firms no longer manufacture many labor-intensive goods imported from LDCs. Most of these imports are noncompeting goods. In calculating factor intensities, economists must consider LDC production of labor-intensive products that DCs have had to abandon. Compared to conventional calculations by trade economists, Wood finds a much larger demand for unskilled labor in LDCs, whereas the demand for skilled labor in DCs is substantially larger.
Cline (1997:147) finds that trade and immigration caused the skilled wage premium in the 1980s to increase by one-third more than otherwise, an increase that continued into the 1990s.
This enskilling and its increase in the skill premium are a general phenomenon among DCs and Russia, although except for the United Kingdom.
However, free trade increases national income. A rich country can use taxes and subsidies, unemployment compensation, and training programs to see that neither dislocated workers nor the rest of the population loses from external competition.
Those skeptical about globalization argue that increased trade openness and FDI encourage LDCs to keep labor costs low by letting children work. However, Neumayer and de Soysa (2003) show that countries that are more open toward trade, globalization, and FDI have a lower incidence of child labor. The link to child labor is not multinational corporations but the country’s comparative advantage in unskilled-labor-intensive goods (Busse and Braun).
Beegle, Dehejia, and Gatti find that transitory income reductions and credit (liquidity) limitations play an important role in explaining why children work. Removing imperfections in informal credit markets can mitigate child labor problems (Chaudhuri).
Should DCs use trade sanctions against LDCs that use child labor? No. Chaudhuri (2003) thinks that these sanctions will produce perverse effects; a liberalized trade policy, which results in positive-sum gains, is more effective in bringing down the evil of child labor.
What about argument for protection against goods using polluting processes that American law prohibits? Do LDC pollution havens distort comparative advantage? Hufbauer and Schott (1993:94) say “no”: the international trading rules “are designed to prevent environmental measures from becoming a new handmaiden of protection.” Moreover, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, pollution control expenditures as a percentage of value added in U.S. manufacturing in 1991 were less than 2 percent and less than 0.2 of 1 percent of layoffs in 1987–90 resulted from environmental and safety regulations.
Antweiler, Copeland, and Taylor’s cross-national empirical evidence finds that free trade is generally good for the environment; that is, if trade openness raises world incomes by 1 percent, pollution concentrations fall by roughly 1 percent. The authors find no evidence that pollution havens distort comparative advantage.
7.Which is more effective in expanding LDC output and employment: export expansion or import substitution? What policies avoid biases against exports?
Answer: Evidence confirms that the expansion of exports, less limited by domestic demand growth, facing international competition, more likely to experience cost economies from increased market size, and receiving information from DC users to improve product quality, tends to be more successful in expanding output and employment. Policies should adjust exchange rates so they don't discriminate against exports, implement only modest trade restrictions, and lower tariffs.
8. Name and then characterize those LDCs that were most successful in expanding exports in the last quarter of a century or so.
Answer: These countries were countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Spain, Brazil, China, India, and Malawi, countries that (in the 1980s) had a comparative advantage in exporting labor-intensive goods and importing capital or skilled-labor intensive-goods.
9. Why is the nominal rate of tariff protection a poor gauge of the effective rate of protection for processed and manufactured goods?
Answer: The nominal tariff rate is a poor gauge. First, tariff rates are much higher on labor-intensive goods in which LDCs are more likely to have a comparative advantage. Second, the effective rate of protection, a measure of protection at each processing stage, is usually higher than the nominal rate for manufactured and processed goods, since developed-country tariff rates rise as imports change from crude raw materials to semimanufactures to finished goods.
10.Why are nominal exchange-rate changes inadequate when calculating currency depreciation or appreciation? Indicate how to calculate the real exchange rate.
Answer: They are inadequate, because the nominal exchange rates need to be adjusted for the relative inflation rates in both countries. For example, consider the Nigerian naira in 1968 (the base year), N1 = $1.40, while the consumer price indices in both the United States and Nigeria were 100. By 1979, N1 = $1.78, while the U.S. consumer price index was 208.5, and Nigeria's was 498. The real exchange rate (the nominal exchange rate adjusted for relative inflation rates at home and abroad) is N1 = $4.25 (1.40 x 1.27 x 2.39).
11. Which LDCs have gained the most from participation in global production networks (GPNs)? What are the reasons for their gains? What strategies can non-GPN LDCs use to become a part of a global production network?
Answer: Labor-intensive manufacturers have gained the most from GPNs, a value-added chain or division of labor of manufacturing output, organized by multinational corporations, in which production is broken into discrete states in a number of countries, with each performed in countries best suited for stages. Both low-income and middle-income countries’ manufacturing exports as a percentage of total exports have risen from 1981 to 2001. A significant percentage of international trade and foreign investment has shifted from the production and exchange of final consumer goods to the production and exchange of parts and components. Among emerging nations, Mexico, Thailand, Malaysia, China, and high-income Korea comprise 78 percent of the sales of parts and components to DCs.
Reasons: Rapid technological progress in transport, communications, electronics, and data processing has increased flows of foreign direct investment and cross-border production network. Cheaper and faster telephone, fax, Internet, and cargo connections, and improved ability to process and analyze data, using electronic interchange, have facilitated global networks. The major explanation for the gains are lower tariffs, which, for example, are an important contributor to the size of intermediate inputs relative to total sales of U.S. affiliates, a measure of GPN activity. During the decade before the accession of eight East and Central European countries into the original E.U. 15 in 2004, the exports of processed goods from East to West increased rapidly. In addition, after the formation of NAFTA in 1994, Mexico’s maquiladora industry grew spectacularly. Reduced LDC protection, especially on inputs and resources, has allowed a number of LDCs to move up the value-added ladder, with low-income countries expanding their exports of low technology exports and middle-income countries’ exports increasing in the level of their technology (World Bank 2003 & 2004).
Strategies: Major strategies include reducing tariffs and other protection and encouraging direct foreign investment.The link between LDCs and DCs can involve ownership, arm’s length transactions (where sales are in organized markets), and supplier-purchaser relationships. LDCs, as China and India, can negotiate favorable joint ventures and technology transfer agreements, enabling learning gains to be captured in domestic enterprises independent of the foreign multinational corporations.
GPNs enable production to be broken into discrete stages, each performed in countries best suited for the stages. Frequently, LDCs undertake production activities requiring low-skilled labor, a low-tech component of a high-tech good. However, the LDC can improve productivity through learning by doing and expanding productive firms. Both China and India have doubled global production sharing from 1980 to 1998, as indicated by the doubling of imported inputs into a unit of export. The expansion of duty-free access of imported intermediates in the production of exports has facilitated participation in GPNs for both countries.
China has favored imported inputs in the labor-intensive production of manufactures. Indeed, processing of imported intermediates comprise about half of total exports. Both China and India have expanded the range of products exported.
12. What DC changes in tariff policies would aid LDC development?
Answer: DCs should remove or reduce trade barriers against third-world exports, especially manufactured and processed goods, natural-resource-based goods, and labor intensive goods. The tariffs and other trade restrictions developed countries use to divert demand to domestic production especially hurt LDC export expansion of these goods, economic growth, and poverty reduction. Cline (2004) calls for DCs to provide “immediate free entry for imports from ‘high risk’ low-income countries” (highly indebted poor countries, least developed countries, and sub-Saharan Africa). The poverty-intensity of DC imports from these countries is high, with 60–70 percent of imports from the $2/day poor (33 percent from LDCs generally), implying that eliminating DC trade barriers could do more than anything else to reduce poverty.
DCs need to reduce nontariff barriers, of which a number, such as those under Super 301, trigger price mechanisms, and antidumping rules in the U.S., still remain.
So far the generalized system of tariff preferences (GSP), by which DCs offer lower tariffs to some LDCs than others, have generated only modest benefits for the LDCs. Expanding the scheme could accelerate LDC export growth and help economic growth in their economies.
13. What changes should LDCs make in trade policy to increase their gains from globalization?
Answer: LDCs gain by moving toward freer international trade, and by reducing tariffs, subsidies, quotas, administrative controls, and other forms of protection, and by learning by doing through participation in global production networks or by producing standardized goods at late stages of the product cycle
Industry and services, especially in labor-intensive production, can gain substantially by encouraging foreign investment that results in participation in global production networks (GPNs), a value-added chain or division of labor of manufacturing output, organized by multinational corporations (MNCs), in which production is broken into discrete states in a number of countries, with each performed in countries best suited for stages. LDCs participating in lower value added steps has expanded rapidly in recent years, resulting in MNCs increasing international outsourcing, offshoring services (especially in ICT, information and communications technology), importing components from low-cost producers and exporting to overseas processors. MNC-led borderless economies may be organized like flying geese, with technically advanced economies in the lead; newly industrializing countries specializing in sophisticated R&D- and technology-intensive industries; and low-income countries undertaking less sophisticated, labor-intensive, low value-added assembly. In time, low-income countries, such as India and China in recent years, have climbed the ladder toward providing the skills and organization for late-stage ICT processing.
Another important way of gaining from globalization is through undertaking policies, such as foreign investment, hiring foreigners, buying foreign machinery, and learned from foreign importers’ standards, to facilitate technological transfer and adoption. The product cycle model indicates that while a product requires highly skilled labor in the beginning, later as markets grow and techniques become common knowledge, a good becomes standardized, so that less-sophisticated countries can mass produce the item with less skilled labor. LDCs may then acquire a comparative advantage in standardized goods (Vernon).
14. How much progress has the WTO/GATT system made in facilitating the trade expansion of LDCs since 1960? What changes would you recommend to the WTO/GATT system to expand LDCs’ gains from trade further?
Answer: The World Trade Organization (WTO)/General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) system, not only administers rules of conduct in international trade among economies where market prices are the rule, but also has provided a post-World War II venue for member countries to negotiate reduced tariff and other trade barriers. During the period 1960 to 2000, world growth in GNI per capita was the fastest of any 40-year period in history, largely due to the rapid post-World War II trade liberalization.
To expand trade and income growth further, the WTO needs to liberalize trade in services and agricultural goods, restrain nontariff trade barriers, and increase membership to include countries such as Russia.
15. What changes are needed in WTO agreements for LDCs to benefit from agricultural trade? From trade in services?
Answer - Agriculture: Eliminating or reducing global agricultural policy distortions, mainly subsidies (with time limits for phasing out) and tariffs, would result in substantial gains in world welfare. Agricultural tariffs in DCs are higher in DCs than industrial tariffs, while other border barriers (subsidies and quantitative restrictions) are substantial. For example, simulations indicate that eliminating trade distortion in world cotton trade would increase cotton exports by West Africa (Mali, Burkina Faso, and Benin) 13 percent, increasing West African GNI and reducing rural poverty substantially (World Bank).
LDCs also need to reduce their trade barriers in agriculture. LDCs would realize even much larger efficiency gains by free agricultural trade within the developing world than by free DC-LDC farm trade.
Trade in services: With globalization, more labor services have entered the international marketplace. Trade in services amounts to 25 percent of total world trade, which represents growth faster than trade in goods. Liberalization of services could provide substantial increased income in the developing world, especially in inexpensive skilled labor services, in which LDCs have a comparative advantage.
16. Indicate the nature of the present international exchange-rate system and how it affects LDCs.
Answer: The present managed floating exchange rate system is a hybrid of six exchange rate regimes which are (1) single floats of major international currencies, the U.S. dollar, Canadian dollar, British pound, and the euro of the 12 E.U. members of the European Monetary System, (2) the independent or managed float of minor currencies, (3) the frequent adjustment of currencies according to an indicator, (4) pegging currencies to a major currency, such as an extreme case of the hard peg, the currency board, established by Argentina in 1991, and (5) pegging currencies to a basket (composite) of currencies, such as the special drawing rights (SDRs). This affects LDCs because it means that the value of their currencies are largely tied to supply and demand, much of which depends on what takes place in a few DCs. If more of a currency is demanded than supplied, the value goes up, and vice versa.
17. Under what circumstances might a LDC gain from depreciating its currency? What are some of the advantages of depreciation?
Answer: A LDC may gain from depreciation if its currency is overvalued in the marketplace because overvaluation tends to discourage import substitution and exports. When a LDC's prices of foreign exchange are lower than market rates, they are biased against exports. Devaluing the domestic currency to its equilibrium rate in order to ration imports through the market, encourage import substitution, and promote exports are usually advantageous. Additionally, domestic currency depreciation would increase labor-intensive production and employment.
18. Why may efforts to achieve a market-clearing exchange rate not improve economic efficiency and growth in a domestic economy that is otherwise not liberalized?
Answer: Market-clearing exchange rates may not provide enough signals for improving the efficiency of resources use if domestic prices of goods and services, wages interest rates, and other prices are not flexible, i.e., not liberalized. In fact, liberalizing one price (for example, the exchange rate) while other prices are still repressed may be worse than having all prices distorted.
19. Can an LDC attain all three of the following goals: stable exchange rates, free capital mobility, and national control over monetary policy? If not, which goals should have the highest priorities and what should be the tradeoffs between the various goals?
Answer: Most LDCs would not be able to obtain all three: stable exchange rates, free capital mobility, and national control over monetary policy. Attempts to do so have resulted in weak-currency countries devaluing contributing to a crisis in foreign-exchange and capital markets. During the 1980s and early 1990s, countries such as Taiwan and Singapore, demonstrated their ability to maintain exchange-rate stability against the dollar or basket of currencies. However, most LDCs are too vulnerable to external price and demand shocks to maintain stability of their currencies vis-a-vis major developed countries.
For large developing countries, such as China and India, national control over monetary policy tends to have a high priority and other goals are less important. For small countries, such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, an independent monetary policy is not likely. Free capital movements or exchange rate stability may be more important. The tradeoff between various goals will depend on the country’s situation.
20.Discuss why LDCs have made so few gains in their attempts at regional economic integration.
Answer: Few LDC attempts at economic integration have succeeded, mainly because less advanced nations have been discontented that the better off nations reap the lion's share of the benefits. For example, the East African Cooperation (EAC) broke up in 1977, as Tanzania and Uganda charged that the overwhelming amount of new industrial investment went to the relatively developed center, Nairobi, and other cities in Kenya. Furthermore, although theory indicates the union gains most from specialization reallocation from less efficient producers exiting the industry and shifting their resources to activities with a greater comparative advantage, most LDCs perceive this “creative destruction” as harmful.
21. Should WTO/GATT encourage the expansion of regional integration among LDCs? If not, what alternatives would you recommend?
Answer: WTO/GATT allows regional trade organizations (RTOs) that remove barriers among members (in no more than 10 years after the formation of an RTO) and do not raise trade barriers against nonmembers. RTOs can reduce total world welfare by trade diversion from a member country displacing imports from a lowest-cost third country; for example, the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) diverts some U.S. sourcing from lower-cost Korea, Taiwan, and Asian and Caribbean countries to Mexico.
Economists tend to favor worldwide free trade because it increases global efficiency more than RTOs. Indeed economists such as Grossman and Helpman are convinced that RTOs reduce world welfare, arguing that political pressures to form RTOs are greater when members’ firms gain more from trade diversion than they lose from trade creation, a situation most likely to reduce world welfare. However, most economists think that regional is better than bilateral trade agreements.
WTO/GATT needs a careful analysis about the effect of an RTO on world welfare before approving the RTO, and need to continue to monitor an RTO after it has been formed to ensure that RTOs do not have a protective effect. There are criteria for examining whether RTOs are beneficial: Frankel contends that RTOs are more likely to spur net trade creation when the number of RTOs in the world is low (for example, two or three RTOs approach the ideal of worldwide free trade), transport costs between world regions are high, transport costs within the RTO are low, the preference for RTO goods is low, the asymmetries (RTO size in gross product and number of member nations) in blocs are low, and the elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign goods (percentage increase in quantity demanded/percentage reduction in price as a result of the shift from the domestic to the foreign source) is high, a number that depends on the level of protection.
22.What policies might an LDC undertake to reduce the premium for the black market for foreign exchange?
Answer: Black markets for foreign exchange form in response to restrictions on trade and controls on currency transactions. Liberalizing the official market for foreign exchange, an action that usually depreciates the domestic currency, will usually reduce the black-market premium for foreign exchange.
23. What changes do LDCs want in the international economic order? What progress has been made in implementing these demands? Are any of the demands inconsistent? Are any contrary to LDC interests? (The question is based on Nafziger 2006b, cited on p. 649.)
Answer: LDCs want to see changes in the following areas: (1) a transfer of real resources, (2) science and technology, (3) redeployment of industries protected in DCs to LDCs, (4) increased food and agriculture aid, and (5) more international trade with LDCs. Success in attaining these goals have been limited. Real food and other aid has fallen in recent years, although foreign investment has increased but to a limited number of countries. Many DC businesses resist sharing their techniques or devoting their efforts to solving LDC scientific and technological problems when they do not have economic control. DC-LDC international trade has increased, although not to the extent expected. Few of the demands are inconsistent. These five goals are generally in the interest of LDCs.
24.Discuss the relative merits of the positions of liberals and the U.N. General Assembly concerning changes in the international economic order. (The question is based on Nafziger 2006b, cited on p. 649.)
Answer: The international economic order comprises all economic relations and institutions linking people from different nations. Third-world countries within the U.N. General Assembly wanted more policy influence in international institutions, more control over international economic relations, and a restructured world order that emphasized their needs. Liberals in the DCs opposed many of the LDCs’ requests and agenda for a new international economic order and put more emphasis on achieving the Washington Consensus (pp. 149-153). In the last two decades, the emphasis has shifted from LDC demands to DCs’ requirement that LDCs undergo Washington Consensus policies. Regardless of the merit of demands for a new international economic order (NEIO), much of the rich world is convinced that discussing the NEIO is moot. Perhaps discussion of the Millennium Development Goals (see pp. 16-17) is the best that LDCs can hope for. But even these goals were not taken very seriously by the United States and some other DCs, preoccupied with terrorism and national security issues, at the 2005 World Summit.
Chapter 18:
1.Why did many political leaders of states gaining independence after World War II emphasize state planning?
Answer: Because they believed that laissez-faire capitalism rigidly adhered to during the colonial period was responsible for slow economic growth before independence. Thus they pushed for systematic state planning to remove these capitalistic obstacles. Leaders such as Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah contended that vigorous state planning would remove the distorting effects of colonialism and free a LDC from dependence on primary exports.
2. Why might a capitalist LDC want to plan?
Answer: The complexity of contemporary technology and the long time between project conception and completion require planning, either by private firms or government. Markets cannot flourish without government setting up and maintaining the infrastructure that enables participants to trade freely and with confidence. Capitalist countries plan in order to correct for externalities, redistribute income, produce public goods (for example, education, police, and fire protection), provide infrastructure and research for directly productive sectors, encourage investment, supply a legal and social framework for markets, maintain competition, correct market failure, and stabilize employment and prices.
3. What is the dirigiste debate? Indicate Lal’s characterization of the dirigistes and the response of Lal’s critics.
Answer: The dirigiste debate concerns the extent to which the government should intervene in the market in LDCs, particularly to set prices and the role of the state generally. Lal argues that development economics is dominated by dirigiste, those that favor government intervention into LDC prices. The dirigiste dogma, according to Lal, is responsible for the demise of development economics. Critics of Lal respond that Lal’s description of the dirigiste is a caricature. While development economists often reject adherence to Western economic theory, they usually favor income transfers rather than price controls, although they put more emphasis on planning than Lal does.
4. Why have so few LDCs been successful at detailed centralized planning?
Answer: Planning in many LDCs has failed because detailed programs for the public sector have not been worked out, and excessive controls are used in the private sector. Most LDCs have too few resources, skills, and data to benefit from detailed planning.
5. What problems have mixed economies had in using Soviet-type planning?
Answer: Planning in many mixed LDCs has failed because detailed programs for the public sector have not been worked out, and excessive controls are used in the private sector, undermining its effectiveness. The government simply could not control all details of operations. Even Soviet "controlling" planning, which took years to develop, was still subject to decentralized management discretion.
6. What problems occur when using widespread controls to influence private investment and production in a mixed or capitalist economy?
Answer: The use of widespread controls to influence private investment and production in a mixed or capitalist economy distorts resource use, creates a black market, and discourages new firm entry. India, despite considerable capabilities in planning, could not make controls work, instead restraining production and entrepreneurship (see pp. 659-661). Central planners lack the information essential that more decentralized decision-makers have. India finally realized the cost of licensing and quotas, and how bureaucratic controls distorted private output and prices.
7. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the market as an alternative to state planning? What economic systems could combine some of the advantages of both planning and the market? How effective are these systems?
Answer: The plan and market are separate ways of coordinating transactions. Although the market allocates resources efficiently among alternative means, the market does not work so well as planning in correcting for market failure, adjusting for externalities and correcting for market failure Planning eliminates certain costs of the market system but also increases large-scale diseconomies – diminishing returns to management. Some socialist economic systems have attempted market socialism but seldom with great long-run success.
8. Indicate the strengths and weaknesses of market socialism and worker-managed socialism in LDCs. How might a LDC avoid Yugoslavia’s economic problems of the 1980s?
Answer: Market socialism combines the advantages of market allocation with more uniform income distribution policies by dividing the returns from social ownership of land and capital among the whole population. Worker-managed socialists contended that socialist planning must be managed by workers to be democratic and must use the market for resource allocation to be efficient. The objective was to maximize net income per member or worker. In Yugoslavia, this sytems provided incentives for the workers to produce and worked well into the late 1970s. Yugoslavia instituted reforms in 1976 that established basic organizations (BOs) of associated labor, a separate autonomous planning unit for each department in the firm. The result was an enlarged group responsible for decision-making that created an ill- defined hierarchy. The need for consensus among so many units gave many people (for example, discontented, even striking, work units, such as janitors or carpenters) the capacity to impede and few people the power to implement policies. When coalitions broke down, the state or bureaucracy could dissolve disruptive workers’ councils, recall business managers, or withhold infrastructure or funds.
Other weaknesses of the Yugoslav self-managed socialism were the lack of participation of rank-and-file employees in important policy making, the dependence of pay on factors outside BO control (for example, closing down production because suppliers failed to deliver an essential input), the unconcern for long-run performance (considerable turnover of workers, who lack ownership shares in the firm), neglect of externalities, widely varying income among workers doing the same job in different firms, lack of a labor market, the state’s soft budget constraint (an absence of financial penalties for enterprise failure), restricted entry of new firms to increase competition, collusion between vertically and horizontally linked firms, investment choice based on negotiations not benefit-cost analysis, overborrowing (resulting from no interest charge), disincentives to expand employment, too little investment from current surplus, and too many incentives for highly capital-intensive production (from pressures to distribute higher incomes per member). To avoid the Yugoslav problem, the firm needs a well-defined hierarchy, and the state needs the power to make the firm pay for negative externalities and to suffer financial penalty for failure (that is, chronic enterprise losses). Given the lack of models, worker-managed socialism is not likely to be successful.
9. What are the roles of political leaders and planning professionals in formulating an economic plan?
Answer: The role of the political leaders is to set the goals, hire the planners, and decide the relative weight to give to conflicting goals. The planning professionals can interpret economic data to help political leaders in identifying goals, and clearly state the economic meaning of the goals and formulate the costs of one goal in terms of another. The political leaders and not the planners make decisions based on value judgements.
10. What instruments do planners use to achieve goals?
Answer: Planners express goals as target variables, for example the annual GNP growth and the output growth of manufacturing. Goals are achieved through instruments, such as monetary, fiscal, exchange rate, tariff, tax, subsidy, extension, technology, business incentive, foreign investment, foreign aid, social welfare, transfer, wage, labor training, health, education, economic survey, price control, quota, and capital-rationing policies..
11. Illustrate how the instrument variables used depend on the plan’s duration.
Answer: The availability of instrument variables depends on the length of time in which the goals are to be achieved. Short-term plans focus on improving economic conditions in the immediate future (the next calendar or budget year); medium-term plans on the more distant future (say, a five-year plan); and long-term plans on the very distant future (15, 20, or more years). To increase free rice allotments per capita may take only a few weeks, to build a dam a decade, but to slow down labor force growth takes 15 to 20 years.
12. Why is the use of complex macroeconomic planning models in LDCs limited?
Answer: Most LDCs have too few resources, skills, and data to benefit from complex macroeconomic planning models. Yet a simple aggregate model may be useful as a first step in drawing up policies and projects.
13. What are the most important parts of the plan in a mixed or capitalist LDC?
Answer: Most LDCs with a large private sector are limited to an indicative plan, which indicates expectations, aspirations, and intentions, but falls short of authorization. Indicative planning may include economic forecasts, helping private decisionmakers, policies favorable to the private sector, ways of raising money and recruiting personnel, and a list of proposed public expenditures – usually not authorized by the plan, but by the annual budget.
In most LDCs, the private sector, comprised, at least, of most of agriculture, is larger than the public sector. Planners may set targets for production, employment, investment, exports, and imports for the private sector but usually have no binding policies to affect the target. Beyond forecasting, the usefulness of target figures for the private sector depends on the reliability of data, the persuasiveness of the planning process, and policy control over the private sector.
Professionals that play an especially important role in planning include: (1) the person with treasury experience, used to dealing with government departments and planning public expenditures; (2) the practical economist familiar with the unique problems that emerge in LDCs to help formulate public policies; and (3) the econometrician to construct input-output tables to clarify intersectoral economic relations (Lewis). Private sector planning means government trying to get people to do what they would otherwise not do – invest more in equipment or improve their job skills, change jobs, switch from one crop to another, adopt new technologies, and so on.
Some policies for the private sector might include the following: (1) investigating development potential through scientific and market research, and natural resources surveys; (2) providing adequate infrastructure (water, power, transport, and communication) for public and private agencies; (3) providing the necessary skills through general education and specialized training; (4) improving the legal framework related to land tenure, corporations, commercial transactions, and other economic activities; (5) creating markets, including commodity markets, security exchanges, banks, credit facilities, and insurance companies; (6) seeking out and assisting entrepreneurs; (7) promoting better resource utilization through inducements and controls; (8) promoting private and public saving; and (9) reducing monopolies and oligopolies (Lewis).
14. Is China a good role model for LDCs that wish a market socialist economy?
Answer: China describes its socialism as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” but today it has many capitalist elements. China’s approach during its reform period, beginning in 1979, was influenced by its effort to reverse the inefficiency from centralized decision making and state-controlled prices during the Maoist period, 1949-1976. Moreover, China market reform proceeded by trial and error rather than by a grand design. While LDCs can learn lessons from China’s reform strategies, China’s unique history and lack of blueprint makes China’s specific strategies too idiosyncratic to be used as a model for market socialism.
15. What is an input-output table? Of what value is input-output analysis to a planner? What are some of the weaknesses of the input-output table as a planning tool?
Answer: An input-output table is a technique for describing the interrelationships between inputs used in production and outputs. The table shows how the output of each industry is distributed among other industries and sectors of the economy, and the inputs to each industry from other industries and sectors. Assumptions of fixed technical coefficients, the absence of externalities, lack of joint products, and no technical change raise questions about the validity of input-output analysis Still the errors may not be substantial, especially for short time periods such as less than five years.
16.What policies can planners undertake to encourage the expansion of private sector production?
17. What advice would you give to a person in charge of development planning in a LDC with a large private sector?
Answer: The plan in an economy with a large private sector is usually indicative planning which indicates expectations, aspirations, and intentions, but falls short of authorization. Indicative planning may include economic forecasts, helping the private decision-makers, policies favorable to the private sector, ways of raising money and recruiting personnel, and a list of proposed public expenditures to be included in the annual budget.
In most LDCs, the private sector, comprised, at least, of most of agriculture, is larger than the public sector. Planners may set targets for production, employment, investment, exports, and imports for the private sector but usually have no binding policies to affect the target. Beyond forecasting, the usefulness of target figures for the private sector depends on the reliability of data, the persuasiveness of the planning process, and policy control over the private sector. Planners can be helpful to the private sector by providing documents showing how to improve data collection, raise revenue, recruit personnel, and select and implement projects (Lewis).
Planning in a country with poor economic data should concentrate on organizing an effective census bureau and department of statistics, hiring practical field investigators and data analysts, and taking periodic economic surveys, all important for the private sector. Sound development planning in a private sector-dominated economy requires information on national income, population, investment, saving, consumption, government expenditure, taxes, exports, imports, balance of payments, and performance of major industries and sectors, as well as their interrelationships.
Private sector planning means government trying to get people to do what they would otherwise not do – invest more in equipment or improve their job skills, change jobs, switch from one crop to another, adopt new technologies, and so on.
Some policies for the private sector might include the following:
1. investigating development potential through scientific and market research, and natural resources surveys;
2. providing adequate infrastructure (water, power, transport, and communication) for public and private agencies;
3. providing the necessary skills through general education and specialized training;
4. improving the legal framework related to land tenure, corporations, commercial transactions, and other economic activities;
5. creating markets, including commodity markets, security exchanges, banks, credit facilities, and insurance companies;
6. seeking out and assisting entrepreneurs;
7. promoting better resource utilization through inducements and controls;
8. promoting private and public saving; and
9.Reducing monopolies and oligopolies (Lewis 1966).
18. Since the fall of communism in 1989–91, is there any role for governmental planning?
Answer: Most people want to control and plan their economic future. The complexity of contemporary technology and the long time between project conception and completion require planning, either by private firms or government (Galbraith). Rajan and Zingales (2003) argue that “markets cannot flourish without the very visible hand of government, which is needed to set up and maintain the infrastructure that enables participants to trade freely and with confidence.”
Many growth-enhancing activities in a capitalist economy require coordinated policy, frequently at the national level. Development planning is the government’s use of coordinated policies to achieve national economic objectives, such as reduced poverty or accelerated economic growth. A plan encompasses programs such as antipoverty programs, family planning, agricultural research and extension, employment policies, education, local technology, savings, investment project analysis, monetary and fiscal policies, entrepreneurial development programs, and international trade and capital flows – programs that capitalist economies require. Planning involves surveying the existing economic situation, setting economic goals, devising economic policies and public expenditures consistent with these goals, developing the administrative capability to implement policies, and (where still feasible) adjusting approaches and programs in response to ongoing evaluation.
Planning takes place in capitalist LDCs. Capitalist countries plan in order to correct for externalities, redistribute income, produce public goods (for example, education, police, and fire protection), provide infrastructure and research for directly productive sectors, encourage investment, supply a legal and social framework for markets, maintain competition, compensate for market failure, and stabilize employment and prices
Government needs to produce the public or collective goods, schools, defense, sewage disposal, and police and fire protection that the market fails to produce.
Most mixed or capitalist developing countries are limited to an indicative plan, which indicates expectations, aspirations, and intentions, but falls short of authorization. Indicative planning may include economic forecasts, helping private decisionmakers, policies favorable to the private sector, ways of raising money and recruiting personnel, and a list of proposed public expenditures – usually not authorized by the plan, but by the annual budget.
See also P. 673 (including the last paragraph with the nine listed points to the answer to questions number 16 and 17).
Chapter 19:
1. Indicate and discuss the major World Bank and IMF programs for ameliorating LDC external equilibria and debt problems. Analyze the effectiveness of World Bank and IMF approaches to the LDC external crisis. What changed roles, if any, would you recommend for the World Bank and IMF in attaining LDC adjustment and reducing the LDC debt crisis?
2. Discuss and evaluate the views of the critics of World Bank and IMF approaches to LDC adjustment.
Answer: The World Bank has several programs to assist LDCs with debt and external equilibria such as (1) an interest subsidy account (a "third window") for discount loans for poorest countries facing oil price increases, (2) structural adjustment loans, and (3) Special Program of Assistance in 1983 to ease the debt crisis. Although these programs have their critics, after 1987 they provided debt relief, including cancellation of debt from aid and concessional rescheduling for commercial debt from creditor governments. The IMF served as lender of last resort for countries with balance of payments problems. Even though the quantitative significance of IMF loans for LDC external deficits has been small, the seal of approval of the IMF is required before the World Bank, regional development banks, bilateral and multilateral lenders, and commercial banks provide funds.
Critics from LDCs charge that the IMF presumes that international payments problems can be solved only by reducing social programs, cutting subsidies, and depreciating currency. According to the Brandt report, the IMF’s insistence on drastic measures in short time periods imposes unnecessary burdens on low-income countries that not only reduce basic-needs attainment but also occasionally lead to “IMF riots” and the downfall of governments. These critics prefer that the IMF concentrate on results rather than means (Independent Commission on International Development Issues 1980; Mills 1989).
Despite a decline in funds from the 1970s to the 1980s, the IMF maintained or even increased its leverage for enforcing conditions on borrowers in the 1980s. For during the 1980s and early 1990s, World Bank loans consolidated conditions set by the IMF, rather than setting conditions based on an independent analysis. The IMF became gatekeeper and watchdog for the international financial system, as IMF standby approval served as a necessary condition for loans or aid by others. Moreover, the World Bank led donor coordination between DCs and the Bank and Fund, increasing their external leverage and reducing bilateral donors’ and other international agencies’ independent assessment of the IMF’s insistence on orthodox (often stringent) stabilization policies.
Many LDC critics feel the IMF focuses only on demand while ignoring productive capacity and long-term structural change. These critics argue that the emphasis of the IMF on austerity programs – contractionary monetary and fiscal policies – is overly costly. Additionally, these governments object to the Fund’s market ideology and neglect of external determinants of stagnation and instability. Moreover, IMF austerity curtails programs to reduce poverty and stimulate long-run development. Yet although the IMF has perceived its role as providing international monetary stability and liquidity, not development, the concessional component of its structural adjustment loans, which began in 1986, emphasized development more. However, in 1988, the seven largest Latin American countries contended that “the conditionality of adjustment programs, sector lending, and restructuring agreements often entails measures that are inadequate and contradictory, making the economic policies more difficult in an extremely harsh economic climate” (IMF Survey, 1988).
Beginning in the 1950s, structural economists from the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) criticized IMF orthodox premises that external disequilibrium was short-term, generated by excess demand, requiring primarily contractionary monetary and fiscal policies and currency devaluation. ECLA economists emphasized the necessity for long-run institutional and structural economic change – accelerating the growth of export earnings, improving the external terms of trade, increasing the supply elasticity of food output through land reform, reducing income inequality, and expanding the industrial sector and antimonopoly measures before shorter-run financial and exchange-rate policies would be effective.
The newer structuralist critique of the 1980s and 1990s also stresses the long-run transformation of the economy. Critics viewed the Latin American payments crisis as resulting from a long-term structural crisis in export supply and wanted IMF programs to stress these long-run changes and avoid austerity programs (Sutton; Sharpley; de Oliveira Campos).
To avoid heavy social costs, the UNICEF urges adjustment with a human face, including IMF and World Bank adjustment programs emphasizing the restoration of LDC growth while protecting the most vulnerable groups, as well as growth-oriented adjustment, such as expansionist monetary and fiscal policies and World Bank/IMF loans sufficient to avoid a depressed economy. According to UNICEF, the empowerment and participation of vulnerable groups – the landless, the urban poor, and women – are essential to improve policies and protect these groups and children, especially the undernourished (Cornia, Jolly, and Stewart; Stewart).
In its criticisms of World Bank and IMF adjustment programs, the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) (1989) offered an African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programs for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation (AAF-SAP), in 1989. Like the structuralists, ECA rejected the orthodox prescription for Africa’s poorly structured economies. Like UNICEF, ECA complained that the consequences of structural adjustment programs are: declining per capita income and real wages, rising unemployment, deterioration in the level of social services from cuts in social spending, falling educational and training standards, rising malnutrition and health problems; and rising poverty levels and income inequalities. Many African governments have cut social expenditures such as education and health to pay debt service and reduce budget deficits. From the point of view of long-term development, the reduction in spending on education and social spending from stabilization and structural adjustment has reversed investment in human capital. Indeed, ECA Executive SecretaryAdedeji (1989) argued that structural adjustment “has produced little enduring poverty alleviation and certain [of its] policies have worked against the poor.”
The ECA objected to the World Bank’s and IMF’s adjustment programs emphasizing deregulating prices, devaluing domestic currency, liberalizing trade and payments, promoting domestic savings, restricting money supply, reducing government spending, and privatizing production. These programs, ECA argued, fail in economies like those of Africa with a fragile and rigid production structure not responsive to market forces.
The ECA (1989) called for a holistic alternative to failed Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs, with an emphasis on increased growth and long-run capacity to adjust. Yet the ECA’s list of policy instruments was short on specifics.
3. Discuss the optimal sequence of adjustment and reforms by LDCs facing external crises. Is this sequence consistent with orthodox strategies advocated by the World Bank and IMF?
Answer: Suggested reform sequence is (1) liberalizing imports of critical capital and other inputs, (2) devaluing domestic currency to a competitive level, (3) promoting exports through liberalizing commodity markets, subsidies, and other schemes, (4) allocating foreign exchange for maintaining and repairing infrastructure for production increases, (5) removing controls on internal interest rates to achieve positive real rates, (6) reducing public-sector deficits to eliminate reliance on foreign loans, (7) liberalizing other imports, rationalizing the tariff structure, and (8) abandoning external capital-account controls. Moreover, recipients should implement IMF demand-reducing programs before the World Bank’s supply-increasing ones. If countries begin with supply reforms that take a longer time, the lack of demand restraint will contribute to inflation and an unmanageable current-account deficit. Still, adjustment loan recipients also need to avoid excessive initial demand restraint that depresses the economy; simultaneous devaluation, as in stage 2, could avoid this contractionary effect (Mosley, Harrigan, and Toye 1991; FAO 1991). Critics argue that most IMF and World Bank recommendations do not pay attention to the optimal sequence of reforms, thus leading to inconsistencies and contradictions.
4. Discuss the concepts of internal and external balances, and the adjustments LDCs should make to attain both balances.
Answer: LDCs need to attain both balances. The internal balance refers to full employment and price stability and the external balance refers to exports equaling imports. Countries facing a persistent external deficit can (1) borrow overseas without changing economic policies, (2) increase trade restrictions and exchange controls, which is against the rules of the international trading system, or (3) undertake contractionary monetary and fiscal policies, which sacrifice internal goals.
5. Under what conditions, if any, would you advise LDCs to expand the share of their state-owned sector? Under what conditions, if any, would you advise LDCs to reduce SOEs?
Answer: Not all SOEs operate poorly. Indeed state enterprises are likely to perform well with competition; no investment licensing; no price, entry, nor exit controls; liberal trade policies; and substantial managerial autonomy and acountability. Under these conditions, expanding SOEs might be warranted, especially when they serve some social purpose, such as quality control or avoidance of an oligopolistic business elite. The case for reducing SOEs is based on the adverse effect of an “overextended” public sector on growth.
Thus whether to expand or reduce will depend upon the specific case. In cases where social profitability exceeds financial profitability, the case can be made for expanding. Efficiency and competition should be considerations in both instances.
6.Compare the performance of private and public sectors in LDCs.
Answer: Studies show that the efficiency of public and private enterprises is comparable, given a certain size firm with the key factor being how the firm is managed. Millward, however, contends that the variation in technical efficiency from best- to worst-practice firms is greater among government firms than private firms. Furthermore, public enterprises are mot likely than Furthermore, public enterprises are more likely than private enterprises to choose an excessive scale of operations. Public firms have easier access to state financing to mute bankruptcy and more pressure to provide jobs and contracts to clients and relatives than private enterprises. In sub-Saharan Africa, corruption, mismanagement, rent seeking, and limited economic infrastructure contributed to overstaffing, widespread losses, and low productivity,
7. Should the state use public enterprises to redistribute income?
Answer: In LDCs, public enterprises rarely redistributed income to lower income persons. For example, in low-income countries, a subsidy to a electricity firm to expand electricity use usually subsidizes people who have above-average incomes. A public enterprise should pay for itself in the long run unless it serves some social purpose, such as redistributing income to lower-income recipients. However, frequently political elites and their allies are threatened by programs that redistribute income to the dispossessed.
In many LDCs, political leaders gain advantage from using public enterprises to intervene in the market to improve prices and incomes of urban classes relative to farmers. State intervention in the market may be an instrument of political control and assistance.The World Bank’s Berg report criticizes African states for keeping farm prices far below market prices, dampening farm producer incentives, using marketing boards to transfer peasant savings to large industry, and setting exchange rates that discourage exports and import substitutes (domestic production replacing imports).
In a predatory state, the ruling elite and their clients use their positions and access to resource to plunder the economy rather than distributing resources for the common good. In this type of state, powerful people use funds from public enterprises for systematic corruption, from petty survival venality at the lower echelons of government to kleptocracy (thievery) at the top.
Still there may be cases where public enterprises in populist LDCs can be used to redistribute income, such as rice distribution to low-income persons or a bank lending to peer borrowing groups of poor women.
8. What can LDCs do to improve the performance of their private sector?
. Answer: The private sector needs state support of institutional infrastructure (like corporate governance) to have a positive effect on growth (Stiglitz). The state also needs to create market incentives, deregulate state controls, and spur a class able and willing to respond by innovating, bearing risk, and mobilizing capital, without restricting minorities and opposition groups.
When privatizing, government may need to proceed slowly to avoid a highly concentrated business elite being created from newly privatized firms falling into a few hands, as was true during indigenization in Africa and the transition in Russia.
Finally, private enterprises perform better with competition; no investment licensing; no price, entry, nor exit controls; and liberal trade policies.
9. What is privatization? How successful have attempts at privatization in LDCs been? What are some of the pitfalls of privatization?
Answer: Privatization refers to a range of policies (1) changing at least part of an enterprise's ownership from public to the private sector, (2) liberalization of entry into activities previously restricted to the public sector, and (3) franchising or contracting public services or leasing public assets to the private sector. There are both cases of success as well as failure. Forcing competition, creating market incentives and deregulating state controls presupposes a class able and willing to respond by innovating, bearing risk, and mobilizing capital.
Pitfalls: see pp. 698-699.
10.Assess the efficacy of MNC-SOE joint ventures in LDCs.
Answer: SOE-MNC joint ventures in LDCs at best enabled the LDC government to better protect its national interest while affording the MNCs a reduced political risk. In many cases there was little improvement especially in Africa. Multinational corporate ownership was replaced by MNC-state joint enterprises, which enriched private middlemen and women and enlarged the patronage base for state officials, but did little to develop administrative and technological skills for subsequent industrialization.
11.Should LDCs put more emphasis on privatization or socialization, or should they continue the status quo?
Answer: Each LDC needs to address the issue on its own merits. Pp. 661-665 provides a basis for discussing the relative merits of the market (privatization) vs. socialization. Expanding socialization depends on whether the expansion results in social profitability exceeding financial profitability. Efficiency and competition are major considerations. With privatization, government may want to proceed slowly to avoid a highly concentrated business elite being created from newly privatized firms falling into a few hands thus limiting oligopolistic situations.
12. What were the main reasons for the collapse of state socialism in the Soviet Union?
Answer: The reasons for this collapse are many: distorted incentives and price signals, the party and state monopoly of the nomenklatura, the disincentives for technological innovation, the collapse of trade among communist economies, inconsistencies between decontrol of economic activity and Gorbachev’s effort at tightening discipline, incentives to misreport information, dominance of industries by a monopoly enterprise, administrative not scarcity prices, the lack of market institutions, a rigid rouble exchange rate that quickly became overvalued, consumer sectors as buffers under planning, distortions from inflation, wildly negative real interest rates, the lack of financial penalties for enterprise failure (a “soft budget constraint”), the torn "safety net," the inability to collect taxes, lack of market institutions, the neglect of services, the weight of the military-industrial complex, and widespread environmental degradation.
13. Barthlomiej Kaminski indicates that state socialism is nonreformable. Evaluate this contention.
Answer: State socialism, such as that in the Soviet Union, after years of suppression of interest and voice, had little capacity for adaptation, redesign, or self-correction. State socialism is nonreformable, as direct controls were essential for the party and state to defend its privileged position. Party officials and apparatchiks opposed, and even sabotaged, reform because it reduced their power and their ability to solicit kickbacks and other benefits. The large number of officials operating in the black market opposed the effect of market reform, which reduced the black market and officials’ incomes and profits. The party monopolized policy initiatives, channeling special interests into association with the party.
14. Evaluate the effectiveness of the “shock therapy”/“big bang” approach and the alternative approach. #14, #15, & #16 can be considered together.
15. Jeffrey Sachs contends: “I blame Russia’s problems on communist ineptitude and corruption, the utter degradation of the old administrative structure, and the thoughtless reaction of the West to the growing financial plight of the republics.” Discuss and evaluate this view. [Sachs' position is that shock therapy was never carried out because of little international support.]
16. The economist Thomas E. Weisskopf states: “The outlook for revitalization of Russia’s economy is bleak. Only an alternative to shock therapy can assure that the Russian economy will be successfully restructured and revitalized. . . . It would . . . require a much larger role for government in shaping the social and economic environment than radical free marketeers are willing to contemplate. Such an alternative approach would be more likely to obtain democratic support than shock therapy and therefore the Russian government would be more likely to implement it successfully.” Discuss and evaluate this view. [Weisskopf, who holds views similar to Wachtel and Poznanski, arguing that only a gradual approach to institutional change was tolerable to the Soviet people, is on the opposite side of Sachs.]
Answer to #15, #16, & #17: Sachs (1993), an advisor to the governments of Solidarity leader Lech Walesa in Poland and later Boris Yeltsin in Russia in their transitions to the market, argues in favor of “shock therapy,” an abrupt transition to adjustment and the market. Critic Popov (2001) contends that shock therapists put a heavy emphasis on “introducing the whole reform package at once to ensure that it became too late and too costly to reverse the reforms.” Indeed Reddaway and Glinski accuse President Boris Yeltsin, his domestic advisers, U.S. government officials and scholars, and “functionaries of the IMF” of promoting shock therapy in late 1991 as part of a “Russian historical pattern of “revolutions from above.” In doing so, they resisted any “civic democratic” opposition to the encrusted Soviet party and state leadership, the nomenklatura.
Wachtel (1992), an evolutionist who emphasizes the gradual building of institutions, contends that shock therapy downplays the creation of a small-scale private sector, small independent banks, market reforms in agriculture, and funds for a “safety net” for social programs and full employment for the population. Poznanski (1996), who stresses that institutions form at a relatively slow pace, contends that attempts to radically remake institutions are potentially destabilizing and costly. Replacing an established institution with an untested project is dangerous. Indeed, by the mid-1990s, electorates in Poland, Russia, and Hungary, disillusioned with abrupt market reforms, voted the former Communist Party, often refashioned as social democrats or democratic socialists, to a parliamentary plurality in place of the party of economic reform.
In response to critics, Sachs (1994) argues correctly that production in the Soviet Union was in decline, inflation rates were surging, and the black-market value of the ruble was falling in the immediate years before President Yeltsin’s transitional government came into power in late 1991. Moreover, Sachs charges that United States and IMF aid to Russia was disbursed too slowly, and that shock therapy could not have failed because it was never tried.
Popov (1996) describes Russian reform as inconsistent shock therapy. Russian reformers introduced a Polish-type shock therapy by deregulating prices instantly in January 1992, but failed in macroeconomic stabilization, eliminating subsidies, and shutting down loss-making enterprises. The pressure of interest groups and the lack of consensus between center and regions, between the parliament and government, and within the government itself, was at the heart of the failure of shock therapy. Russia had little choice but to tolerate a high rate of inflation in the early 1990s, inflation that reflected the lack of political consensus (Popov 1996). But this inflation was costly for those on fixed income, as a Ukraine woman indicated: “When I retired, I had 20,000 rubles in my savings account. . . . That money is now not enough for bread and water” (World Bank 2001i:53).
17. Discuss China’s urban reform, agricultural reform, and other reforms after 1978–79, including some of the problems associated with the reforms and the impact that the reforms had on economic performance.
Answer: After the death of Mao Zedong, founding member of the Chinese Communist Party, in 1976, Deng Xiaoping and other leaders recognized the necessity for economic reform to reduce waste and imbalances.
In agricultural reforms beginning in 1979, China decontrolled (and increased) prices for farm commodities, virtually eliminated their compulsory deliveries to the state, reduced multitiered pricing, relaxed interregional farm trade restrictions, encouraged rural markets, allowed direct sales of farm goods to urban consumers, and decollectivized agriculture, instituting individual household management of farm plots under long-term contracts with collectives and allowing farmers to choose cropping patterns and nonfarm activities. The household responsibility system (HRS) shifted production responsibility from a production team, the size of a village, to a household. From 1977 to 1984, China’s growth in food output per capita, 4.6 percent yearly, was even outstripped by its growth in oilseed, livestock, and cotton output. These remarkable gains were achieved without increased farm inputs except for chemical fertilizer.
Technical efficiency in Chinese agriculture increased from 1978 to 1984, becoming the major source of growth. Decollectivization, the household responsibility system, the increased link of reward to output, and modest price decontrol during the reform period increased resource productivity. Work monitoring and incentives improved, agriculture was diversified, and families allocated more labor to highly remunerative noncrop (or even nonagricultural) activities.
After 1984, agricultural growth decelerated from exhaustion of many of the gains from reform, government’s reduction of massive subsidies, profitable opportunities in rural off-farm enterprises, the fragmentation of farm plots, and the underdevelopment of rural banking. Still agricultural productivity grew rapidly in the 1990s.
Globalization and structural shifts with economic growth are accelerating the migration of surplus farm labor to urban areas, where China has a comparative advantage. A major effect of liberalization is internal adjustment costs as farmers face competition from other regions (OECD).
In the 1980s, township and village enterprises (TVEs) organized as cooperatives, produced 60–70 percent of rural output. TVEs enjoyed cheap labor (with no lifetime employment guarantees), but also startup capital from the collective accumulation and credit cooperation, and free land. Their cheap products catered to the market, giving TVEs advantage over other sectors. In an era in which the private sector had not yet been accepted ideologically and politically, and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) had not yet been reformed, TVEs, with their flexibility, could undertake contracts or organized as joint-stock cooperatives or companies, without bearing a government burden. TVE production helped correct price distortions and pushed reform forward (Lin, Cai, and Li), outstripping state-owned enterprises in productivity (Jefferson). TVEs and urban collective enterprises comprised a growing share of industrial output, 39 percent in 1996. –TVEs, the primary form, and urban – comprised 39 percent of industrial output, a growing share since 1985 (Jefferson and Rawski 1999b:27). TVEs also shared their surpluses with workers.
Reform also included small entrepreneurial activity, the individual economy. One trigger to the individual sector was the urban unemployment caused by youths sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) returning to cities. Individual entrepreneurs opened small restaurants, set up repair shops and other retail outlets, or became pedicab operators. Furthermore, farmers coming to the city to sell their produce expanded the quantity and improved the quality of urban services. Overall, China’s privately self-employed in cities and towns grew from 150,000 in 1978 to roughly 5–10 million in 1988. In 1996, individual-owned firms accounted for more than 80 percent of the eight million enterprises in China, but less than 16 percent of industrial output (Jefferson and Rawski 1999).
State-owned enterprises (SOEs) rather than private firms are the keys to China’s urban reforms. After reforms were first introduced in the late 1970s, urban reforms entailed built-in contradictions, as market forces threatened the power and expertise of bureaucrats, who were trained to run a Soviet-style command system. The reform instituted a management responsibility system, in which an enterprise manager’s task was to be carefully defined and performance was to determine managers’ and workers’ pay. Reforms were to give enterprise management considerable autonomy to choose suppliers, hire and fire labor, set prices, raise capital, and contract with foreigners. Management was supposed to have responsibility for the success or failure of the enterprise. The initiative and decisions were to be centered in producing units rather than in government. Yet as of the mid-1980s, only a fraction of managers of industrial enterprises opted for the responsibility system.
Economists identify several problems with China’s industrial reform. Rewarding producers with higher pay for higher productivity requires an increase in consumer goods, especially food. And with reduced investment, growth must rely on technical innovation and increased efficiency. Moreover, in China’s central planning system, the planning commission and the People’s Bank made most decisions, a power that could not be taken away at one stroke. The planning commission set targets on an annual basis for the amount of output required in each industry and the inputs that would be required to achieve that output. The planners conveyed these targets to the planning commissions and eventually to individual enterprises, which recommended changes based on local conditions. However, in practice, large SOEs were managed in the first 10 years after Mao very much like they were during the Maoist period. Industrial reforms did not have much effect on this sector. Initially, when the reform decentralized decision making, it merely replaced central restrictions with local and regional restrictions (Perkins; Hardt and Kaufman).
Another major problem was fragmented administrative control, numerous overlapping authorities for project approval, and multiple levels of controls at different levels of government. In 1983, the Qingdao Forging Machinery Plant, a state enterprise, was responsible to the national Ministry of the Machine Industry, the city materials board, and the county for material supplies, to the municipal machine industry office for plant production, to the county planning agency for output value, to relevant county agencies for supplies from the plant, to two separate county agencies for personnel, and to the county committee for party matters, which was immersed in implementing policies (Guangliang).
Thus, planning was not integrated or coherent, and enterprises were not treated consistently concerning targets. Investment decisions were bureaucratized and politicized. Moreover, administrative agencies lacked enough information about enterprises and commodities to make good decisions. Despite the management responsibility system, in practice management was still centralized and rigid, with firm managers having limited control over performance. Enterprise managers had few incentives, because the state gave managers production plans and designated product recipients, so there was little room for initiative or innovation. The manager whose only skill was saving money was of little use in achieving success, because he or she could always borrow money cheaply from the People’s Bank or take funds from the enterprise’s net income.
The key to getting enterprise managers to respond to market signals was for them to pay more attention to making profits rather than simply expanding output. Managers concentrated on profits when they were able to keep a larger and more predictable portion of them and use them for bonuses for them and their workers, rather than turning profits over to the state budget (Perkins 1986). But profits can only guide enterprise behavior efficiently if they are determined by prices reflecting true relative economic scarcity, rather than incorrectly, as in China, just after 1970. For example, wrong market signals meant that enterprise managers tried to purchase vast imports in excess of the foreign exchange available.
For the market to have meaning, enterprises must be able to buy productive inputs and sell products on the market. But prices usually did not show where resources could best be put to use, thus providing false signals to enterprises. In many instances, enterprises were still not allowed to retain profits for capital; indeed, much capital was still allocated administratively rather than by interest payment.
For some time after 1979, prices were arbitrary and distorted and changed only incrementally throughout the system. Distorted prices meant that profits were not linked to supply and demand. Furthermore, the Chinese restricted entry and exit of firms, lacking the benefit of creative destruction. In addition, for increasing market forces to result in higher levels of efficiency, enterprises must compete with each other rather than have monopoly control of particular markets. Moreover, enterprise managers had little control over paying or hiring labor and little in firing unproductive workers. Factor prices were highly distorted.
During the early period of reform, firms had a soft budget constraint. Although management and worker bonuses were nominally linked to profits and other targets, virtually no enterprise lost bonuses for not meeting targets, since firms were able to negotiate during the output year to reduce quotas. Enterprise managers bargained for profit targets, which sometimes were changed retroactively. Furthermore, banks used profits of successful firms to infuse with life failing firms, which received a substantial share of the budget in the 1980s.
Chinese industry in the first 10 years of the reform still suffered from the classic Soviet planning approach – using the preceding year’s achievement as the minimum target for the current year, known by the Chinese as “whipping the fast ox.” Near the end of the year, enterprises overfulfilling quotas deliberately slowed down operations in order not to increase targets too much for the subsequent year. Moreover, most enterprises did not receive their quotas until after the beginning of the planning year. Because of dependence on administrative decisions and the cooperation of other firms in receiving inputs, enterprises kept excessive levels of inventory.
As the state set few variety, grade, or style targets, the enterprise had little incentive to produce the variety of goods demanded by the market. Price incentives also were lacking for quality improvement.
By the late 1980s and 1990s, partial reform increased the promarket sentiments of many planners and enterprise managers, who saw how smaller and private enterprises took advantage of opportunities offered by the market (Jefferson and Rawski). At the same time, the emergence of a buyers’ market, from increases in the supply of light industry and consumer goods, increased incentives to improve industrial performance and quality (Tidrick 1987).
A key management reform, gradually implemented in the 1980s, was to expand the right of the firm to an increasing share of residual profits. The government reduced the number of industrial products subject to compulsory planning from 131 in 1980 to 14 in 1988, while also reducing fixed prices on foodstuffs and inputs (Lichtenstein 1991), thus improving microeconomic allocation efficiency. Furthermore, a growing number of SOEs have reorganized themselves into joint stock companies, intensifying competitive pressures on those remaining in the state sector.
Contract responsibility enables most firms to retain all or a progressively increasing share of above-quota profits. In the 1990s and early years of the 21st century, directors and managers increased their decisionmaking authority, less constrained by state interference. The association of increased profits and retained earnings, on the one hand, with wages and bonuses, served as an incentive for the firm to increase productivity. The result of increased labor incentives, labor market reforms and greater enterprise autonomy was an explosive increase in labor productivity from 1978 to 1996, especially in the 1990s. (Jefferson and Singh).
Problems remain. Profit retention rates, and thus incentives, for SOEs vary substantially. SOEs’ total factor productivity is only half that of the private and TVE sectors. Although prices are increasingly determined by enterprise discretion, where there is state price control, managers widely engage in rent seeking activities (ibid.)
Many of China’s SOEs serve the function of “company town,” thus being burdened with social service, pension, unemployment insurance, health, education, and other welfare expenses (Jefferson and Rawski 1999). Moreover, Chinese banks have “built up a mountain of non-performing loans (NPLs) by lavishing cash on value-destroying state firms while starving deserving private borrowers.” (Economist 2004). A clear assignment of property rights would improve monitoring and curtailing of rent-seeking behavior, probably necessitating a change in ownership rights (Jefferson, Mai, and Zhao 1999:111).
Many economists express optimism that over the years, private enterprises, which have bought shares of SOEs, and collective enterprises will dominate the loss-ridden public enterprises. Indeed, the share of industrial output by SOEs fell from 80 percent in 1978 to 28 percent in 1996 (Jefferson and Singh). Still, SOEs account for a disproportional percentage of urban employment, bank loans, and production of heavy industry, although most lose money (Jefferson and Singh). However, the support for reform is so pervasive in China that its rulers are not likely to reverse the reforms.
China’s banks, “as appendages of government, . . . are massive, bureaucratic and imbedded with an intensely political culture,” in which bank managers are rewarded on party loyalty. SOEs and their reporting are of poor quality. Years of politically motivated lending increased bank bad debts to 145 percent of GDP (Economist 2004). As China moves to international convertibility of its currency, banks will need reform.
China moved from national self-sufficiency during the Mao period to incentives to attract foreign direct investment in the 1980s.with preferential tax rates, reduced tariffs, flexible labor and wage policies, more modern infrastructure, and less bureaucracy than elsewhere in China. In 2001, $47 billion of $209 billion FDI flows to LDCs flowed to China (also $24 billion to Hong Kong, China) (UNCTAD 2003). China has overtaken the United States as the top ranking country in FDI confidence (World Bank 2003). Taiwanese firms in China are responsible for 40 percent of China’s exports, and Most Hong Kong and Chinese overseas investors a large share of the rest.
China’s growth performance, partly a result of decentralization and market reforms, has been the fastest in the world from the 1980s to the present. Most economists expect continuing fast growth for the forseeable, although a scenario similar to the end of Japan’s miracle could contribute to decelerating growth in China. China, like Japan, not only faces massive bad debts owed to banks but also may have exhausted gains from internal and external economies of scale, learning by doing, and gains from the “advantages of backwardness,” adopting technology cheaply from more advanced economies. An unknown includes the ability of China to respond to inequality, worker and peasant discontent, and demands for national and ethnic self-determination.
18.Do you agree with economists who argue that Chinese economic strategies are characterized by continuity and evolution, not abrupt change, especially when compared to those in Russia and other former communist countries undertaking reforms in the 1990s?
Answer: Yes, unlike Russia in the 1990s, China’s post-Maoist leadershp rejected “shock therapy,” so that reforms in China proceeded step by step, or “touching stones while walking across a river.” China did not destroy the old state apparatus while undertaking reform, as Russia did. Moreover, unlike Russia, China decontrolled prices, marketized, and privatized where they had competitive sectors, such as agriculture but maintained controlled prices where they had monopolistic and oligopolistic sectors, as in industry.
In agriculture, China decollectivized much more successfully than Russia, harking back to the New Economic Policy of 1961-1965. In contrast, Russia in the 1990s had no prior experience with liberalization and markets. China’s industrial policy, 1979-2005, evolved more gradually than Russia’s in the 1990s. Although China suffered from its share of corruption, it has resisted the asset stripping and favorable buyouts of state industrial enterprises for apparatchiks under the guise of privatization that Russia has faced.
19.Discuss the problems China has had with the reform of its SOEs.
Answer: State-owned enterprises (SOEs) rather than private firms are the keys to China’s urban reforms. After reforms were first introduced in the late 1970s, urban reforms entailed built-in contradictions, as market forces threatened the power and expertise of bureaucrats, who were trained to run a Soviet-style command system. The reform instituted a management responsibility system, in which an enterprise manager’s task was to be carefully defined and performance was to determine managers’ and workers’ pay. Reforms were to give enterprise management considerable autonomy to choose suppliers, hire and fire labor, set prices, raise capital, and contract with foreigners. Management was supposed to have responsibility for the success or failure of the enterprise. The initiative and decisions were to be centered in producing units rather than in government. Yet as of the mid-1980s, only a fraction of managers of industrial enterprises opted for the responsibility system.
Economists identify several problems with China’s industrial reform. Rewarding producers with higher pay for higher productivity requires an increase in consumer goods, especially food. And with reduced investment, growth must rely on technical innovation and increased efficiency. Moreover, in China’s central planning system, the planning commission and the People’s Bank made most decisions, a power that could not be taken away at one stroke. The planning commission set targets on an annual basis for the amount of output required in each industry and the inputs that would be required to achieve that output. The planners conveyed these targets to the planning commissions and eventually to individual enterprises, which recommended changes based on local conditions. However, in practice, large SOEs were managed in the first 10 years after Mao very much like they were during the Maoist period. Industrial reforms did not have much effect on this sector. Initially, when the reform decentralized decision making, it merely replaced central restrictions with local and regional restrictions (Perkins; Hardt and Kaufman).
Another major problem was fragmented administrative control, numerous overlapping authorities for project approval, and multiple levels of controls at different levels of government. In 1983, the Qingdao Forging Machinery Plant, a state enterprise, was responsible to the national Ministry of the Machine Industry, the city materials board, and the county for material supplies, to the municipal machine industry office for plant production, to the county planning agency for output value, to relevant county agencies for supplies from the plant, to two separate county agencies for personnel, and to the county committee for party matters, which was immersed in implementing policies (Guangliang).
Thus, planning was not integrated or coherent, and enterprises were not treated consistently concerning targets. Investment decisions were bureaucratized and politicized. Moreover, administrative agencies lacked enough information about enterprises and commodities to make good decisions. Despite the management responsibility system, in practice management was still centralized and rigid, with firm managers having limited control over performance. Enterprise managers had few incentives, because the state gave managers production plans and designated product recipients, so there was little room for initiative or innovation. The manager whose only skill was saving money was of little use in achieving success, because he or she could always borrow money cheaply from the People’s Bank or take funds from the enterprise’s net income.
The key to getting enterprise managers to respond to market signals was for them to pay more attention to making profits rather than simply expanding output. Managers concentrated on profits when they were able to keep a larger and more predictable portion of them and use them for bonuses for them and their workers, rather than turning profits over to the state budget (Perkins 1986). But profits can only guide enterprise behavior efficiently if they are determined by prices reflecting true relative economic scarcity, rather than incorrectly, as in China, just after 1970. For example, wrong market signals meant that enterprise managers tried to purchase vast imports in excess of the foreign exchange available.
For the market to have meaning, enterprises must be able to buy productive inputs and sell products on the market. But prices usually did not show where resources could best be put to use, thus providing false signals to enterprises. In many instances, enterprises were still not allowed to retain profits for capital; indeed, much capital was still allocated administratively rather than by interest payment.
For some time after 1979, prices were arbitrary and distorted and changed only incrementally throughout the system. Distorted prices meant that profits were not linked to supply and demand. Furthermore, the Chinese restricted entry and exit of firms, lacking the benefit of creative destruction. In addition, for increasing market forces to result in higher levels of efficiency, enterprises must compete with each other rather than have monopoly control of particular markets. Moreover, enterprise managers had little control over paying or hiring labor and little in firing unproductive workers. Factor prices were highly distorted.
During the early period of reform, firms had a soft budget constraint. Although management and worker bonuses were nominally linked to profits and other targets, virtually no enterprise lost bonuses for not meeting targets, since firms were able to negotiate during the output year to reduce quotas. Enterprise managers bargained for profit targets, which sometimes were changed retroactively. Furthermore, banks used profits of successful firms to infuse with life failing firms, which received a substantial share of the budget in the 1980s.
Chinese industry in the first 10 years of the reform still suffered from the classic Soviet planning approach – using the preceding year’s achievement as the minimum target for the current year, known by the Chinese as “whipping the fast ox.” Near the end of the year, enterprises overfulfilling quotas deliberately slowed down operations in order not to increase targets too much for the subsequent year. Moreover, most enterprises did not receive their quotas until after the beginning of the planning year. Because of dependence on administrative decisions and the cooperation of other firms in receiving inputs, enterprises kept excessive levels of inventory.
As the state set few variety, grade, or style targets, the enterprise had little incentive to produce the variety of goods demanded by the market. Price incentives also were lacking for quality improvement.
By the late 1980s and 1990s, partial reform increased the promarket sentiments of many planners and enterprise managers, who saw how smaller and private enterprises took advantage of opportunities offered by the market (Jefferson and Rawski). At the same time, the emergence of a buyers’ market, from increases in the supply of light industry and consumer goods, increased incentives to improve industrial performance and quality (Tidrick 1987).
A key management reform, gradually implemented in the 1980s, was to expand the right of the firm to an increasing share of residual profits. The government reduced the number of industrial products subject to compulsory planning from 131 in 1980 to 14 in 1988, while also reducing fixed prices on foodstuffs and inputs (Lichtenstein 1991), thus improving microeconomic allocation efficiency. Furthermore, a growing number of SOEs have reorganized themselves into joint stock companies, intensifying competitive pressures on those remaining in the state sector.
Contract responsibility enables most firms to retain all or a progressively increasing share of above-quota profits. In the 1990s and early years of the 21st century, directors and managers increased their decisionmaking authority, less constrained by state interference. The association of increased profits and retained earnings, on the one hand, with wages and bonuses, served as an incentive for the firm to increase productivity. The result of increased labor incentives, labor market reforms and greater enterprise autonomy was an explosive increase in labor productivity from 1978 to 1996, especially in the 1990s. (Jefferson and Singh).
Problems remain. Profit retention rates, and thus incentives, for SOEs vary substantially. SOEs’ total factor productivity is only half that of the private and TVE sectors. Although prices are increasingly determined by enterprise discretion, where there is state price control, managers widely engage in rent seeking activities (ibid.)
Many of China’s SOEs serve the function of “company town,” thus being burdened with social service, pension, unemployment insurance, health, education, and other welfare expenses (Jefferson and Rawski 1999). Moreover, Chinese banks have “built up a mountain of non-performing loans (NPLs) by lavishing cash on value-destroying state firms while starving deserving private borrowers.” (Economist 2004). A clear assignment of property rights would improve monitoring and curtailing of rent-seeking behavior, probably necessitating a change in ownership rights (Jefferson, Mai, and Zhao 1999:111).
Many economists express optimism that over the years, private enterprises, which have bought shares of SOEs, and collective enterprises will dominate the loss-ridden public enterprises. Indeed, the share of industrial output by SOEs fell from 80 percent in 1978 to 28 percent in 1996 (Jefferson and Singh). Still, SOEs account for a disproportional percentage of urban employment, bank loans, and production of heavy industry, although most lose money (Jefferson and Singh). However, the support for reform is so pervasive in China that its rulers are not likely to reverse the reforms.
20.What lessons can LDCs learn from Russia’s collapse of state socialism and economic reform?
Answer: Many LDCs can learn from Russia’s efforts at liberalization and adjustment. Russia’s state socialism, more developed and deep-seated than Poland’s and China’s, required more substantial institutional change for successful transition to the market. As Nove (1983) states: “To change everything at once is impossible, but partial change creates contradictions and inconsistencies.”
Russia’s legacies of consumer-goods neglect, gigantimania and industrial concentration, resistance to technological innovation, shoddy quality, quota disincentives, and information concealment were more institutionalized than Poland’s. For example, Poland had less industrial concentration, had made some progress in the 1980s toward privatization, and provided more competition to state-owned monopolies after reform than Russia. Other difficulties Russia encountered in its reform were lack of incentives, false signals from prices, nonprice capital allocation, monopoly pricing after price decontrol, a soft budget constraint for enterprises, a torn “safety net” for workers and the elderly, opposition to or capture of liberalization benefits by vested bureaucratic interests, neglect of institutional and legal changes essential to expedite a market economy, and severed trade links. Poland moved toward demonopolization before or concurrently with price control, began organizing a capital and labor market, had less politicized lending to inefficient or failing firms, and provided more support to the economic welfare of the poor than Russia. Although both countries encountered opposition from the bureaucracy, resistance in Poland was less substantial, perhaps because the material levels of living of wage earners did not decline as substantially as in Russia.
Nolan (1995) has two explanations for Russia’s lack of success in economic growth and reforms compared to China’s: (1) Russia tried to pursue political liberalization and economic reforms early and simultaneously rather than pursuing economic reforms while avoiding political liberalization similar to China and other fast-growing East Asian economies, and (2) Russia’s efforts at glasnost (openness) and democratization destroyed the old state apparatus while failing to construct an effective successor state, thus engendering an economic collapse, in comparison to China, who took a step-by-step approach to economic reform, rejecting Russia’s “shock therapy.”
Ross (1994) provides several rules for liberalization policy, based on the experience of Russia and other transitional economies. First, Russia did not begin its price decontrol, marketizing, and privatization where you have competitive sectors, such as agriculture. Second, Russia did not control prices in monopolistic and oligopolistic sectors of industry, as China did. Russia’s mistake increased prices for consumers in these uncompetitive sectors. Russia’s industrial firms reduced output and raised prices to maximize profits. Third, Russia failed to wait to decontrol industrial prices until it could provide international competition, as in the case of Poland’s industry, or when government can break up existing enterprises or provide enough domestic competition so that firms will not restrict output. In Russia’s case, the instability of the rouble hampered export expansion so that foreign exchange was not adequate to import from foreigners who might have competed with domestic enterprise. Fourth, Russia failed to use monetary and fiscal policies to set an interest rate to ration credit and to dampen inflation. Fifth, Russia overvalued its rouble from 1989 to 1998, failing to liberalize foreign exchange rates as Poland did in 1989. Sixth, in the early 1990s Russia did not provide a safety net for the poor and unemployed to reduce the resistance of the population opposed to reform.
21.What lessons can LDCs learn from China’s transition from socialism to a market economy?
Answer: Many LDCs can learn from China’s efforts at liberalization and adjustment. China did not require as much institutional change for successful transition to the market, as China could draw on gradual change from at least some precedents from the pre-reform period.
Nolan (1995) has two explanations for the success of China’s economic growth and reforms compared to Russia’s: (1) China’s pursuit of economic reforms while avoiding political liberalization (similar to other East Asian fast-growing economies) and (2) China’s step-by-step approach to economic reform, rejecting “shock therapy,” especially as practiced by the IMF and World Bank. China did not destroy the old state apparatus while undertaking reform, as Russia did.
Ross (1994) provides several rules for liberalization policy, based on the experiences of China and other transitional economies. First, decontrol prices, marketize, and privatize where you have competitive sectors, such as China’s agricultural sector. Second, maintain controlled prices where you have monopolistic and oligopolistic sectors, as in China’s industrial sector. Russia made the mistake of decontrolling prices, marketizing, and privatizing industrial products, thus increasing these prices for consumers and the competitive sectors. Russia’s industrial firms reduced output and raised prices to maximize profits.
In agriculture, China decollectivized much more successfully than Russia, which stifled private initiative and marketization. In industry, China encountered many of the same stubborn interests opposing liberalization as Russia did. Although China has suffered from its share of corruption, it has resisted the asset stripping and favorable buyouts of state industrial enterprises for apparatchiks under the guise of privatization that Russia has faced. Still, China’s path toward reform by “touching stones while walking across a river” could be imperiled by instability during the early decades of the 21st century. Third-world countries should not follow the path of China to reform, although these countries can learn lessons from China. Each developing country needs to find its own path toward adjustment and development.
EmoticonEmoticon