Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Norway – Economic policy – History'
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Lindgren, Eva. "Samhällsförändring på väg : Perspektiv på den svenska bilismens utveckling mellan 1950 och 2007." Doctoral thesis, Umeå universitet, Institutionen för ekonomisk historia, 2010. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-33469.
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The aim of this thesis is to give a perspective on the development of the Swedish automobility between 1950 and 2007. New knowledge on automobility’s role for economic historical development will be achieved by studying the interaction between the diffusion of the private car on the national and the regional level, and the households’ preferences and the government’s regulations of car ownership. The first paper, Two Sides of the Same Coin?, compares car diffusion in Norway and Sweden to find explanations for the national and regional patterns. We ask whether the slower diffusion in Norway can be explained with national differences in income, institutions, infrastructure and population settlements; or if regional differences in income and population density have affected the outcome? Our conclusion is that car diffusion in Norway and Sweden displays two sides of the same coin; the national levels converged, but the process did not follow the same regional pattern. Regional differences in income and population density have in general been a significant explanation for car density in Sweden, but not in Norway. The second paper, Driving from the Centre to the Periphery?, examines whether the diffusion of private cars followed the over-all socio-economic and geographical changes in Sweden from 1960 to 1975. In particular, it studies if ownership per capita followed changes in income or changes in population density (urbanisation). The analysis is based on unique Swedish parish-scale census material that includes all private car owners for the years 1960, 1970 and 1975. Our conclusion is that income levels were more important than other explanations for the diffusion of private cars in Sweden between 1960 and 1975. The third paper, ‘En ledande och samordnande funktion’, contributes with new knowledge on how the Swedish government has organised traffic safety in certain ways since the 1950s. The emphasis is on the establishment and closing down of the National Road Safety Office (TSV) and how the changing forms of organisations before, during and after TSV have been reflected in the road plans from 1958, 1970 and 1990. Our conclusion is that the motives for both establishment and closing down of the TSV were the same; to create a more efficient organisation regarding traffic safety. These changes have been reflected in the road plans where an increased control over the infrastructure can be recognised, especially during the last two decades. The fourth paper, A Dark Side of Car Ownership, examines whether improved technical performance with respect to fuel consumption have been counterbalanced through increasing engine power and weight, how such properties are valued by the consumers, and in what way political instruments have affected this development. The analysis is based on historical data covering all car models within the 50 percentiles of new registrations. Our conclusion is that a vehicle purchase rebound effect can be identified since the fuel consumption has decreased over time, while the engine effect has increased. Also, the Swedish car fleet has developed in a setting of political instruments and regulations working in favour of larger and more fuel consuming cars.
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McKillip, James D. "Norway House: Economic Opportunity and the Rise of Community, 1825-1844." Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/20520.
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This dissertation argues that the Hudson’s Bay Company depot that was built at Norway House beginning in 1825 created economic opportunities that were sufficiently strong to draw Aboriginal people to the site in such numbers that, within a decade of its establishment, the post was the locus of a thriving community. This was in spite of the lack of any significant trade in furs, in spite of the absence of an existing Aboriginal community on which to expand and in spite of the very small number of Hudson’s Bay Company personnel assigned to the post on a permanent basis. Although economic factors were not the only reason for the development of Norway House as a community, these factors were almost certainly primus inter pares of the various influences in that development.
This study also offers a new framework for the conception and construction of community based on documenting day-to-day activities that were themselves behavioural reflections of intentionality and choice. Interpretation of these behaviours is possible by combining a variety of approaches and methodologies, some qualitative and some quantitative. By closely counting and analyzing data in archival records that were collected by fur trade agents in the course of their normal duties, it is possible to measure the importance of various activities such as construction, fishing and hunting. With a clear understanding of what people were actually doing, it is possible to interpret their intentions in the absence of explicit documentary evidence.
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Lindgren, Eva. "Bilism för regional utjämning? : Studier av privatbilismens geografiska och socioekonomiska spridningsmönster 1950-2000." Licentiate thesis, Umeå University, Department of Economic History, 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-1517.
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This licentiate thesis, with the English title Automobility towards Regional Equality? Studies of the geographical and socioeconomic diffusion of the private automobility in Sweden 1950-2000, has the overall aim to investigate the interaction between the private automobility and the Swedish socio-economical development in general. Firstly, the diffusion of private car ownership in Sweden is mapped both geographically and economically at the national level covering all citizens above the age of 18. Secondly, a comparison with the Norwegian diffusion pattern shows how automobility has interacted with two partly different national contexts. This aim will be dealt with in two articles.
Since the diffusion of private cars in Sweden has not yet been examined in a long run and national perspective covering all individuals, the first article, Driving from the Centre to the Periphery? The Diffusion of Private Cars in Sweden 1950-2000 with focus on 1960-1975, investigates how the diffusion of private cars followed the over all socio-economic and geographical changes from 1960 to 1975; did changes in car ownership per capita primarily follow changes in incomes or changes in population density (urbanisation)? Swedish traffic and regional policies in the 1960s aimed at making the car an instrument for national integration and regional equality, and make it available throughout the country. In the article the effect of that policy is tested. The analysis is based on Swedish census material that includes all car owners for the years 1960, 1970 and 1975. Our conclusion is that income levels were more important than other explanations to the diffusion of private cars in Sweden between 1960 and 1975.
Since Norwegian private car density has lagged behind the Swedish and did not reach the same national levels until the late 1980s, despite the same GDP per capita levels, the second article, Two Sides of the same Coin? Private Car Ownership in Sweden and Norway since 1950, compares car diffusion in Norway and Sweden in both historical time and model time in order to find specific explanations for the national and regional patterns of car diffusion. Can both the time lag and the diffusion process be explained with national differences in income, institutions, infrastructure, and population settlements? Or have regional differences in income and population density affected the outcome? Our conclusion is that car diffusion in Norway and Sweden displays two sides of same coin; the national levels converged, but the process did not follow the same regional pattern. Regional differences in income and population density have in general been a significant explanation for car density in Sweden but not in Norway.
Thus, the licentiate thesis shows how private car ownership in Sweden from the 1950s has interacted with increasing regional equality, especially concerning geographical diffusion.
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Lin, Syaru Shirley, and 林夏如. "National identity, economic interest and Taiwan's cross-strait economic policy 1994-2009." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2010. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B43761896.
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Greenwood, Robert. "The local state and economic development in peripheral regions : a comparative study of Newfoundland and Northern Norway." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1991. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/35768/.
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This comparative study of local development initiatives is inspired by efforts to address the chronic economic underdevelopment of Newfoundland. It explores the combination of economic and political forces which generate and sustain regional disparities within industrialised countries. This requires a conceptualisation of peripherality, underdevelopment and development. In the face of global economic restructuring, there are emerging trends which may be creating development opportunities which peripheral regions have social and economic advantages in exploiting. As these are rooted in the the potential of regional production systems of interdependent small and medium sized firms, economic development strategies must be implemented on a sub-national, and - in the Canadian context - subprovincial level. Traditional regional development policies by higher levels of government have failed on both political and economic grounds; a lower level of economic decision-making must take the lead if these emergent possibilities are to be realized. Local economic decision-making can take many forms: voluntary, third sector bodies, regional boards or bureaucracies of higher levels of government, or elected local government. Because only the last, the local state, can draw on the legitimacy of local democratic accountability, combined with the authority and resources of a state body, it is argued that it is best suited to implementing local development strategies, particularly those which must foster the trust and regional consensus for the delicate balance of co-operation and competition necessary for successful inter-firm networks. These conceptualisations provide the analytic thrust for a comparative analysis of development efforts implemented by a range of local organisational forms in Newfoundland and Northern Norway. Like Newfoundland, Northern Norway depended upon resource exploitation, particularly the fishery, with similar labour market and demographic characteristics. As part of a unitary state with weak regional government but substantial local government autonomy, Northern Norway provides a useful contrast in terms of local institutional forms. No assumption is made that the findings of the four Norwegian case studies can be generalised to the experience of the four Newfoundland cases examined. By relating the varying forces at work in each context, however, analytic generalisation is possible, in which the primary causal forces discerned in specific cases can inform theory, which can in turn be related to other contexts. Only by attemptig .to discern the substantial constraints on efforts to generate economic activity in peripheral regions can appropriate organisational forms and development strategies be adopted.
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Giugliano, Ferdinando. "Industrial policy and productivity growth in Fascist Italy." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:982ff041-a460-4d62-9973-d6431b6b3092.
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The first chapter - Crisis? Which Crisis? - constructs a new series of industrial value added at constant (1938) prices for Italy, for the period between 1928 and 1938. The data employed are shown to be better indicators of the dynamic of the Great Depression than those used by Carreras and Felice (2010) and allow to substantially revise the profile of the Crisis. The contraction appears to be more pronounced and persistent, placing the Italian experience more in line with that of other industrialised countries. The second chapter - The Italian Climacteric - presents new estimates of total factor productivity growth for Italy over the Fascist era and compares them with analogous ones for the pre-World War One period and for Germany and Britain. Because of the absence of a fully reliable GDP series, a dual growth accounting framework is employed. This approach permits the incorporation of new data on land rents and of new evidence on the returns to human capital. Results show that during the interwar era Italy experienced a “climacteric", defined as a cessation of TFP growth, which compares poorly with the coeval performance of Britain and Germany. This disappointing result contrasts vividly with what occurred in the late liberal Italy, when TFP grew less quickly than in Germany, but faster than in Britain. The third chapter - A Tale of Two Fascisms - offers the first quantitative assessment of labour productivity dynamics within the Italian industrial sector and of their links with Fascist competition policy. We argue that the institutional context in which Italian firms operated and, in particular, changes in the level of product market competition had a significant effect in determining their productivity performance. By relying on a new dataset and on new labour productivity estimates, we show that the earlier more liberal period of the Fascist era was characterised by a true productivity boom, which ended following the switch to a more interventionist industrial policy. Panel data evidence shows that reductions in the level of competition in the industrial sector were associated with lower productivity growth, while changes in industrial structure were a less significant factor.
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Ohinata, Shin. "Issues in economic growth and trade policy in East Asia." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2000. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4205/.
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This thesis consists of three studies. The topics discussed are in the area of international trade and economic growth with a reference to the policy issues in East Asia. The study in Chapter 2 presents a model of North-South trade which can explain the observed cross-country variations in factor prices. Intuition and evidence suggest that knowledge is largely non-excludable and hence all countries should have access to broadly similar technology. However, this public-good assumption for technology leads to implausible predictions of factor prices in standard models. The model in this study does not assume any differences in technology but its predictions are consistent with observations. In Chapter 3, the implications of the two vintage models for growth accounting are examined. Growth accounting studies have shown that total factor productivity growth in East Asian economies has been slower than expected. Analysis of the vintages models suggests that this puzzling finding could be due to mismeasurements of capital arising from the particular characteristic of East Asian growth experience. In Chapter 4, it is shown that when asymmetric economies adopt an open regionalism policy, some of them may gain at the expense of others. This result is very different from the commonly held view in the literature. In certain situations, some economies in the bloc achieves a higher welfare level than under global free trade. A policy of open regionalism could therefore turn out to be an obstacle to the process of multilateral trade liberalization.
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Cadioli, Giovanni. "Soviet economic thought and economic policy in the 1940s : influence on 1950s-1960s reforms." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2018. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:255012eb-5322-404d-b39a-ad11edb0640d.
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The present thesis looks at the Soviet economy in the 1940s-1960s period. It specifically focuses on the influence of economic policy and thought developed in the late 1940s on the post-Stalinist era. The thesis' aim is to prove that several key elements of 1950s-1960s economic reforms had already been conceptualised, proposed or implemented during the Stalinist period. The pillars of this 1940s-1960s reforming continuity which the research deals with are khozraschet, economic levers (profit, value, market, prices, credit, bonuses), perspective planning, the balance of the national economy method, as well as the debates concerning the law of value and the repeated attempts at drawing up a General Plan and at drafting a new Party Programme. The key figure this thesis focuses on is N.A. Voznesensky, top Soviet planner in 1939-1949. In the late 1930s he revived practices and methods discontinued after 1928, while under his aegis, policies and debates that later influenced post-Stalinist reforms were developed in the late 1940s. The thesis relies on primary evidence gathered at four Russian state archives (RGAE, GARF, ARAN, RGASPI) and on research carried out at British, Russian, Italian and German libraries.
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Alsabah, Mohammad. "Welfare Economics and Public Policy in Early 20th Century Great Britain." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1723.
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The Liberal welfare reforms were a series of bills passed in the British Parliament in the early twentieth-century. Initiated in response to a number of pressing economic and social issues, the Liberal welfare reforms were legislated with the purpose of combating poverty and improving the livelihood of the British working-class citizen. This thesis in economics outlines and examines critically the economic design behind the Liberal welfare reforms between 1906 and 1914.
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García, Valeriano F. "A critical inquiry into Argentine economic history, 1946-1970." New York : Garland Pub, 1987. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/15487658.html.
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Zhang, Xuanyang. "Essays on trend inflation, nominal rigidity, and optimal monetary policy." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2018. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/120162/.
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Johnman, Lewis. "The higher Civil Service, 'Treasury control' and British economic policy between the Wars." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.286164.
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Chin, Si-wŏn. "Learning, institutions and Korea's FDI policy compared with Japan." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2000. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4221/.
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The basic assertion of this thesis is that policy makers' belief systems and economic institutions have to change their structures and contents as the nation's economic developmental stage is upgraded. Put differently, a state's economic performance or achievement of economic objectives will be facilitated if there is no cleavage or conflict among economic policy, economic belief systems, and economic institutions. This means that the utility of the developmental state is valid until a nation's economy is in a take-off position. Persistent developmentalism after this stage will result in developmentalism losing its validity and becoming a main obstacle for further economic development. At this time, more liberalised economic policies which are not only supported by changed belief systems and institutions but also compatible with the neo-liberalising international political economy are needed. In other words, this thesis does not seek to answer the question 'which is the better strategy for economic development between developmentalism and neo-liberalism?' but emphasises the importance of the proper timing of transition from developmentalism to a liberalised and deregulated economy which is compatible with a mature civil society and the neo-liberalising international political economy.
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Castro, Vítor Manuel Alves. "Growth, cycles and macroeconomic policy in the European Union." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2008. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/1046/.
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The implementation of the Maastricht criteria, establishment of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), creation of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) raised several challenges for the European Union (EU) countries. The main aim of this dissertation is to analyse the economic implications of those institutional changes. Chapter 2 provides an empirical answer to the question of whether Maastricht and SGP fiscal rules have affected growth in the EU countries. Results from the estimation of a growth equation show that growth of real GDP per capita in the EU was not negatively affected in the period after Maastricht. The main conclusion of this analysis is that the institutional changes that occurred in some European countries after 1992 were not harmful to growth. Chapter 3 tries to identify the main causes of excessive deficits in the EU. A conditional logit model is estimated over a panel of EU countries, where an excessive deficit is defined as a deficit higher than 3% of GDP. Results indicate that a weak fiscal stance, low economic growth, elections and majority left-wing governments are the main causes of excessive deficits. They also show that the institutional constraints imposed after Maastricht over the EU countries have succeeded in reducing the probability of excessive deficits, especially in small countries and in countries traditionally affected by large fiscal imbalances. A widespread idea in the business cycles literature is that the older is an expansion or contraction, the more likely it is to end. Chapter 4 provides further empirical support for this idea of positive duration dependence controlling simultaneously for the effects of other factors on the duration of expansions and contractions. This study employs for the first time a discrete-time duration model to analyse the impact of some variables on the likelihood of an expansion and contraction ending for a group of EU and non-EU countries. The evidence suggests that the duration of expansions and contractions is not only dependent on their actual age: the duration of expansions is also positively dependent on the behaviour of the OECD composite leading indicator and on private investment, and negatively affected by the price of oil and by the occurrence of a peak in the US business cycle; the duration of a contraction is negatively affected by its actual age and by the duration of the previous expansion. Finally, Chapter 5 raises the question of whether central banks’ monetary policy can be described by a linear Taylor rule or, instead, by a more complex nonlinear rule. This chapter also analyses whether those rules can be augmented with a financial conditions index containing information from some asset prices and financial variables. A forward-looking specification is employed in the estimation of the linear and nonlinear rules. A smooth transition model is used to estimate the nonlinear rule. The results indicate that the behaviour of the Federal Reserve of the United States can be described by a linear Taylor rule, whilst the behaviour of the ECB and Bank of England is best described by a nonlinear Taylor rule. In particular, these two central banks tend to react to inflation only when inflation is above or outside their targets. Moreover, the evidence also suggests that the recently created ECB is targeting financial conditions, contrary to the other two central banks.
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Ho, Khai Leong. "Indigenizing the state : the new economic policy and the Bumiputera State in Peninsular Malaysia /." The Ohio State University, 1988. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487596807821657.
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au, Iain Browning@det wa edu, and Iain W. P. Browning. "Western Australian Education Policy and Neo-classic Economic Influences." Murdoch University, 2002. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20051129.112230.
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This thesis is primarily an historical examination of how neo-classic economics influenced WA education policy formation from the mid 1980s until the release of the Curriculum Framework (1998). It first aims to examine and explain the context and origins of neo-classic economic influences globally, and then explores the process and impact of its introduction to WA policy-making in general, and to education policy in particular.
Within the thesis some fundamental propositions put forward by other theorists are built upon. The most significant is the view that between 1983 and 1998, there has been a distinct and well documented shift in the primary ideological forces driving education policy throughout the western world. This is attributable to a strengthened link between education and national economic goals which has resulted in an economic imperative and the use of an economic discourse to describe educational aims. From these understandings this thesis explores whether neo-classic economics has played a significant influence in shaping education policy in WA, as it has done in many parts of the world.
The methodological approach principally involves the textual analysis of major policy documents preceding and including the Curriculum Framework (1998). The focus is on primary and secondary sources, essentially to discover, analyze, and demonstrate how neo-classic economics had influenced education policy in WA by 1998.
Taking a pragmatic approach, this professional doctorate makes a specific contribution to research through synthesizing the impact of neo-classic economics on WA schools policy via a range of principally secondary sources. In particular, it explores how neo-classic economics influenced WA education policy by seeking to answer four fundamental research questions:
1. Was the influence of neo-classic economics evident internationally, and if so did it impact on education policy?
2. How did neo-classic economics influence Australian Commonwealth Government schools policy?
3. Were there clear neo-classic economic influences evident within other Australian states, and, if so, did they influence schools policy?
4. In whose interests were neo-classic economic education policies?
Neo-classic economic approaches were espoused widely as a solution to the apparent failure of in economics from the early 1970s onwards. Beare (1995) argued that in many countries policy perspectives for education and other welfare services changed in a number of 'profound' ways, the most significant was the use of an economic rationale to justify almost every significant policy initiative.
Within the Anglo-democracies, specifically the US and UK, the pursuit of neo-classic economic policies involved the adoption of initiatives allowing the 'market' to dictate what should or should not occur within the economy. As a part of the neo-classic economic drive, governments endeavoured to improve efficiency within the public services. Consequently, education policy became driven by an economic imperative often to the detriment of educational aims.
This study demonstrates that neo-classic economic policy came to dominate government decision making in Australia following the election of the Hawke Labor Government in 1983 (Dudley and Vidovich 1995).This was similar to neo-classic economic patterns in the US and UK. By 1985 neo-classic economic trends at the Commonwealth level were clearly evident and become overt and robust with the passage of time. Under Minister Dawkins Commonwealth education policy was fumy linked to national economic goals.
An examination of the Victorian context demonstrates neo-classic economic trends within the other Australian states' education policies. Under the Kennett Liberal Government the shift to neo-classic economic education policy resulted in reductions in educational spending, staffing cuts and school closures. The prime motivation for the reforms was the reduction of costs and the aligning of education through a focus on vocational subjects and employment related skills.
Concomitant with the rise of neo-classic economics was a commensurate growth in the attention of Australian business and industry to education policy. Business and industry groups increasingly promoted the notion of human capital theory by linking education and economic growth. This can be partly attributed to employers' growing interest in having schools produce individuals suitably prepared for positions in the workplace, a phenomenon which has been reflected in WA secondary schools through a shift to a vocationalised curriculum (Browning 1977). In effect business was able to defray expending capital on training workers through hiring school leavers tailored for workplace positions. From at least the early 1980s there was accelerating evidence of a more active and open involvement of business in the major education inquiries which also contributed to policy formation dominated by neo-classic economics.
The exploration of the global and national context of neo-classic economics confirms that neo-classis economic influences within WA Qd not occur in isolation. From at least 1987 it is evident that neo-classic economics influenced WA education policy. The consequence was a curriculum shaped predominantly by economic interests as opposed to educational concerns.
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Sgherri, Silvia. "Policy evaluation with macroeconometric models." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2000. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4154/.
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This thesis presents a number of examples where macroeconometric models are employed as useful tools for evaluation of contemporary policy problems. A range of approaches is proposed to shed light on how macromodels can actually contribute to the policy debate. In particular, the thesis emphasises how different models maybe augmented or modified and stresses the need for care in the experimental design of policy simulations. Small stylised models of the UK economy are estimated in the first part of this thesis. They are used to assess the performance of simple monetary policy rules under the current inflation targeting monetary regime. In a monetary policy regime of inflation targeting, the appropriate target band-width can be assessed by calculating the variance of inflation in a macroeconomic model under alternative policy rules. A recent Bank of England study concludes from stochastic simulation of a small semi-structural model that a 'fairly substantial lump of inflation uncertainty' exists in the United Kingdom. In chapter 2 an extended and improved version of that model is developed while their estimates of inflation variability are revised downwards by deploying analytic techniques. In chapter 3 a new small 'semi structural' dynamic model of the UK economy is estimated, with particular attention to the modelling of wages and prices. It is used to assess the performance of simple monetary policy rules, including 'inflation forecast targeting' and 'Taylor' rules, while taking into account different degrees of forward-lookingness in both inflation targeting horizon and wage bargaining. Computation of asymptotic inflation-output standard-error trade-offs is provided under various specifications and parametrisations of the model. Large-scale country models have the convenience to make explicit a complete range of relationships among macroeconomic variables most of which, for obvious reasons, are neglected in smaller dynamic models. As a consequence, such quantitative framework offers an unique opportunity to evaluate not only the aggregate impact of exogenous shocks on the variables of interest, but also to identify the underlying economic mechanisms enabling the transmission of such shocks. In the second part of the thesis, I undertake simulations of the National Institute's Domestic Econometric Model (NIDEM) to analyse the characteristics of the UK monetary transmission mechanism. Chapter 4 emphasises that the impact of interest rate movements on real variables is strictly determined by both the monetary regime at work and the underlying assumptions regarding consumption behaviour. Certainly, the steady integration of the members of the EMU and increasing awareness of the need for closer co-operation in monetary and fiscal policy have stimulated greater interest in modelling interdependencies between European countries and the impact and feedbacks from the rest of the world economy. Many of the key issues have now an international aspect, so it becomes more and more difficult to rely on single-country models to provide necessary analysis. International transmission mechanisms can therefore be better tackled with a multi-country model. The third and last part of this thesis focuses on cross-country asymmetric transmissions in response to a common monetary shock within EMU. In particular, in chapter 5 an empirical analysis of the links between monetary and fiscal policy within EMU is presented. This is done through simulation of a neo-classical highly non-Ricardian multi-country model: the IMF's MULTIMOD Mark III (MM3). Chapter 6 provides further evidence about the effects of embracing a Monetary Union when underlying macroeconomist structures still differ across countries. By use of the same model-based quantitative framework, this chapter examines the role of nominal and real rigidities in European labour markets for the assessment of asymmetries in monetary transmission under various monetary regimes.
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Sagagi, A. Muhammad. "Commercial policy and industrialisation in Nigeria, 1963-1978." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1985. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/34674/.
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As a contribution to the continuing debate among trade and development economists as to the role of industrial strategies in the pattern of economic development, this study analyses the experience of one developing country, Nigeria, with an import substitution strategy. The performance of the industrial sector is critically assessed and related to the trade policy adopted. Using published data, the study covers 24 industries and a period of 16 years, beginning 1963 and extending to 1978. An analysis of the structure of protection reveals a considerably high and wide ranging levels of effective protection, in favour of consumer-goods oriented sectors. The relationship between these rates of effective protection on the one hand and import substitution and sectoral growth on the other was examined using various parametric and non-parametric tests of association. The evidence, which is only suggestive in nature, indicates that the structure of protection does play a role, albeit a minimal one, in stimulating industrial growth. Using Input-Output techniques, the employment, foreign exchange and output implications of the present strategy of Import- Substitution and of a hypothetical strategy of export promotion are analysed. There is a general absence of 'key' employment sectors and, paradoxically, an export promotion strategy is found to be less employment generating and more capital using but less foreign exchangeusing than the existing strategy. Although there is a considerable scope for capital-labour substitution in many industries, it was found that the often recommended policy of getting prices 'right' will not be sufficient to bring about an appreciable improvement in the employment situation. The development of factor productivity between 1963 and 1978 for each of the 24 industries was analysed; and three possible determinants of productivity are investigated: capital intensity and technical progress, output growth (the Verdoorn's Law) and trade policy. With regards to the latter, it was found that periods of especially slack productivity growth roughly correspond to those in which there was especially restrictive trade policy as quantified by high erps. The economic efficiency of the manufacturing sector was appraised using the criteria of net social profitability, social rate of return and Domestic Resources Costs (DRCs). Evidence was found in support of the hypothesis that the resource pull of protection to the protected industries is accompanied by higher rates of private, but lower rates of social profitability for the more heavily protected sectors. The overall conclusion of the thesis is that the policies of protection should have been more rationally applied and the IS strategy more rationally executed in line with the country's enunciated objectives.
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Gaete, Romeo Gonzalo. "Essays on economics of education and public policy." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2017. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/106602/.
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In Chapter 1, I study the effect of school absenteeism on secondary school students academic outcomes using the Chilean student strikes in 2011 as a source of exogenous variation. The strikes, led by university students but promptly joined by hundreds of thousands of secondary school students, triggered a significant drop in public secondary school attendance (a decline of about 15 percentage points in all four grades). Attendance returned to normal levels in 2012. Using the type of school that students attended in 2011 as an instrument for school absenteeism, I show that school absenteeism has negative effects on secondary school students’ results in a postsecondary high-stakes math exam and university enrollment rates. Instrumental variables estimations suggest that a 10 percentage point decrease in attendance during secondary school is related to a 9.5 percent of a standard deviation decline in the math exam score, and a 3.2 percentage point reduction in the associated probability of university enrollment. I do not find any significant effect on the high-stakes language exam at the 5 percent level. A key finding is the persistent negative effect of school absenteeism on students’ academic performance: this negative effect is present even for those students who sat the high-stakes exams three years after the strikes had ended, that is, after three years of regular schooling following the negative shock to their attendance. These results are not driven by inputs to the education production function that might have been affected by the student strikes, such as disruptiveness at the time of the high-stakes exams, school environment, teachers, class instruction, or class size. Chapter 2 presents the first value-added (VA) estimates for doctoral teaching assistants (DTAs). We focus on the undergraduate program of the Economics Department at a UK university, where the match between students and DTAs is random. We find that a one standard deviation change in DTA quality increases students’ test scores by around 8.5 percent of a standard deviation. A novel feature of our data allows us to examine within-course dynamics in the VA estimates: These are larger for assessments taken during term-time, drop for end-of-term tests and are not statistically different from zero for final exams. The analysis suggests that the lack of persistence of the VA measures might be connected with: (i) Students’ endogenous investment responses and (ii) temporal decay in teacher-related human capital. We discuss how our results can inform the broader debate on the measurement of teachers quality via the VA approach. In Chapter 3, we study the effects of a penalty points system (PPS) introduced in Spain in 2006. We find a 20% decrease in cumulative road fatalities in the five years after the reform, compared to a synthetic control group constructed using a weighted average of other European countries. Evidence suggests that the persistent reduction in road fatalities might not only be driven by deterring risky-driving behavior, but also by taking reckless drivers out of the roads. Using estimates of the value of a statistical life, we calculate that the PPS yielded a net economic benefit of €4.6 billion ($6 billion) over this period, equivalent to 0.43% of Spain’s GDP.
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Barton, Stuart John. "A history of policy signals and market responses in Zambia's relationship with foreign capital." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2016. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709484.
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Sloman, Peter Jack. "Economic thought and policy in the Liberal Party, c. 1929-1964." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c961d45b-8c97-4e4b-b91c-6d0c8c55da5b.
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This thesis examines the reception, generation, and use of economic ideas in the British Liberal Party during the period between its decline in the inter-war years and its revival under Jo Grimond. It uses archival sources, party publications, and the political press to reconstruct the Liberal Party’s internal discourse about economic policy from the 1920s to the 1960s, and sets this discourse in the context of wider economic and political developments: the ‘Keynesian revolution’ in economic theory and British public policy, recurrent political interest in economic planning, and growing concern about relative economic decline. The strength of the two-party system which developed after the First World War meant that the Liberal Party spent most of this period in opposition, and even in the coalition governments of 1931-2 and 1940-5 Liberals had limited input into economic policy-making. As historians have frequently noted, however, the party played an important role in introducing Keynesian ideas to British politics through Lloyd George’s 1929 pledge to ‘conquer unemployment’, and seemed to anticipate the post-war managed economy in important respects. At the same time, the party maintained a close relationship with the economics profession, and vocally championed free trade and competitive markets. This thesis highlights the eclecticism of the Liberal Party’s economic heritage, and its continuing ambivalence towards state intervention. Although Liberals were early and sincere supporters of Keynesian demand-management policies, and took a close interest in economic planning proposals in the 1920s, 1940s and 1960s, their interventionism was frequently constrained by their internationalism and their support for free markets. Most Liberals, then, were neither unreconstructed Gladstonians nor unequivocal supporters of Britain’s post-war settlement. Rather, successive party leaders sought to integrate new economic knowledge with traditional Liberal commitments, in order to make both a credible contribution to policy debates and a distinctive appeal to the electorate.
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Ahmed, Hossam Eldin Mohammed Abdelkader. "Investigating the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in Egypt." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2013. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/4287/.
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This thesis investigates the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in Egypt in the last four decades. To achieve this, five empirical studies are included in this thesis. The consumer‟s expenditure is estimated in Chapter 3, while the investment expenditure under uncertainty is estimated in Chapters 4. Furthermore, the results of these two chapters paved the way to the next chapters, the interest rate channel, chapter 5, and the bank lending channel, Chapter 6. Moreover, Chapter 7 devoted to estimate the exchange rate channel under the regime shift. However, Chapter 2 provides all the required discussion about the economic policies and developments in the Egyptian economy for the purpose of this thesis. The time series econometrics is used in all of these chapters. The unit root tests, the Engle-Ganger two-step cointegration approach, the bounds tests, and GARCH models are used in Chapters 3 and 4. However, unit root tests, the VAR models, Granger-causality, the impulse response function, variance decomposition, the Johansen‟s cointegration, and the VECM are used in Chapters 5, 6, and 7. The results of these chapters assert the existence of the channels of monetary transmission mechanism in Egypt between 1975 and 2010.
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Nooney, Hannah F. "Argentina Trapped: The Intimate Link Between Short-Term Policy Orientation and Economic Volatility." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2012. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/502.
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Argentina, throughout its history, has fallen prey to a unique brand of “exceptionalism.” While it is well-endowed with both the physical and demographic inputs to successful economic growth and development, its story has been defined by a consistent inability to reach its economic potential. This work examines how the nation’s political economy dynamics create an environment that is not conducive to long-term economic development. Through an analysis of both historical factors and the country’s present situation, it focuses on how the primacy of short-term factors has become entrenched in the economic policymaking process. The discussion is comprised of a fusion of economic, political, sociological, and psychological elements, which join together in attempting to explain the duration, magnitude, and repetitive nature of Argentina’s economic woes. This exploration of the past, the present, and their interaction offers insight into the specific factors that continue to keep Argentina from achieving a sustainable development path.
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Rifai, Ghada Issa Said. "British economic policy in Palestine, 1919-1935 : the construction of Haifa harbour : a case study." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2017. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/24736.
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This dissertation addresses the question of how Britain was able to achieve its imperial goals in Palestine in spite of the limitation imposed by the League of Nations' mandate system. To do so, it investigates the construction of Haifa harbour as a case study. The crucial issue was that Britain as the mandatory power and as a founding member of the League of Nations was compelled to adhere to the open door clause and give foreign nationals access to economic opportunities in the mandated territories. Conformity with the mandate system provided the legitimacy necessary for the British government to control Palestine in the context of the new international law that emerged as a result of World War I, prohibiting annexation of acquired territories. Debates in Whitehall occurred about how to obtain economic and strategic benefits whilst keeping rivals away and without breaching the mandate system. Broadly speaking, the Colonial Office's position was to follow the traditional colonial approach while the Foreign Office insisted on adapting to the new global regulations. On several issues policy functioned: on the method of carrying out the harbour works; on the issuing of a loan for Palestine; and on efforts to convince the Iraq Petroleum Company to adopt a route for the oil pipeline from Iraq to terminate in Haifa. This was also made possible due to the British government's employment of an interventionist policy. With the completion of the construction at Haifa harbour, the British government was able to achieve a balance between its own interests and the requirements of the international community and the needs of the local inhabitants.
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Mallarangeng, Rizal. "Liberalizing New Order Indonesia ideas, epistemic community, and economic policy change, 1986-1992 /." The Ohio State University, 2000. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/50013641.html.
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Strachey, Antonia. "The Princely States v British India : fiscal history, public policy and development in modern India." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4bceba59-198a-4be8-b405-b9448fd70126.
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This dissertation examines how direct versus indirect rule shaped late colonial India through government finance. Fiscal policy has hitherto been overlooked in the literature on Indian economic history. This thesis considers how revenues were raised and spent in the Princely States compared with British India, and the welfare outcomes associated with these fiscal decisions. Part One examines the fiscal framework through the neglected public accounts. The key finding is that while the systems of taxation were broadly similar in both types of administration, patterns of public expenditure were dramatically different. The large Princely States spent more public revenue on social expenditure. This was made possible by lower proportionate expenditure on security and defence. Part one charts these trends empirically and unearths political and institutional reasons for the differences in fiscal policy between directly and indirectly ruled India. Part Two examines welfare. The study goes beyond previous anthropometric scholarship by assessing the impact of institutions and policies on biological living standards, deploying a new database of adult male heights in South India. Puzzlingly, heights were slightly lower in the Princely States, traditionally lauded for being more responsive to the needs of their populations, especially those of low status. The resolution to the conundrum is found in poorer initial conditions, and caste dynamics. Higher social expenditure and reduced height inequality occurred simultaneously in the States from the 1910s, suggesting policies directed at low status groups within the Princely States may have been successful. I also examine the consequences of Britain's policy of constructing an extensive rail network across the country. Importantly, the impact of railways differed by caste. Railways were good for High Caste groups, and bad for low status Dalit and Tribal groups. This suggests that railways served to reinforce the existing caste distinctions in access to resources and net nutrition.
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Stewart, Heather Jackson. "UK sea fisheries policy-making since 1945." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/31414.
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This is a study of approaches to fisheries management in the United Kingdom (UK) between 1945 and 1996. It examines the choices and incentives faced by UK Governments when designing policy instruments to deliver international commitments to sustainable fishing. The failure of international agreements to sustainably manage fisheries resources is often attributed to international institutions, the politicization of negotiations and their distributive outcomes. This thesis makes an original contribution by arguing that the success of international agreements was also dependent upon local negotiations that shaped the design of national delivery mechanisms. The central research question concerns the role and influence of local interests in delivering global economic and environmental agendas and how national governments accommodate local tensions within this process. A sustained content analysis of UK Government archives is used to argue that local political and sectional industry interests had a significant bearing on the development of UK fisheries policy and the design of domestic delivery mechanisms. The exception was UK policy on the international distribution of fisheries resources at the United Nations Law of the Sea Conferences (1958, 1960 and 1973-82). Economic considerations drove early environmental policy with sectional fishing industry interests of secondary importance to the potential economic benefits associated with the more valuable energy resources. In then seeking to implement controls on fishing activity, this thesis argues that UK fisheries management mechanisms were designed to compensate for tension between global commitments mandating a reduction in fishing effort and the local fleets and communities that had to bear the costs of industry contraction. This created a policy-making environment in which social and political motivations continually trumped the application of economic and scientific advice. This advice advocated a contraction in the size of the fleet which had become necessary as technical change and falling stocks resulted in overcapacity. The use of fisheries policy as a political tool to ease local tensions incentivised policy choices that directly contributed to the UK's failure to reduce fishing pressure and deliver international commitments. This thesis demonstrates the importance of local negotiations and interests in the construction of national and international approaches to environmental and natural resources problems.
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Curless, Gareth Michael. "Economic development, labour policy, and trade unions in the Sudan, 1898-1958." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/10861.
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Like many other African colonies, the Sudan experienced a period of sustained industrial unrest during the late 1940s. The Workers’ Affairs Association (WAA), the representative body for Sudanese railway workers, led a two year campaign of strikes during 1947 and 1948. The escalating labour unrest provoked considerable unease among British officials in the Sudan Government. Not only was there a fear that the strikes might escalate into broader anti-colonial protest but the sustained campaign of industrial unrest also caused significant disruption to the economy. During the strikes the export of cotton - the Sudan Government’s principal source of revenue - was delayed and the movement of other essential goods was severely restricted. The thesis argues that the economic dislocation caused by the strikes, which coincided with growing concerns about rising anti-colonial nationalism and imperial decline, meant that labour discipline among key sector workers was the primary objective for the late colonial state. Although the protests in the Sudan were part of the broader strike wave that was sweeping through the African continent in the late 1940s, it has largely been excluded from the historiography of this period – primarily because of the Sudan’s unique status as a ‘Condominium’ of Britain and Egypt. Through an analysis of the Sudan Government’s labour policy, the thesis challenges this notion of exceptionality, demonstrating that the British officials of the Sudan Political Service (SPS) were animated by similar concerns and motivations to their counterparts elsewhere in colonial Africa. With this in mind, the thesis aims to address two broad research objectives. Firstly, to examine the causes of the industrial unrest: investigating the relationship between the structure of the economy, social organisation, and post-war economic conditions. Secondly, to analyse the Sudan Government’s response to the labour protests, documenting how immediate economic concerns, combined with post-war ideas relating to industrial relations management and social welfare, shaped colonial labour policy.
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Fitchett, Christian. "Asset price inflation- theory, history, and an alternative model." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2000. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1354820913.
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Ackrill, Robert. "The EC budget and agricultural policy reforms, with special reference to cereals." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1992. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/13300/.
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The aim of this thesis is to explore the links that exist between the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Communities (EC) and the EC budget. In particular, the thesis examines the impact on the budget of reforming the CAP. It shows that the nature of support offered under the CAP up to the 1992 MacSharry reforms has a strong historical precedent in French and German history. It then goes on to examine in greater detail the support mechanisms of the cereals and oilseeds sectors. The cereals sector is focused on because of its importance in agricultural output and in total agricultural support expenditure by the EC. Oilseeds is considered for its policy linkages with cereals in both production and consumption. The detailed nature of expenditures on these sectors is examined in detail, with particular emphasis placed on costs and policy problems arising out of intervention storage. In forecasting future expenditures under different policy scenarios, cereals production and consumption are considered separately. Imports, exports and intervention behaviour are also considered, to permit the examination of all aspects of the cereals market that affect expenditure. The impact of the 1992 MacSharry reforms is compared to a strict continuation of the 1988 stabiliser reforms and a price freeze at 1992 levels for the forecast period to 1999. It is shown that the impact of the 1992 reforms is to reduce the extent of the market imbalances by 1999 as compared with the base scenarios, but unless the level of compensatory payment is cut, then by 1999, the EC faces a support bill that is higher under the new policy than would have been the case had the 1988 reforms been retained.
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Bwire, Thomas. "Aid, fiscal policy and macroeconomy of Uganda : a cointegrated vector autoregressive (CVAR) approach." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2012. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/12918/.
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While confronting the question of aid effectiveness, an important issue (but often ignored) in the context of a developing country like Uganda is which GDP measure would be most reliable as this is crucial for measuring the macroeconomic impact of aid. The most commonly used GDP measure in the aid-growth literature is typically from World Development Indicators (WDI) or Penn World Tables (PWT) (being considered the most reliable or the easiest to obtain). However, disparities in GDP from alternative sources are common and in practice one has different estimates of the level, change and growth of GDP for the same country over the same period. This is of a particular concern especially in developing countries (without exception) where the informal and subsistence sectors are a large share of the economy (Jerven, 2010) and where not all transactions in the formal sector are recorded (MacGaffey, 1991), and the quality of data is still very poor and measurement perceptions of macroeconomic aggregates are varied and weak (Mukherjee, White and Wuyts, 1998). Because the source chosen for GDP may affect inferences on growth and economic performance for African countries, the thesis entry point was an analysis of alternative sources of GDP, and aimed to construct a consistent GDP series for Uganda. The extent of discrepancy in GDP estimates was investigated, and the year on year percentage GDP growth rates, including percentage and average growth rate discrepancies were derived, with a particular focus on sub-periods when GDP from alternative sources diverge most. Although UBOS and WDI real UGX GDP year on year growth rate estimates had a 3.6 percentage point average absolute discrepancy per year, they are consistent, similar and cointegrated. In fact, over 1970-76 and 2000-08 the two series are very close, and they are quite close for 1978-83 and 1993-99. Therefore, either series can be considered to represent trends in the size of the macroeconomy. However, the UBOS real series is smoother and produces a more stable measure of GDP than does the WDI series and it is the underlying source from which macroeconomic data is sought by the international agencies, including WDI. Given this, the less volatile UBOS real series (real UGX GDP/U) was preferred especially as there was less need to incorporate dummies in the rest of the thesis. Fiscal data and private consumption (our preferred measure of growth) in the thesis were derived from this same source. Two dynamics relationships, i.e. one between foreign aid and domestic fiscal variables, and the other between foreign aid, domestic fiscal variables, exports and private consumption in Uganda are assessed using annual data over the period 1972 to 2008. ACVAR model is employed and executed using CATS in RATS, version 2.1and E-views 7.2. Features of the data over 1972-79, a period characterized by political and economic instability in Uganda and the effect of policy shift due to structural adjustment programme and the Museveni regime in Uganda are reflected in the analysis. Considering first the core fiscal variables, we find that aid and fiscal variables form a long-run stationary relation and the role of structural changes remain unclear as the policy shift dummy seems unimportant for the long-run fiscal relation. A test of structural links between aid and fiscal variables reveals that aid is a significant element of long-run fiscal equilibrium, and the hypothesis of aid exogeneity is not statistically supported. In the long-run, aid is associated with increased tax effort, reduced domestic borrowing and increased public spending, although aid additionality/illusion hypothesis remains inconclusive given the nature of the DAC measure of aid used here. A decomposition of the common trends shows that shocks to tax revenue are the pulling forces, while empirical shocks to domestic borrowing, government spending and aid are the pushing forces of the fiscal system. In terms of policy, it is crucial for the donors to increase the reliability and predictability of aid in order for Uganda to improve fiscal planning and reduce the need to resort to costly domestic borrowing. In addition, one way to make inference on the relationship between aid and spending more clear is for donors to coordinate aid delivery systems and also make aid more transparent. Finally, we extended the fiscal analysis and also considered how aid, mediated by the fiscal variables, and exports impact on the growth of the private sector- a relationship a kin to the growth response to aid in Uganda. Results show that aid and the Ugandan macrovariables are significantly cointegrated, and a battery of sensitivity and robust checks demonstrate that the cointegration rank is 2. These are formally identified as representing respectively the statistical analogue of the budgetary equilibrium among the core fiscal variables and the link between aid, fiscal variables, exports and growth in private consumption. Using this rank condition, the hypotheses of long-run exclusion of aid and aid exogeneity are optimally tested within a system of equations, but these are not statistically supported. With particular reference to the growth relation, we find broad support that aid has had, in the long-run, a positive impact on the private sector, albeit indirectly through public spending, and deficit financing is associated with ‘crowd in’ effect linked to public investment spending. However, the belief that ‘earmarking’ aid to investment spending contributes to achieving target growth rates may be exaggerated. It is the productivity, not the level of investment that matter. On the contrary, aid may have an important role in supporting consumption spending, and this happens to be more beneficial to growth in Uganda than may be commonly acknowledged. The role of structural changes remains unclear as the policy shift dummy seems unimportant for the long-run fiscal and growth relations, but may matter for the short-run.
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Ferga, Jumuaa. "UK monetary policy reaction functions, 1992-2014 : a cointegration approach using Taylor rules." Thesis, University of Huddersfield, 2016. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/28564/.
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For more than two decades, monetary policy of countries around the world has undergone significant transformation. The long-term stabilization and lowering of inflation is the primary target of central banks founded on the principles of transparency and credibility. The achievement of inflation targeting and control is ultimately judged by the public’s expectations about future inflation. This objective has focused central bank policy making on modern monetary principles and the adoption of one of its core principles, the monetary policy rule. The central bank of the United Kingdom officially adopted an explicit inflating targeting monetary policy in October 1992 following its operational independence in May 1997. In this study, we attempt to investigate the behaviour of the Central Bank of England under an inflation targeting framework. In other words, whether Taylor-type policy rules can be used to describe the behaviour of the Central Bank of England. We specifically attempt to shed light on the question does Taylor's rule (Taylor, 1993) adequately describes central bank behaviour? And whether the existence of formal targets has induced nonlinearity in this behaviour, beginning in October 1992 until December 2014. The study uses time series estimations of Taylor-type reactions functions to characterise monetary policy conduct in the UK, we use time series data, because all the other studies in this area are using the time series method and recommended it, Osterholm (2005), Nelson (2000), Adam et al (2003), Clarida et al (2000) amongst others. In addition, this study uses a long database which is useful for time series analysis. The analysis uses a modified cointegration and error correction model that is robust to the stationary properties of the data as well as vector autoregression techniques; therefore, our methodology in this study employed three types of econometric tests namely: unit root tests, cointegration tests and error correction models. We used monthly data for the UK over the period October 1992 to December 2014, and we estimate Taylor-type policy rules for the UK in order to find answers to these questions. Our results indicate that the Central Bank of England has not been following the Taylor rule. In other words, the regression results clearly indicated that the Central Bank of England did not follow the Taylor rule in the period 1992-2014. This is because all coefficients of inflation gap and the output gap were statistically insignificant. In addition, we conclude these results link with the New Consensus Macroeconomics, criticism of inflation targeting and endogenous money theory. The main contribution in this study is an up-to-date analysis, and evidence that Bank of England policy does not work with Taylor rules. In addition, on the methodological level most previous studies reviewed in the literature have measured the interest rate, inflation and the output gap using one dependent variable, to measure the behaviour of the Central Bank of England, to assess whether the Taylor rule is effective or not. However, this study fills this gap by using two measure for interest rate, three measure for inflation and two variables to measure the output gap, using The Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter and moving averages, to assess whether the Taylor rule is effective or not effective by using more than one dependent variable.
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Bolten, Annika. "Pegs, politics and petrification : exchange rate policy in Argentina and Brazil since the 1980s." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2009. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/254/.
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Currency crises have long constituted one of the most important sources of politicoeconomic instability across middle-income emerging markets, with exchange rate pegs having been identified as key culprits. Given pegs’ propensity for boom-bust-cycles, it is thus puzzling that governments insist on implementing such constraining regimes and, more importantly, that they tend to postpone exchange rate flexibilisation until a disorderly exit becomes inevitable. This thesis addresses as its core puzzle exchange regime choice in middleincome emerging markets in Latin America, and especially the phenomenon of ‘exchange rate petrification’, by examining the tumultuous exchange rate history of Argentina and Brazil. Adopting a qualitative approach and using comparisons between periods and countries, it traces the process of exchange rate policymaking on the basis of participant interviews and archival and media research over a period ranging from re-democratisation in the early 1980s, through the decade of structural reforms under nominal exchange rate anchors in the 1990s until the crisis exits to inflation-targeting under ‘dirty floats’ in the new millennium. The study shows that existing studies, which narrowly focus on electoral opportunism, credibility-building motivations or structurally-determined interest group pressures derived from OECD contexts, fail to capture the reality of emerging market exchange rate politics, their distinct economic structural context and the inter-relationship between exchange rate policy and executives’ structural reform endeavours. Instead, the analysis suggests that only a model of exchange rate politics that centres on intra-executive dynamics, but incorporates their interplay with societal cleavages and the role of international financial institutions, can account for the countries’ divergent exchange rate policy and especially the differential severity of ‘exchange rate petrification’. Using the cases of Argentina and Brazil as a backdrop, the thesis offers an explanation for the problematic nature of exchange rate pegs that goes beyond the analysis offered by the economics literature, and instead highlights their inherently political nature insofar as national governments conceive of nominal pegs as coalition-building devices in the context of politically controversial structural reforms. Aside from structural factors, such as liability dollarisation, it is governments’ reluctance to surrender this political instrument that perpetuates ‘exchange rate petrification’. As ‘exchange rate petrification’ presupposes the absence of sustained exchange rate politicisation, the thesis also refines the literature’s exchange rate politicisation hypothesis by incorporating several intervening variables, such as the institutional structure of organised society, the nature of the political system and ideational factors, which may mute calls for exchange regime change and thus generate permissive circumstances for exchange rate pegs to petrify.
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Lerskullawat, Attasuda. "Financial development and monetary policy transmission : the case of Thailand." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2014. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/4797/.
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This thesis aims to examine the channels of monetary policy transmission relating to the banking sector (mainly the bank lending channel, firm balance sheet channel and the interest rate channel), and also to investigate the effect of financial development on these channels in Thailand. We first examine the bank lending channel by introducing the micro-data based study (bank panel data) and using the panel data estimation (fix effect, 2SLS, and GMM estimation). Our result confirms the theoretical aspect of the bank lending channel and we also found that the higher the banks’ size, liquidity, and capitalization will weaken the bank lending channel. The second study will investigate the firm balance sheet channel by examining the effect of firms’ financial condition on firms’ investment and using the GMM estimation. We also found that the less financial constraint firms will have a weaker effect of monetary policy via the firm balance sheet channel than the more financial constraint ones. The third study will examine the interest rate channel by focusing on the interest rate pass-through and using the VECM cointegration technique. We found the pass-through in both long-run and short-run with a relatively high degree in long-run than short-run. For the effect of financial development, we found that banking sector development, capital market development, financial liberalization, financial innovation, and financial competition will cause a weaker effect of the policy interest rate via the bank lending channel and the firm balance sheet channel. However, all of these different aspects of financial development (except the banking sector development) shown a stronger effect on the interest rate pass-through and hence strengthen the interest channel.
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Yoo, Ho-Yeol Paul. "A New Political Economy of Economic Policy Change in South Korea, 1961-1963: Crisis, Uncertainty, and Contradiction." The Ohio State University, 1990. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1394809853.
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Depew, Briggs Bourne. "Public Policy and Its Impact On the Labor Market." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/293446.
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My dissertation consists of four chapters that are motivated by understanding the intended and unintended economic outcomes of public policy in the labor market. My particular focus is studying how individuals respond to incentives created by policy and welfare reform. The first chapter explores the effect of expanding dependent health insurance coverage to young adults. I study both the outcomes from state policies and the recent Affordable Care Act (ACA). In the second chapter I analyze the unintended consequences of a New Deal policy that paid farmers to reduce production. As a result, I find significant displacement of croppers and tenants in the Cotton South. The third chapter ties together the micro-foundations of the labor supply to the firm with the macroeconomic areas of on-the-job search theory and the business cycle. By using employee level data from two US manufacturing firms in the volatile inter-war period, I show that these two firms had significantly more wage setting power during recessions than expansions. My final chapter addresses the question of how does reduced immigration restrictions affect the composition of immigrants in the US.
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Fornaro, Luca. "Essays on monetary and exchange rate policy in financially fragile economies." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2013. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/789/.
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In my thesis I study policy interventions, with particular attention to monetary and exchange rate policy, in financially fragile economies. The thesis is composed of four chapters, and each chapter deals with different forms of policy interventions and different dimensions of financial fragility. However, the four chapters share a common message: appropriately designed policies can play a key role in improving macroeconomic performance in economies vulnerable to the risk of financial crises. In the first chapter I consider the role of the exchange rate regime in determining the adjustment to episodes of global deleveraging. To achieve this goal, I develop a framework for understanding the international dimensions of episodes of debt deleveraging. During an episode of international deleveraging world consumption demand is depressed and the world interest rate is low, reflecting a high propensity to save. If exchange rates are allowed to float, deleveraging countries can depreciate their nominal exchange rate to increase production and mitigate the fall in consumption associated with debt reduction. The key insight is that in a monetary union this channel of adjustment is shut off, and therefore the falls in consumption demand and in the world interest rate are amplified. Hence, monetary unions are especially prone to hit the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate and enter a liquidity trap during deleveraging. In a liquidity trap deleveraging gives rise to a union-wide recession, which is particularly severe in high-debt countries. The model suggests several policy interventions that mitigate the negative impact of deleveraging on output in monetary unions. In the second chapter, I consider another policy that can be useful in managing episodes of debt deleveraging: debt relief. As illustrated by the analysis in the first chapter, deleveraging can push the economy into a liquidity trap characterized by involuntary unemployment and low inflation. A debt relief policy, captured by a transfer of wealth from creditors to debtors, increases aggregate demand, employment and output. Debt relief may benefit creditors as well as debtors and lead to a Pareto improvement in welfare. The benefits from a policy of debt relief are greater the more the central bank is concerned with stabilizing inflation. The third chapter considers the role of exchange rate policy in economies in which financial fragility arises because the value of collateral is determined by asset prices. The dependence of collateral on asset prices introduces pecuniary externalities that create scope for policy interventions. In this case, a fundamental trade-off between financial and price stability arises, because the central bank has an incentive to deviate from its traditional objective of granting price stability in order to manipulate asset prices and collateral. The main result is thus that the presence of pecuniary externalities in the credit markets makes a narrow focus on price stability sub-optimal. The fourth chapter, joint with Gianluca Benigno, considers the role of foreign reserves in emerging economies characterized by growth externalities and the risk of sudden stops on capital inflows. We present a model that reproduces two salient facts characterizing the international monetary system: Fast growing emerging countries i) Run current account surpluses, ii) Accumulate international reserves and receive net private inflows. We study a two-sector, tradable and non-tradable, small open economy. There is a growth externality in the tradable sector and agents have imperfect access to international financial markets. By accumulating foreign reserves, the government induces a real exchange rate depreciation and a reallocation of production towards the tradable sector that boosts growth. Financial frictions generate imperfect substitutability between private and public debt flows so that private agents do not perfectly offset the government policy. The possibility of using reserves to provide liquidity during crises amplifies the positive impact of reserve accumulation on growth. The optimal reserve management entails a fast rate of reserve accumulation, as well as higher growth and larger current account surpluses compared to the economy with no policy intervention. The model is also consistent with the negative relationship between inflows of foreign aid and growth observed in low-income countries.
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徐奕培 and Yig-pui Tsui. "Urban land policy in China: a case study of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1992. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31977157.
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Arnberg, Klara. "En ohejdad kommersialism? : Den pornografiska pressen och regleringen av pornografi i Sverige 1950-2000." Licentiate thesis, Umeå University, Department of Economic History, 2007. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-1468.
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This licentiate thesis describes the Swedish pornography policy and how this policy affected the pornography industry. The main aim of the study is to survey the development of the Swedish porn industry 1950-2000 and to consider how it was imagined both as an industry, and as a commercialized form of sexuality. The focus is on the relationship between the pornography industry and the state, and to study this relationship, the thesis is divided into three different but related parts.
The first part concerns the institutional settings with main focus on the abolition of censorship in 1971. The political debates about legalizing pornography are studied in order to ascertain how industry and its actors are conceptualized in this context. It also draws attention to why regulation of the industry was considered necessary in the first place, as well as the how changes in the legislation affected the economic development of the industry itself.
The second part concerns the Swedish pornographic press. My purpose is to map out all publishing houses that produced pornographic magazines from 1950 to 2000, and to chart some aspects of their economic fortunes. The history of pornography and connections to technological change is also studied in terms of estimating the influence of the video breakthrough on sales figures and market strategies for the publishing houses that had to deal with this development.
In the third part, I study the regulation in action, i.e. when the publishers of pornographic magazines are prosecuted. I analyze all of the pre-1971 prosecutions – that is, the prosecutions that took place before regulation was removed. Using these records, it is possible to determine how the regulation was implemented, what content was considered harmful, and how that changed over time. This material, that includes the preliminary investigations from the police, also shows how the pornography producers handle the institutional settings to escape responsibilities and punishment.
In this thesis, I show that the pornography industry in Sweden has a complex and changing relationship to the state. Although pornography is unwanted by politicians during the period, pornography is allowed to publish pictures without any restriction on sexual content in the 1970s. The argument for the deregulation is that censorship is incompatible with a modern democratic and liberal state. Pornography serves as a modern dilemma when the phenomenon is viewed as incompatible with a modern society, conflicting with the goal of gender equality, and when a regulation is seen as incompatible with the idea of basic liberties in a modern democracy.
When it comes to the industry it shows that, quite unexpected, a lot of companies are run by women or as family businesses. There are no empirical grounds for the claim that pornography is an all male industry then, at least not in the Swedish case. The study also shows that the Swedish pornography industry was well established before the law change.
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Wagman, Ira. "From spiritual matters to economic facts : recounting problems of knowledge in the history of Canadian audiovisual policy, 1928-61." Thesis, McGill University, 2006. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=102229.
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Using a theoretical model incorporating recent work in the field of historical epistemology and Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality this dissertation reconsiders key moments in the history of Canadian audiovisual policy as sites for examining the production of knowledge about national cultural activity. Drawing upon archival records, interdisciplinary research and a discursive analysis of policy documents, I argue that the resolution of questions regarding the nature of cultural expertise and the evidentiary value of different forms of knowledge accompanied changing state rationale towards film and broadcasting and foreshadowed the refashioning of Canada's audiovisual sector.To illustrate, I focus on a period between the establishment of the first Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting in 1928 and the institution of Canadian content regulations for television in 1960. During this period there are important shifts in the ways the federal government conceived of and administered the audiovisual sector. In the 1920s and 30s, broadcasting and film production were nationalized and placed within publicly funded institutions such as the CBC and NFB. However, less than twenty-five years later, policy rationale towards the audiovisual sector had shifted, with measures put in place to support the development of the cultural industries. The CBC's dominance over broadcasting and regulation had been replaced by a new structural arrangement involving both public and private broadcasters regulated by independent agencies using content quotas to ensure Canadian programming on the airwaves. In Canada's film sector, the NFB's expansion into feature film and television production was halted through policy shifts encouraging the development of the independent film production sector.
Using case studies that explore the historical context behind the emergence of key administrative techniques I document the declining influence of cultural nationalists and humanistic approaches to cultural issues and the rising influence of accountants, statisticians, and scholars from the nascent field of communication studies in the policy process. These developments run concurrently to shifting government rationale towards the audiovisual sector away from developing "national consciousness" towards the creation of a "national economy" for broadcasting and film drawing on previous industrial development models borrowed from the automotive sector and 19th century National Policy.
Although scholarly attention in the field of cultural policy studies has generally focused upon understanding why these shifts occurred, this thesis is devoted primarily towards understanding how such shifts took place. Attention to these questions moves the field of study away from the pragmatic issues of policymaking and towards larger questions surrounding the triangulation between knowledge, state, and cultural production.
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Siddiqui, Asif. "Microeconomic theory and foreign policy crisis decisions : Bangla Desh, 1971." Thesis, McGill University, 1991. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=60684.
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This study analyzes the Bangladesh Crisis by building upon previous works that have applied microeconomic theory to international relations. One of the most innovative lines of inquiry from the realist school is to study international relations through analogy with microeconomic theory. Although used to analyze conflict, war, and the workings of the international system, a strict application of microeconomic theory to interstate crises is rare. This thesis will endeavour to contribute to this linkage.
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Bonnyai, Samuel. "Innovation modes, determinants and policy effectiveness : a firm level empirical study using the UK CIS 4, 5 and 6." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4689/.
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This thesis makes use of recently collected UK Community Innovation Survey data to investigate 3 areas that allow to characterise and thus understand more clearly the innovation process in the UK. Firstly strategies of innovation used by firms are identified. Next the determinants of innovation, that is factors driving innovation inputs and outputs, are estimated. Thirdly this work examines the effectiveness of financial public support towards innovation. This also allows to establish which firms are more likely to be in receipt of public support and thus whether government innovation policy is in line with its objectives. Furthermore in this thesis a measure of absorptive capacity for the CIS is created, to see whether this proxy contributes in explaining innovative activities and the receipt of public support towards innovation. Similarly a measure of appropriability is generated for use as an explanatory variable in the estimation of the determinants of innovation. Both of these measures permit to find out if their latent variables have nonlinear effects in explaining propensity and extent of innovative spending. All these aspects have not received attention in previous literature, in large part due to the novelty of the data used. Besides the empirical evidence gained on the above, the addition to the literature of this thesis lies in examining several CIS survey rounds together. For one this serves as a robustness check for the conducted applications and on the other hand it allows investigating the comparability of the survey rounds. For this work the CIS 4, the CIS 5 and the CIS 6 are used as they are the most similar and comparable samples of UK businesses to date. Nevertheless it was found that differences in terms of design, wording and exclusion of responses to some question sets in the different surveys impedes their use for trend analysis and panel data analysis. Something the data collecting agencies need to address in the future. Despite these issues the conducted investigation has provided useful insights into innovation as it takes place in the UK. The first empirical chapter has been able to identify two major modes of innovation as captured by the survey. A ‘traditional’ or ‘linear’ strategy aimed at introducing product and process innovations, relying on innovative activities such as R&D and also making use of sources of information, more strongly from market sources then from science sources. Secondly a ‘dynamic’ or ‘systemic’ strategy also involving innovative activities such as R&D but more strongly making use of knowledge sources from science as well as relying on cooperation. The interpretation of this “blue skies strategy” which is not directly linked to achieving technological outputs is that it generates knowledge that helps to keep abreast of market developments and to be ready to spot opportunities in line with the literature on dynamic capabilities thus the identified strategies allow for a plausible interpretation congruent with innovation theory. In this chapter the aforementioned measure of appropriation and absorptive capacity were also successfully generated. These were then shown to play a significant role in explaining innovative activities in the subsequent empirical chapter, both exhibiting decreasing returns to scale. Following the CDM methodology this work has confirmed that knowledge capital as proxied by predicted R&D spending intensity is as important in generating service innovations as it is in stimulating goods innovations for the UK. The results also show that absorptive capacity not only indirectly impacts the likehood of introducing service innovations through its effect on knowledge capital as for goods innovations but also directly. This suggests that services once conceived further have to be tailored to individual customer’s needs. Hence absorptive capacity is specifically important in a developed economy dominated by service sector industries. At the same time the fit of the models confirmed that the CIS could do better at explaining service and process innovations by soliciting more information that are likely to cause these types of innovation. Finally further support for the innovation productivity nexus has been found. The last empirical chapter then established that absorptive capacity is also an important factor explaining the likehood of firms to be in receipt of financial public support towards innovation. This chapter further concluded that the financial public support towards innovation in the UK has in the recent past been effective at stimulating innovative performance besides just R&D spending. The government’s objective of supporting start-ups, that potentially face difficulties in financing their innovative activities, as well as supporting cooperation, vital for the dissemination of knowledge in the economy, is met according to the results. However SMEs could not be shown to be statistically more likely to be in receipt of public support despite facing the same problems as start-ups, though at least they are not less likely to be in receipt of public support then large firms. This finding stipulates that policy objectives are not achieved with regard to specifically targeting SMEs.
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More, Alexander Frederick Medico. "At the Origins of Welfare Policy: Law and the Economy in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean (1150-1350)." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13068537.
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This dissertation is an economic and institutional history of the first comprehensive public health and welfare system in the Western world. Based on previously unexamined archival and archaeological evidence from several European repositories, it argues that the Republic of Venice, at the beginning of the second millennium, implemented legislation of unprecedented scale, intended to regulate and improve the health and standards of living of its population. The Venetian empire, in this period, was unrivaled in its dominance of Mediterranean trade. Economic success and the densifying networks of communications brought new challenges, and new health stresses, including communicable disease, to key commercial hubs under Venetian control, on the Dalmatian coast and islands in the eastern Mediterranean.
At this time, a period commonly known as the Commercial Revolution, Venice itself became one of the most populous and wealthiest European cities. The government of the Republic allocated a substantial portion of its surplus revenues to the establishment and funding of new welfare legislation, influenced by Roman and Byzantine legal precedents. The nature of the Venetian parliamentary system gave rise to a host of detailed norms aimed at subsidizing the import of food and primary necessities. In addition, the Republic created and funded the first and largest state-sponsored staff of medical practitioners in Europe, intended to preserve the public's health in the expansive territories under its control. These practitioners were chosen, by and large, on the basis of testimonies of magistrates and patients who vouched for their expertise and reputation.
Through a detailed analysis of archival, archaeological and narrative evidence, this dissertation alters our understanding of the development of pre-modern states and their contribution to the creation of what historians have broadly defined "welfare policies." Comparisons between the prices of primary necessities among multiple cities of the Mediterranean test the effects of such policies on the standards of living of European populations. A comprehensive list of all public health infrastructures in Venetian territories outlines the long-term role of the state in the creation and funding of hospitals, hospices and orphanages. By contextualizing new and old evidence, this dissertation argues that, in crafting these new policies, Venetian legislators yielded to economic and political considerations, as well as popular expectations and traditions of evergetism.History
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au, p. flatau@murdoch edu, and Paul Robert Flatau. "Essays in the Development, Methodology and Policy Prescriptions of Neoclassical Distribution Theory." Murdoch University, 2006. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20091123.135256.
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This thesis consists of revised versions of five published papers on the development of neoclassical distribution theory, in the English-speaking world together with an introduction and conclusion, which draw together the themes of the papers. The thesis covers the origins of neo-classical distribution theory in the English-speaking world in the work of Jevons and Marshall, through to the second generation of Wicksteed, Clark and Pigou, and finally on to the 1930s and the new perspectives of Hicks and Robinson.
Drawing on archival sources and primary and secondary texts, these essays review the major statements on distribution theory made by key figures in the Jevonian and Marshallian marginalist traditions. The essays shed new light on the origins of neoclassical distribution theory and provide insights into the methodology of nascent neoclassical distribution theory. A drive towards a universal, all-embracing marginal productivity theory of the distribution of income characterises the work of Clark and Wicksteed, but not so Marshall. A formalist mode of analysis, which was to become the hallmark of neoclassical economics in the second half of the twentieth century, is also evident in key works of the period. However, the role of empirical evidence in theory generation and appraisal remains an undeveloped component of late nineteenth and early twentieth century neoclassical theoryMarshall again provides an exception to the general rule.
There is a common adherence, among the key figures examined, to the joint proposition that competitive market wage outcomes are fair, but that low incomes (fair or not) are unjust when they fail to meet minimum needs standards. State remedial action (tax and expenditure policies) is required to remove such injustices. Robinsons theory of exploitation provided an important extension to the neoclassical normative framework. She highlighted the extent to which labour may be exploited due to imperfections in both product and labour markets.
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Shin, Sang Hoon. "Dysfunctional consequences of the Korean performance budgeting system and their policy implications." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2013. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/4380/.
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In 2005, the South Korean government implemented a system of performance budgeting: Self-Assessment of Budgetary Programmes (SABP). Most studies on this system have focused on the relationship between SABP results and subsequent budget allocations. These studies are based on the premise that the SABP system itself is operating well, and consequently SABP results are reliable. However, this thesis questions that premise and analyses the process for arriving at SABP results, especially focusing on differences in views on the merit of programmes between the spending ministries and the Ministry of Strategy and Finance (MOSF), which controls SABP. The thesis addresses four key research questions: Which factors affect differences in views in the SABP process? What are the dysfunctional consequences of SABP? What is the impact of these dysfunctional consequences? And, lastly, what feasible policy alternatives can be proposed? The study suggests that there is a tendency to optimism bias by spending ministries in their self-assessment programmes, often leading to a subsequent drastic downward review of such assessments by the MOSF. These results are established by both quantitative and qualitative analysis. This thesis also provides evidence of dysfunctional effects arising from the SABP process, some of which are “unintended” by both spending ministries and the MOSF, while others are “unintended” by the designers of the SABP system but are likely to be “intended” by the spending ministries, as “agents” in the principal-agent relationship. The thesis concludes that both the unintended and intended dysfunctional consequences of SABP are sufficiently important to suggest that the performance budgeting system needs to be carefully re-designed, and proposals are made for feasible refinements to the SABP process.
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Li, Kangying, and n/a. "The influence of the commercialisation of the economy on maritime policy in Ming China." University of Otago. Department of History, 2007. http://adt.otago.ac.nz./public/adt-NZDU20071001.155057.
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The Ming maritime prohibition policy (1371-1568) reversed the maritime policies of the preceeding Tang, Song and Yuan dynasties. It was maintained for two centuries at considerable costs, but in 1568 was eventually abolished. There has not yet been a satisfactory analysis of this policy, which addresses the issues of why it was introduced, why it was maintained for so long, and why, eventually, it was overturned. This thesis takes a new approach to understanding these issues. Instead of focusing solely on external factors, such as the need for defence against Japanese piracy, it focuses on the internal situation of Ming society, and instead of focusing on the policy as an epiphenomenon it considers the social foundation for Ming foreign trade policy.
In this thesis, the maritime policy is treated as a product of the social, economic and political configurations of Ming China. It argues that the establishment of the policy, its maintenance and abolition reflect two different socio-economic structures, hence two different political bases. The suppression of commerce during the early Ming reflected the interests of the political elite that came to power with the establishment of the new dynasty. The abolition of the maritime prohibition reflected the way the commercialisation of the socio-economic landscape brought a new political élite to power, in which many more officials with merchant-family backgrounds participated in the policymaking process. Commercialisation drove the social re-configuration and reshaped the political landscape, and this resulted in the late Ming years in an overturn of many of the policies that had been introduced at the beginning of the dynasty. Such a structural approach allows us to gain a richer understanding of the maritime prohibition policy.
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Hughes, Christopher William. "Japanese economic power and security policy in the post-Cold War era : a case study of Japan-North Korea security relations." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 1997. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/14741/.
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This thesis investigates the future direction of Japanese security policy by asking whether Japan can contribute to international security through the use of economic rather than military power after the Cold War, and what are the policy-making obstacles to this. Chapter one outlines how the post-Cold War debate on security has shifted from military to economic conceptions of security, and how this makes it possible to conceive of Japan as a global civilian power which employs its economic strength to contribute to international security. Chapters two and three then go on to construct a detailed theoretical model of economic security policy and Japanese economic power in order to test empirically the concept of global civilian power in the case study. Chapter four introduces the case study of Japan-North Korea security relations and demonstrates that since the end of the Cold War the North Korean security threat has come to be perceived by policy-makers in Japan as generated by economic insecurity, and thus requiring the types of economic solutions that a global civilian power can provide. Chapter five then tests the model of Japanese economic power against the case of North Korea and reveals that even though Japan has the latent capacity to use economic power to help resolve this security problem, as yet it has not mobilised sufficient economic power to enable it to act a global civilian power. Chapter six looks at the internal security policy-making process in Japan in order to explain the reasons behind Japan's non-fulfillment of the role of a global civilian power, and argues that in fact Japan in this period has increased its military role in security by utilising the legitimacy of the North Korean threat. In the light of the preceding arguments, the conclusion reappraises the concept of global civilian power, Japan's security role, and the implications for global security.
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Papadia, Andrea. "Government action under constraints : fiscal development, fiscal policy and public goods provision during the Great Depression and in 19th and early 20th century Brazil." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2017. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3683/.
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This dissertation is composed by three papers whose unifying themes are the origin and impact of fiscal institutions. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it highlights the usefulness of the concept of fiscal capacity for the macroeconomics and international finance literatures by demonstrating its impact on sovereign default and fiscal dynamics during the Great Depression. Limits to the ability to tax have clear implications for macro-financial research, but are neglected by much of the literature. Second, my work contributes to the fiscal and state capacity literature by focusing on municipal level fiscal institutions in Brazil. Although research in this field is burgeoning, our understanding of the origin and impact of fiscal institutions in many parts of the world, including Latin America, is still very limited, particularly at the sub-national level. In terms of structure, the dissertation is a backwards journey from the impact of fiscal institutions to their origin. The first paper studies one of the ultimate outcomes of fiscal dynamics – sovereign default – by analyzing the debt crisis of the 1930s. The second paper takes the collapse in public revenues during the Great Depression as a starting point and demonstrates that fiscal institutions were a fundamental factor in the dynamics of fiscal aggregates. By shifting the focus to a single country and a different time period – the second half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries – the third paper demonstrates that slavery was deeply detrimental to the development of local governments’ ability to tax and provide fundamental growth and welfare-enhancing public goods in Brazil.
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Compaore, Eveline Marie Fulbert Windinmi. "The role of the National Innovation Systems Framework in facilitating socio-economic development in Burkina Faso : model and policy practice." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2016. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/36975/.
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Since the 1960s the government of Burkina Faso has consistently sought to implement new development policies to improve the economic and social conditions of its people. Until the end of the 1990s these efforts have been disappointing and unsatisfactory. In the early 2000s there was a shift towards a knowledge-centred development policy and policy makers trusted that it would bring about the sough-after improvements. In 2006 Burkina Faso chose to adopt the National Innovation Systems (NIS) framework as a policy tool to implement this new policy. Drawing on a broader definition of technology that covers social technologies, this thesis used the ST-Systems analytical concept to chart the adoption and diffusion of the NIS policy tool at two levels, namely at strategic policy level and at the operational level, focusing here on the case of Bt cotton which was officially introduced to Burkina Faso in 2003. Ethnographic methods, including in-depth interviews with policy makers, farmers, Monsanto representatives, civil society actors and researchers, were used to gain new insights into the difficulties encountered by these actors when trying to implement the NIS policy tool. 60 interviews were analyzed against a backdrop of detailed historical studies, based on examining a large amount of grey literature, published between 1961 and 2016. Findings show that the implementation of the NIS policy for innovation diffusion for socio-economic development in Burkina Faso was shaped by local actors competing for control of financial resources and power positions. The new tool also had to compete with older, more familiar tools. In the end, it failed to bring about the expected improvements in policy design and practice at sectoral level. The thesis is among the first to have studied empirically the transfer processes of the NIS policy tool for innovation diffusion in an African country (Burkina Faso) through a case study focusing on the introduction of Bt cotton. The results achieved should contribute to more informed development policy-making in Burkina Faso.
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Kettell, Steven. "The political economy of exchange rate policy-making : a re-assessment of Britain’s return to the gold standard in 1925." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2002. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3890/.
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This thesis examines the political economy of exchange rate policy-making from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. It argues that conventional means of understanding this subject are problematic, and it develops an alternative framework for analysis based on a Marxist methodology. From this perspective exchange rate policymaking is understood to be a component part of a wider governing strategy that is made by the core executive with a view to regulating class struggle, to providing favourable conditions for capital expansion, and for ensuring a sufficient degree of freedom for the pursuit of high political goals. This theoretical framework is applied empirically through an examination of Britain’s return to the gold standard in 1925. In contrast to conventional explanations for this policy decision it is argued that the return to gold was the central component of a governing strategy designed to address long-term economic and political difficulties in the British state through the imposition of financial discipline and the ‘depoliticisation’ of economic policy-making. Furthermore, in contrast to conventional assessments of the policy as having been a disaster, it is also argued that the return to gold was a relative success. Though failing to resolve Britain’s economic difficulties, the policy was generally successful in containing class unrest and in enabling the core executive to displace pressures over economic conditions and policy-making away from the state. The substantiation given to the alternative theoretical view of exchange rate policymaking by these empirical claims is also supported by an examination of the policy regime developed after the collapse of the gold standard, and by a brief examination of Britain’s membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism from 1990-1992, which is shown to have direct parallels with the return to gold. On this basis, the thesis offers a firm foundation for drawing wider generalisations about the political economy of exchange rate policy-making in terms of an alternative Marxist perspective.