Cost efficiency and banking performances in a partial universal banking system: application of the panel smooth threshold model

This paper studies the cost efficiency of bank in a partial universal banking system (PUBS), Taiwan. Instead of assuming one common technology in the bank cost function, two technologies are assumed to be imbedded in the cost function. Fee revenues are used as threshold to divide the banks into two technologies. A bank whose fee revenues exceeding the threshold is designated as universal bank technology while falling below the threshold is designated as traditional deposit-loan technology. The panel smooth transition model is adopted, which allows banks to smoothly adjust between the two technologies. Two criteria are suggested, overbanking and the trend-toward-fee revenues, to assess the new model's performances. With respect to scale economies, the results do find a panel smooth transition model yield more reasonable results than the conventional OLS and random effect of panel data approach. Based on the panel smooth transition model, the optimal fixed asset size is around ten billion New Taiwan dollars.

How best to link poverty reduction and debt sustainability in IMF-World Bank models?

This paper attempts to provide an economic model in the context of developing countries to address the policy strategies related to poverty reduction. With a view to deal with the shortcomings of the existing approaches as regards poverty reduction, this paper develops a model on the basis of the policy framework of the IMF and the World Bank to show how demand growth can be a crucial mechanism in determining the potential rate of growth, and then to suggest ways in which poverty—conceptualised officially in absolute terms with a subjective cut-off point (e.g. US $1/$2 a day), and a new objective measure in terms of consumption deprivation—can be linked with the key policy variables contained in the adjustment programmes. A strategy of investment in infrastructure and in human development, and improving access to credit markets, particularly in rural areas to encourage or 'crowd in' private investment is a precondition for growth and poverty alleviation. Debt relief can only provide a temporary, not a sustainable, solution to the problem of reducing poverty.Stabilisation, growth, poverty reduction, debt sustainability,

The role of macroeconomic instability in public and private capital accumulation and growth: the case of Turkey 1963-1999

This study investigates the empirical relationship(s) between macroeconomic instability, public and private capital accumulation and growth in Turkey over the period 1963-1999. Time series econometric techniques, such as cointegration and impulse response analysis, are used. The results of this paper suggest that the chronic and increasing macroeconomic instability of the Turkish economy has seriously affected her capital formation and growth. Furthermore, the Turkish experience indicates that chronic macroeconomic instability seems to be a serious impediment to public investment, especially to its infrastructural component, and shatters, or even reverses, the complementarity between public and private investment in the long run.