Growth, Development Policy,Job Creation and Poverty Reduction

Policies seeking to directly help the poor have an important role to play. But without sustained growth in per capita output and significant job creation, they will not succeed. Policies promoting growth have been suggested, most notably by avoiding pro-cyclical responses to macroeconomic shocks (especially from abroad), steering macroeconomic prices, such as exchange and interest rates, to support developmental objectives, pursuing industrial and trade policies involving increasing returns, promoting financial development, and making productive use of foreign aid. Ensuring national economies have sufficient policy space to achieve sustained growth and structural change should be the over-riding policy concern.Macroeconomic policy; development policy; economic growth; poverty reduction; employment; job creation.

Development Questions for 25 Years

development, growth, economic policy, institutions

Fiscal issues in macroeconomic stabilization

A key question for stabilization programs concerns how governments get into fiscal difficulty in the first place. Accordingly, this paper is about fiscal policy issues that arise during such macroeconomic stabilization in developing economies. Specifically, this report sets out the basics, as they apply in the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) studies and takes up three theories about the fiscal deficit. According to these theories, deficits may arise because of political or structural reasons, or perhaps because the relevant authorities want to maximize revenue from the inflation tax. The report also discusses the effects of deficit reduction, a central component of orthodox stabilization packages and examines other fiscal topics brought up in the WIDER country papers.Economic Stabilization,Banks&Banking Reform,Access to Markets,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies

Structural Change, Economic Policy, and Development

This study is about the growth and development performance of non-industrialized regions in the latter part of the 20th century. We find that sustained per capita GDP growth was accompanied by structural change in terms of output and labor share shifts as well as productivity growth with (in some cases) strong reallocation effects due to movements of labor from low to high productivity sectors. Regions that did not enjoy per capita growth showed little structural evolution apart from a rising employment/population ratio in service sectors. On the demand side, we examine shifts in net borrowing by the private sector, government, and rest of the world. Mutually offsetting co-movements of government and foreign net borrowing occurred sporadically at most. In other words, the widely accepted “twin deficits” view of macro adjustment does not seem to apply. Macroeconomic flexibility, on the other hand, may be very important. The policy background for these findings is sketched out along with a critique of justifications provided by the World Bank. Proposals are advanced for policy changes.

Real Exchange Rate, Monetary Policy and Employment

The exchange rate affects the economy through many channels and, consequently, has diverse macroeconomic and development impacts. Five are analysed in this paper: resource allocation, economic development, finance, external balance and inflation. The use of the exchange rate as a developmental tool in conjunction with its other uses (often in coordination with monetary policy) is at the focus of the discussion.exchange rate, development policy

Empty Sources of Growth Accounting, and Empirical Replacements à la Kaldor with Some Beef

Standard sources of growth accounts are empty of content because they rely on neoclassical production theory. Rather, analysis can be based on productivity growth quations derived either from NIPA accounting conventions or algebraic identities. These complementary schemes impose valid restrictions on growth rates of the wage rate, profit rate, capital, labor, and their respective average productivities. A Solow-type growth model based on proper accounting can be shown to converge. Detailed results differ markedly from those of the standard model. Alternative, essentially Kaldorian supply-and demandbased alternatives to sources of growth based on a familiar output growth vs. productivity growth diagram with constant employment growth contours added in look like a useful alternative to the mainstream modelsSources of Growth Accounting, Total Factor Productivity Growth, Kaldorian Growth Model

Developing and Transition Economies in the Late 20th Century: Diverging Growth Rates, Economic Structures, and Sources of Demand

This study reviews the growth and development performance of developing countries in the latter part of the 20th century. Sustained growth among “successful” countries was accompanied by structural change in terms of output and labour share shifts, trade diversification, sustained productivity growth with some strong reallocation effects due to movements of labour from low to high productivity sectors. Neither the widely accepted “twin deficits” nor the “consumption-smoothing” behaviour views of macro adjustment seem to apply, though macroeconomic flexibility may be very important. Finally, neither human capital accumulation nor foreign direct investment are sufficient, by themselves, to stimulate growth.economic development, structural change, comparative studies, development policy

On Lower Bounds for ss-multiplicities

A recent continuous family of multiplicity functions on local rings was introduced by Taylor interpolating between Hilbert-Samuel and Hilbert-Kunz multiplicities. The obvious goal is to use this as a tool for deforming results from one to the other. The values in this family which do not match these classic variants however are not known yet to be well-behaved. This article explores lower bounds for these intermediate multiplicities as well as gives evidence for analogies of the Watanabe-Yoshida minimality conjectures for unmixed singular rings.Comment: 10 page

The s-multiplicity function of 2x2-determinantal rings

This article generalizes joint work of the first author and I. Swanson to the $s$-multiplicity recently introduced by the second author. For $k$ a field and $X = [ x_{i,j}]$ a $m \times n$-matrix of variables, we utilize Gr\"obner bases to give a closed form the length $\lambda( k[X] / (I_2(X) + \mathfrak{m}^{ \lceil sq \rceil} + \mathfrak{m}^{[q]} ))$ where $s \in \mathbf{Z}[p^{-1}]$, $q$ is a sufficiently large power of $p$, and $\mathfrak{m}$ is the homogeneous maximal ideal of $k[X]$. This shows this length is always eventually a {\it polynomial} function of $q$ for all $s$.Comment: 9 pages, Errors fixe