The world crisis: the implications of globalised finance

The term “globalisation” has survived its first significant sell-by date in modern times. Rightly, it continues to attract policy attention and debate at the very highest levels. Together with just a handful of others—economic growth and inequality, financial crisis, climate change—with all of which it remains inextricably intertwined, only globalisation among economic phenomena has both effects and causes observable from outer space. Its impact on the welfare of humanity is therefore singular. This is even before one considers the sweeping changes in culture and politics that ever greater global integration both requires and engenders. This article cannot hope to cover the massive body of modern thinking that surrounds globalisation. Instead, what it seeks to do is two-fold: first, flag, with the benefit of hindsight, some of the key background points that any continuing discussion of globalisation needs to keep in mind; and second, offer conjecture where the most likely contentious issues in the near future might be. To keep within space constraints, careful and exhaustive discussion of empirical evidence is omitted. Instead, just the largest salient facts are provided where needed

The invisible hand and the weightless economy

As modern economies grow, production and consumption shift towards economic value that reside in bits and bytes, and away from that embedded in atoms and molecules. This paper discusses the implications of such changes for the nature of ongoing growth in advanced economies and for the dynamics of earnings and income distributions - polarization, inequality - across people within societies

The aggregate weak axiom in a financial economy through dominant substitution effects

Consider a two period financial economy with incomplete markets and with agents having von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions. It is well known that when the economys endowments are collinear, the excess demand function will obey the weak axiom when certain mild restrictions are imposed on agents coefficient of relative risk aversion. This result is obtained through the application of a theorem on the law of demand (for individual demand) formulated independently by Milleron (1974) and Mitjuschin and Polterovich (1978). In this paper, we develop their arguments further and apply them to economies without collinear endowments. We identify conditions which guarantee that the economys excess demand function obeys the weak axiom near an equilibrium price.

What Do We Learn from Unit Roots in Macroeconomic Time Series?

It is often argued that the presence of a unit root in aggregate output implies that there is no "business cycle": the economy does not return to trend following a disturbance. This paper makes this notion precise, but then develops a simple aggregative model where this relation is contradicted. In the model output both has a unit root, and displays repeated short-run fluctuations around a deterministic trend. Some summary statistical evidence is presented that suggests the phenomena described in the paper is not without empirical basis.

Internet Cluster Emergence

Internet development holds the promise of transmitting economic value across physical space at zero marginal cost. In such a 'weightless economy', what factors matter for the location of economic activity and thus for economic development? This paper sketches a model of spatial dynamics over a three-dimensional globe, where transportation costs don't matter. The paper develops conditions under which clusters of activity emerge.Distribution dynamics, economic geography, internet, location, space, time, Toepitz, weightless economy

Comparative Statics of the Weak Axiom

This paper examines the comparative statics of Walrasian economies with excess demand functions which obey the weak axiom. We show that in these economies there is a precise sense in which goods that are in excess supply (demand) after some perturbation will experience a fall (rise) in its price. We apply this to an exchange economy with additive utility functions, which can be interpreted as a financial economy with von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions. We show that when the subjective probabilities which agents attribute to a particular state falls, so will the price of consumption in that state. Another interesting issue is the impact of changes to the endowment on the equilibrium price. We develop conditions under which, for an exchange economy, this equilibrium map - from endowment to equilibrium price - will obey the weak axiom and another stronger, monotonicity property.

One Third of the Worlds Growth and Inequality

This paper studies growth and inequality in China and India û two economies that account for a third of the world's population. By modelling growth and inequality as components in a joint stochastic process, the paper calibrates the impact each has on different welfare indicators and on the personal income distribution across the joint population of the two countries. For personal income inequalities in a China-India universe, the forces assuming first-order importance are macroeconomic: growing average incomes dominate all else. The relation between aggregate economic growth and within-country inequality is insignificant for inequality dynamics.China, distribution dynamics, Gini coefficient, headcount index, India, poverty, world individual income distribution

Cross Country Growth Comparison: Theory to Empirics

This paper reviews the cross-country record of economic growth, using as organizing framework how economic theory has guided that empirical analysis. The paper argues that recent studies of economic growth û both empirical and theoretical û distinguish from previous work in three distinct ways: 1. An explicit focus on cross-country growth and development experiences; 2. Improved, more extensive cross-country data; 3. A heightened need, driven by real-world topicality, for understanding the role of knowledge and technology in economic growth.Convergence, cross-section, regression, distribution dynamics, endogenous growth

Pursuing Green Growth: Some Conflicts and Necessary Conditions for a Pragmatic Environmental Policy

This paper focusses narrowly on three areas of public policy concerning the environment deemed necessary for sustainable economic growth. It has relevance to Asian nations as they continue to demand for higher growth and at the same time keeping environmental degradation in check. The three areas are: (1) the issue of siting environmentally unfriendly but nationally required facilities, otherwise known as the NIMBY syndrome, (2) the waste generation problem, and (3) the need to price green goods. In addition to the above three areas for public policy, the paper also discusses a number of pragmatic principles for use in environmental management. Such things as cost-benefit analysis and project appraisal; the pursuit of clean and advanced technologies and inherent conflicts; exploring market solutions; understanding multiple stakeholders; and last but not least the need to establish data baselines for environmental quantity and quality.

Ideas are not like other assets.

Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) are supposed to be a system to reward creative thinkers. But Danny Quah finds that all too often they fail both in theory and in practice. Here he explores other possibilities, particularly in relation to computers and software.