Governance Quality and Economic Growth

Among both academics and the wider development community there seems to be a general acceptance of the value of good governance and its role in promoting economic growth. However, beyond this general statement, there is a lack of deeper theoretical understanding as to why good governance is expected to foster economic growth and how such effects may take place. We de.ne governance quality as the capacity of a government to internalize externality. A theoretical model is developed to formally integrate governance quality into an endogenous growth framework. We elucidate the underlying mechanisms, through which governance quality affects economic performance: governance quality affects the productivity of public investment and in turn has an impact on economic performance. We also highlight that the endogeneity of governance quality and development stages have strong implications for the governance-growth relationship.

Migrant Entrepreneurs and Credit Constraints under Labour Market Discrimination

We use a unique data of representative migrants and urban local workers in 15 Chinese cities to investigate entrepreneurship and credit constraints under labour market discrimination. We divide self employed into prefer to be self-employed and prefer to have a salaried job but cannot find one; and divide salaried workers into want-to-be entrepreneurs and happy-to-be salaried workers. Over 40 percent of migrant workers are either currently or want-to-be entrepreneurs. Both groups are very similar in terms of risk taking preferences and network size. Want-to-be entrepreneurs however suffer from credit constraints identified by negative financial shocks in the year before. Our back-of-envelope calculation reveals that overcoming the current level of credit constraints may be worth 2% of GDP per year direct earnings increases.entrepreneurs, credit constraints, migration, China