Foreign bank penetration, resource allocation and economic growth: evidence from emerging economies

This paper examines the implications of foreign bank penetration on economic growth from the perspective of resource allocation in host countries. We use aggregate banking data, constructed from bank-level balance sheets and income statement information covering more than 1200 banks in the 35 emerging economies of Asia, Latin America and Eastern and Central Europe for the period from 1996 to 2003. By applying the pooled OLS and fixed-effects models, we present consistent evidence that the effect of gross fixed capital formation on output growth is higher in an economy with a more pronounced level of foreign bank penetration relative to an economy with a lower level of foreign bank penetration. This finding suggests that foreign banks play an important role in allocating capital in a more productive way, thus leading to a higher economic growth rate. One of the main policy implications of our findings in this paper is that foreign banks may serve as a channel in enhancing economic integration of emerging economies with advanced economies that are the home countries of foreign banks.foreign bank penetration; economic growth; resource allocation

A note on approximating the min–max vertex disjoint paths on directed acyclic graphs

AbstractThis paper shows that the FPTAS for the min–max disjoint paths problem on directed acyclic graphs by Yu et al. (2010) [7] can be improved by a rounding and searching technique

A new spreading scheme for convolutionally coded CDMA communication in a Rayleigh-fading channel

There has been increased interest in the use of direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS/CDMA) for wireless communication systems. We find that the asymptotic bit-error probability (BEP), P_b, of a convolutionally coded code-division multiple-access (CDMA) system in a frequency-selective Rayleigh-fading channel depends on the length of the shortest error event path and the product of symbol distances along that path. Based on this observation, we propose a new spreading scheme that maximizes the length of the shortest error event path. It is shown that the proposed scheme yields an improvement of 1.0-1.3 dB at P_b = 10^(-5) over the conventional convolutionally coded CDMA system, and even a higher improvement can be achieved as the required BEP is decreased