The Effects of Export, Technical change and Markup on Total Factor Productivity Growth: Evidence from Singapore's Electronics Industry

This paper illustrates a new technique to measure the effect of export demand on the conventional TFP growth index at the industry level. We apply the technique to Singapore’s electronics industry and find that rapid growth in exports accounts for most of the TFP growth in this industry.TFP growth, exports, Singapore's electronics industry

Killing the Goose that Lays the Golden Egg: a Time-Series Analysis of Institutional Change and Economic Growth in Hong Kong

This paper examines how the rule of law and democratic accountability have affected Hong Kong’s GDP growth rate in the past 20 years. We find that democratic accountability has deteriorated substantially since the changeover of sovereignty in 1997, while the rule of law has remained strong and stable. Empirical results from ARDL bounds tests show a strong positive long-run relationship between growth and democratic accountability, and Granger causality tests reveal that democratic accountability causes the growth rate of GDP in the short run. These conclusions are robust to controlling for the effects of investment and the Asian financial crisis in 1997. Our results suggest that the deterioration in democratic accountability following the handover in 1997 has come at the expense of a considerable decline in economic growth, and controverts popular arguments in Hong Kong that improving democratic accountability will harm economic growth.Institutions, growth, democratic accountability, rule of law, Hong Kong

Does Rapid Economic Growth Accelerate Democratization? Time-Series Evidence from High Performing Asian Economies

We examine the direction of causality between growth and democratization for the high performing Asian economies using a new time-series technique called autoregressive distributive lag. We find that for all eight of such economies, the direction of causality runs consistently from democratization to growth and not the other way around. Rapid growth in the high performing economies appears to have little effect on democratization. We also find that the net effect of democratization on growth is not always positive. Against the widely-held view that growth enhances democratization, our evidence suggests that rapidly developing countries under authoritarian rule are unlikely to improve their democratic institutions.Growth, Democratization, High performing Asian economies

Growth volatility and technical progress: a simple rent-seeking model

Recent empirical evidence demonstrates that a higher level of technical progress is associated with a lower level of growth volatility and higher expected economic growth. This paper builds a simple growth model which combines the insights of Angeletos and Kollintzas (2000) and Tse (2000, 2001, 2002) with endogenous productivity growth and rent-seeking behavior to account for these stylized facts. Our model also complements the literature that focuses on the heterogeneity of different agents. Future research directions are also discussed.volatility of economic growth, technical progress, rent-seeking, stabilization policy, institution.

An Exploration of the Efficiency of the Chinese Stock Market

This paper explores weak and semi-stong efficiency for both A and B shares traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges using daily data for seven indexes for the period 1992-2001. We find evidence of departures from weak efficiency in the form of predictability or returns on the basis of their own past values. Over the period as a whole this was most marked for the B shares in both the exchanges and absent altogether in the index for the 30 leading stocks on the Shanghai market, suggesting that previously reported predictability simply reflects thin trading. We also find evidence that efficiency suffered when banks were excluded from the stock market in 1996 and efficiency improved when they were re-emitted in early 2000. We also find widespread evidence of the day-of-the-week effect as others have before us. Interestingly, we found this effect to have completely disappeared after 1999. In the area of semi-strong market efficiency, we found predictability from the predicability from the A to the B board returns in Shanghai but no evidence of cross-board causality in Shenzhen.

The Dynamic Interrelationships Between the Greater China Share Markets

This paper investigates the interrelationships between prices on the mainland Chinese share market and those in the neighbouring markets of Hong Kong and Taiwan. While there is a growing literature on interrelationships between share market including the emerging markets in Asia, very little is known about the role of mainland markets in the region. We consider the interrelationships between the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges and those in Hong Kong and Taiwan. We begin by combining the Shanghai and Shenzhen price indexes into a single value-weighted index and investigating its relationship to the indexes for Hong Kong and Taiwan. We find that the mainland markets are relatively isolated from the other two markets considered, although after the Asian crisis there is evidence that Hong Kong has weak predictive power for returns in the mainland. Hong Kong also clearly Granger-causes Taiwan although the reverse is not true. Both Hong Kong and Taiwan have strong contemporaneous relationships, a feature which is more market after the Asian crisis. We also analysed the two mainland markets separately, both by themselves and with Hong Kong. We found some predictability of thes prices in one market on the basis of lagged prices in the other although this was less apparent after the Asian crisis. Both before and after 1997, there were strong contemporaneous relationships between the two mainland markets, vindicating our earlier decision to treat them as a single market.

The Deep Historical Roots of Macroeconomic Volatility

We present cross-country evidence that a country's macroeconomic volatility, measured either by the standard deviation of output growth or the occurrence of trend-growth breaks, is significantly affected by the country's historical variables. In particular, countries with longer histories of state-level political institutions experience less macroeconomic volatility in postwar periods. Robustness checks reveal that the effect of this historical variable on volatility remains significant and substantial after controlling for a host of structural variables investigated in previous studies. We also find that the state history variable is more important in countries with a higher level of macroeconomic volatility