The household is a critical decision-making and consumption unit and various crucial decisions are indeed made within households. These include decisions on day-to-day expenditures, decisions about where to live, who to live with, who should work and how to raise income, as well as where children should attend school, and how to spend the available income. However, perceiving the household as a single ‘glued-together’ unit, whose interests are as that of an individual, suggests that investigations into intra-familial issues are unnecessary, thus neglecting what actually happens within households. Employing resource theory and the theory of assortative mating in the application of the cooperative intra-household bargaining model, the current study examines the sources of bargaining power that informs financial decision-making processes by females within co-resident couples. The study also determines how bargaining power and financial decision-making of female partners in co-resident couples impact on family-type public goods expenditure.
Research Briefs
Since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods international monetary international currencies have been particularly volatile. This volatility in the relative value of international currencies holds especially true for the currencies of emerging market economies. These economies are arguably more susceptible to the probable negative macroeconomic effects resulting from speculative attacks on their respective currencies than developed market economies. Emerging markets are not characterised as having adequate financial markets and macroeconomic institutions conducive of stability. Nevertheless, exactly what the negative macroeconomic effects could be – if any – has been the subject of considerable empirical scrutiny since the 1980s. Of particular concern to international economists have been to examine what the potential effect of exchange rate volatility could be on global welfare and international trade flows. While the volume of research has been substantial, empirical research has thus far been unable to reach consensus surrounding the conjectured effect that exchange rate volatility may exert on international trade flows. After the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 to 2009, the Great Recession of 2008 to 2012 and with several European countries still reeling from the sovereign debt crisis, emerging market currencies have seen great fluctuations in value over the last couple of years.
Financial structure, the extent to which a country’s financial system is either bank-based or market-based has been shown to have an effect on some countries economic growth, while in other countries, it has been shown to be of no economic significance. Many of the studies have focused on developed and emerging economies that have well developed financial systems relative to the financial systems of developing countries.
Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) is a region of over 950 million people but also with greatest proportion of population without access to electricity. The World Development Indicators reveal that electricity-related CO2 emissions (CO2EM), and the ratio of electricity transmission and distribution losses (RETDL) have been rising in SSA over the past decades, implying deterioration in efficiency of the power sector. Given the recent rising focus on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), studies on the impact of electricity consumption and CO2 emissions on economic growth remain vital to inspire energy policy and academic research. Several studies have examined environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) that hypothesizes environmental quality and economic growth nexus. Closely related to this study, plenty of literature is done on the cointegration between electricity, CO2 emissions and growth. Despite the fact, firstly, accounting for electricity quality is still lacking and remains a serious gap. Secondly, measuring both the nature and size of the influence of electricity-related CO2 emissions on the growth contribution of electricity stock (quantity) and quality is another angle that has not been properly interrogated in the literature. Therefore, we investigate the economic growth effects of both electricity stock and quality before and after accounting for electricity-related CO2 emissions.
Multi-sector sticky price models produce unusual outcomes when the prices of durable goods are flexible. This is because, on the one hand, as empirical evidence suggests, a monetary policy shock results in the positive movement of aggregate consumption in both durable and non-durable goods sectors. On the other, it is because the movement of durable goods is greater than that of non-durable goods, as suggested by Erceg and Levin (2002, 2006). On the other hand, Barsky et al. (2003) show that in a two-sector economy with flexibly priced durable goods and sticky priced non-durable goods, the flexibility of prices of durable goods governs the response of aggregate consumption to a monetary policy tightening. This is because the shadow value of durable goods is approximately constant owing to the typically high stock-to-flow ratio of durable goods. Thus, the responsiveness of the user cost of durable goods does not result in an improvement in total utility for the households.
Competition policy aims to encourage efficiency and promote choice by protecting consumers from anti-competitive behaviour by firms. The rationale is that by creating competitive markets, economic welfare will be maximised. Network industries, like telecommunications or electricity, however, are characterised by scale economies and sunk costs, which create barriers to entrants and prevent effective competition from being realised. In such industries, sector specific regulation plays an important role in preventing incumbents from abusing their market power, by imposing conditions to encourage entry and competition.
The impact of financial development on economic growth has received much attention in the recent literature. The general conclusion is that development of the financial sector is positively related to the level of growth. However, theoretical studies have espoused discontinuities in the relationship. More importantly, the relationship between finance and economic activity is well mediated by the level of initial per capita income, human capital and existing financial development. While this is well documented at the theoretical front, empirical literature is silent on the nonlinearities in finance–growth nexus caused by the threshold variables. Beyond examining the impact of financial development on economic growth for 29 SSA countries over the period 1980–2014, in this study, we further investigate whether the impact of finance on growth is conditioned on the initial levels of countries’ income, human capital and financial sector development. Our overall finding is that, financial development is positively and significantly associated with economic growth. However, the growth–enhancing effect of finance is higher when measured with private relative to domestic credit. We re–examine the threshold effect of finance in the face of the threshold variables. Our evidence suggests that, in almost all cases, financial sector development is positively related to growth albeit insignificantly below the estimated thresholds. The only exception is the impact of private credit on growth below the income threshold where the impact is slightly significant. Similar trend is also noticed when domestic credit mediates the finance–growth nexus.
Lack of information about households’ welfare losses could lead to incorrect policy choices. Given the ever-increasing reliance on electricity, extreme weather conditions and current energy diversification strategies, it is vital that policymakers obtain information about households’ welfare losses due to power outages. According to Schmidthaler (2012), the costs associated with power outages may be direct, indirect or ongoing.
Excessive use of fossil fuels is widely acknowledged as one of the main causes of climate change. The energy sector is one of the sectors that make use of fossil fuels. Greenhouse gasses are released during the combustion of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas, to produce electricity. Generating electricity from nuclear reduces pollution externalities hence it is argued by some to be part of a sustainable solution to achieving low-carbon energy options. This option According to Ertor-Akyazi et al. (2012) since energy security is a critical element in an economy, nuclear energy can play a role in ensuring smooth supply of electricity; it is reliable, and can provide electricity on a larger scale, similar to fossil fuels.
This paper assesses institutional aspects of private shareholding in the central banks of South Africa and Turkey. It is shown that only a small number of central banks other than the SA Reserve Bank (SARB) in South Africa and Türkiye Cumhuriyet Merkez Bankasi (TCMB) in Turkey have any form of private shareholding, although South Africa and Turkey and the only two emerging-market countries with central banks with private shareholding.
Evidence gathered over the past 40 years demonstrates that education is important, both at the micro and macro level. Education has been associated with increase in workers’ productivity, higher economic growth, improved health status and reduced crime among other non-monetary outcomes.
Populism in politics is not a new phenomenon. It has been present for as long as democracy has been in existence. As far back as the time of ancient Greece, Plato remarked on the dangers of populism in democracies. Paraphrasing Plato, “The demagogue gains power by democratic means, claiming to be a champion of ‘the people’ and making wild promises; in particular he offers intoxicating quantities of the neat spirit of independence”. It is clear that populism in democracies has been a recurring feature.
Child malnutrition is an important indicator of poor child health status and is strongly associated with high mortality risk. Childhood malnutrition is also associated with poor health outcomes, educational performance and labour market outcome in later life. Therefore, poor health at childhood is one of the mechanisms for explaining inter-generational transmission of education, economic status and overall human capital formation and underscore why child health condition can be regarded as an important factor for future production and hence economic growth and development. Investment in child health is likely to pay o_ both to the individual in the form of higher future earnings, to the household in the form of overall household income and well-being and to the entire economy by reducing poverty inequality and strengthening economic growth. This explains why child health outcome in developing countries has been one of the concerns of most development agencies in the past decades.
Promotion of exports remain a core objective of trade policy in many countries. Information on how long or how short the duration of a trade relationship is for an average exporter may be important from a policy point of view. Policy makers from almost all countries aim to encourage exports and entry of new exporters, because exports are a major driver of economic growth and jobs. This is usually accompanied by fiscal incentives geared toward promotion of exports and raising the number of new exporters as a performance metric. However, knowledge on how many of these new exporters will be able to survive in international markets remains extremely scarce for countries in the Sub-Saharan Africa, and certainly for Kenya. This is surprising given that the length of survival can be considered one of the most comprehensive measures of exporter performance. This paper seeks to add to a growing literature examining this issue for SSA countries.
Following the worldwide movement calling for responsible global corporate citizenry, there has been a shift in thinking about the role and involvement of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in areas of limited statehood. There is a growing expectation of transparency in MNE dealings with such governments and more active corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, focused on capacity building and development. However, because the state is often unwilling or unable to provide basic services, facilities and infrastructure, local populations have come to expect these tasks to be carried out by MNEs operating in their area that often reluctantly comply. This has blurred the distinction between where the responsibilities of the MNE starts and ends, and has led to the creation of hybrid organizations, and innovative partnerships which seeks to engage with stakeholders and contribute towards broader development goals. Our focus is at a more aggregate level about when, how and why a MNE may opt for a more engaged approach as opposed to a more transactional one in a post-conflict setting.
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