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Industrial Ownership and Environmental Performance
The authors explore the differences in pollution control performance of industries with different types of ownership in China-state-owned (SOE), collectively- or community-owned (COE), privately owned (POE), companies with foreign direct investment (FDI), and joint ventures. About 1,000 industrial firms in three provinces of China were surveyed, and detailed 1999 firm-level information was obtained. The authors analyzed the differences between firms in receiving and reacting to environmental regulatory enforcement, community pressure, environmental services, as well as in the firm's internal environmental management among the different types of ownership. The authors also conducted econometric analyses on the determinants of pollution discharge performance. The results show that foreign direct investment and collectively-owned enterprises have better environmental performances in terms of water pollution discharge intensity, while state-owned enterprises and privately owned enterprises in China are the worst performers. The results also suggest that collectively-owned enterprises in China do internalize environmental externalities.
Land Allocation in Vietnam's Agrarian Transition
Abstract: While liberalizing key factor markets is a crucial step in the transition from a socialist control-economy to a market economy, the process can be stalled by imperfect information, high transaction costs, and covert resistance from entrenched interests. Ravallion and van de Walle study land-market adjustment in the wake of Vietnam's reforms aiming to establish a free market in land-use rights following de-collectivization. Inefficiencies in the initial administrative allocation are measured against an explicit counterfactual market solution. The authors' tests using a farm-household panel data set spanning the reforms suggest that land allocation responded positively but slowly to the inefficiencies of the administrative allocation. They find no sign that the transition favored the land rich or that it was thwarted by the continuing power over land held by local officials. This paper"a joint product of the Poverty Team and the Public Services Team, Development Research Group"is part of a larger effort in the group to understand the welfare impacts of major policy reforms.
Tax Systems in Transition
How have tax systems, whose primary role is to raise resources to finance public expenditures, evolved in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union? Mitra and Stern find that: (1) the ratio of tax revenue-to-GDP decreased largely due to a fall in revenue from corporate income tax; (2) the fall in revenue from the corporate income tax led to a decline in the importance of income taxes, notwithstanding a rise in the share of individual income tax; (3) social security contributions together with payroll taxes became less important in the Commonwealth of Independent States; and (4) domestic indirect taxes gained in importance in overall tax revenues. Apart from the i...
The Potential Demand for an HIV/AIDS Vaccine in Brazil
This study assesses the potential demand by the public sector for a preventive HIV/AIDS vaccine in Brazil and the costs of alternative strategies for a vaccination program. Brazil has a mature AIDS epidemic: the percent of the population living with HIV or AIDS (about 0.6 percent of adults) is not as high as in other severely affected developing countries, but infection rates in specific risk groups in the population are very high and HIV has spread beyond these groups into the general population of low-risk individuals. Preventive HIV/AIDS vaccines are still in the testing stage. The characteristics of the first vaccines developed, in terms of their efficacy, duration of effectiveness, ease...
Is the Emerging Nonfarm Market Economy the Route Out of Poverty in Vietnam?
Are the household characteristics that are good for transition to a more diversified market-oriented development process in Vietnam also important for reducing poverty? Or are there tradeoffs? The determinants of both poverty incidence and participation in rural off-farm activities are modeled as functions of household and community characteristics using comprehensive national household surveys for 1993 and 1998. Despite some common causative factors, such as education and region of residence, the processes determining poverty and inhibiting diversification are clearly not the same. Participation in the emerging rural nonfarm market economy will be the route out of poverty for some, but certainly not all, of Vietnam's poor. This paper--a product of Public Services, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to understand how to reduce poverty.
Regulation, Productivity and Growth
In this paper, we relate the scope and depth of regulatory reforms to growth outcomes in OECD countries. By means of a new set of quantitative indicators of regulation, we show that the cross-country variation of regulatory settings has increased in recent years, despite extensive liberalisation and privatisation in the OECD area. We then look at the regulation-growth linkage using data that cover a large set of manufacturing and service industries over the past two decades. We focus on multifactor productivity (MFP), which plays a crucial role in GDP growth and accounts for a significant share of its cross-country variance. We find evidence that reforms promoting private governance and competition (where these are viable) tend to boost productivity. Both privatisation and entry liberalisation are estimated to have a positive impact on productivity. In manufacturing the gains are greater the further a given country is from the technology leader, suggesting that regulation limiting ...
Rapid Labor Reallocation with a Stagnant Unemployment Pool
Lithuania is a transition economy undergoing rapid enterprise restructuring associated with substantial job turnover. At the same time, unemployment in Lithuania is high and of long duration. This presents a puzzle: high job turnover epitomizes labor market flexibility, while high unemployment indicates labor market rigidities. What are the reasons behind this paradox? Why do the unemployed not benefit from job opportunities created by high job turnover, which entails high rates of job creation and hiring? To answer this question, the author looks at three perspectives on labor market flexibility: 1) The macroeconomic perspective-A flexible labor market is one that facilitates full use and e...
Improving Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems OECD Conference Proceedings
This conference proceedings from the OECD Conference on Agricultural Knowledge Systems (AKS), held in Paris inJune 2011, discusses experiences and approaches to AKS explores how to foster development and adoption of innovation to meet global food security and climate change challenges.
The Impact of Contractual Savings Institutions on Securities Markets
Impavido, Musalem, and Tressel assess empirically the impact of contractual savings institutions portfolios (pension funds and life insurance companies) on securities markets, for example, depth and liquidity in the domestic stock market, and depth in the domestic bond market. They discuss how the institutionalization of savings can modify financial markets through the lengthening of securities' maturities. The results are the following: * An increase in assets of contractual savings institutions relative to domestic financial assets has a positive impact on the depth of stock and bond markets on average. * The impact on stock market depth and liquidity is nonlinear: it is stronger in countr...
