Legislative Participation in Budgetary Systems: Is there Evidence of Convergence?

Concepts such as lesson-drawing, policy diffusion, policy transfer and, more recently, “isomorphic mimicry” have been used to suggest that, over time, administrative practices, policies and governance systems across countries are converging. Three different sources of data are used to examine the extent of convergence in the roles of legislatures in budget processes. Taken together, there is very limited evidence of convergence despite the efforts of entities such as the International Budget Partnership or and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.     

Population and income: Is there a puzzle?

Abstract

This note presents wide evidence on the relationship between population and income for 125 countries for which data was available for the period 1950–2000. The main result is that there is a weak but negative relationship between population growth and per capita GDP, as income increases population expands at a slower rate. This relationship appears to be stronger for African countries and for Asian countries before 1970.     

Is global inequality getting better or worse? A critique of the World Bank’s convergence narrative

The dominant narrative of global income inequality is one of convergence. Recent high-profile publications by Branko Milanovic and the World Bank claim that the global Gini coefficient has declined since 1988, and that inter-country inequality has declined since 1960. But the convergence narrative relies on a misleading presentation of the data. It obscures the fact that convergence is driven mostly by China; it fails to acknowledge rising absolute inequality; and it ignores divergence between geopolitical regions. This paper suggests alternative measures that bring geopolitics back in by looking at the gap between the core and periphery of the world system. From this perspective, global inequality has tripled since 1960.     

Income inequality and level of corruption in post-communist European countries between 1995 and 2014

This paper analyses the relationships between income inequality and corruption in Europe and looks specifically at post-communist European countries. The scientific community agrees that there is important relationship between income inequality and corruption and many authors believe that low income inequality is connected to low corruption. According to empirical papers, this is true not only on the European scale, but also on a global scale. In this paper, I test this claim by conducting a multilevel analysis on 39 European countries in the period of 1995–2014. This model ascertains that there are immense differences between post-communist countries and the rest of European countries. The effects of income inequality on the level of corruption are discussed.     

Divergence in India: Income differentials at the state level, 1970–97

Abstract

We examine India's regional disparities in economic performance between 1970–97. Our preliminary analysis shows that, in absolute terms, initially poorer states grew at slower rates than initially wealthier ones and that there is also evidence of increasing dispersion of income levels across the states. Our econometric analysis investigates the possibility of club convergence and conditional convergence. Although we do not find evidence of the former, we can suggest some of the factors associated in the latter. Our research also indicates that the onset of economic policy reform in 1991 significantly intensified growth differentials between the states.     

Son Preference and Household Income in Rural China

Why is it that couples who have a son or whose last child is a son earn higher conditional income? To solve this curious case we tell a detective story: evidence of a phenomenon to be explained, a parade of suspects, a process of elimination from the enquiry, and then the denouement. Given the draconian family planning policy and a common perception that there is strong son preference in rural China, we postulate two main hypotheses: income-based sex selection making it more likely that richer households have sons, and an incentive for households with sons to raise their income. Tests of each hypothesis are conducted. Taken as a whole, the tests cannot reject either hypothesis but they tend to favour the incentive hypothesis; and there is evidence in support of the channels through which the incentive effect might operate. To our knowledge, this is the first study to test these hypotheses against each other in rural China and more generally in developing countries.     

Human Trafficking,A Shadow of Migration – Evidence from Germany

This paper investigates relationship between migration and human trafficking in Germany by analyzing macro-level data from 150 countries. The empirical results suggest that migrant networks of a specific source country pull human trafficking from that respective country. However, the migration effect varies across different income levels of source countries. The positive effect of migration on human trafficking decreases as income increases, and furthermore, the effect is irrelevant to high income countries. In addition, the migration effect is particularly significant on the criminalisation side of human trafficking, but the evidence is less clear when it concerns the victimisation side.     

Inequality and Economic Growth: The Empirical Relationship Reconsidered in the Light of Comparable Data

Almost all the recent empirical work on the relationship between income inequality and economic growth has used inequality data that are not consistently measured. This article argues that this is inappropriate and shows that the significant negative correlation often found between income inequality and growth across countries may not be robust when income inequality is measured in a consistent manner. However, evidence is found of a significant negative correlation between consistently measured inequality of expenditure data and economic growth for a sample of developing countries.     

Progress in Health around the World

Health is a key component of human development. This article looks at how health is measured, and the convergence of health across countries. We argue that health measures should account for illness as well as mortality, but in practice life expectancy is a reasonable proxy for population health. While health is improving we see two distinct groups of countries in the data, clustering around different long run steady states. Many countries have experienced large health gains without prior income gains and in countries not affected by HIV/AIDS the last 40 years have been a success story in terms of health.     

Food Price Transmission and Economic Development

In this paper we challenge the conventional wisdom that the world’s poorest countries are also the most vulnerable to spikes in international food prices. We derive an inverted U-shaped relationship between food price transmission and the development level of a country from a theoretical model. This prediction is subsequently tested in two sets of regressions where economic development is approximated by per capita income and where we control for a number of other potential determinants of food price transmission. The first set of regressions is based on estimated transmission elasticities and the second on actual domestic food price changes during spikes in international food prices. In both sets of regressions we find strong evidence of the existence of an inverted U-shaped relation between food price transmission and income. Thus, food prices in middle income (rather than in low income) countries respond the strongest to changes in international food prices, implying that the poor in these countries are the most exposed to spikes in food prices. We also show that the factors explaining the variation in the estimated transmission elasticities can explain the variation in domestic food price changes during spikes in international food prices equally well.     

German and Italian Municipalities’ Internal Control Systems: Convergence to a Neo-Weberian Reform Pattern?

This article contributes to the debate on convergence/divergence of public management reforms toward the new public management (NPM) paradigm by analyzing the internal control systems (ICSs) in Germany and Italy. Specifically, the study describes the ICS established at the normative level in German and Italian municipalities and evaluates the extent of the decisional convergence to NPM, using the INTOSAI guidelines. Although similarities between the two ICSs and the INTOSAI guidelines emerged, decisional convergence is not demonstrated. Instead, these countries seem to converge to a Neo-Weberian reform pattern since they are cautious in the introduction of new managerial tools and they maintain their domestic original ICS.     

International comparisons of income levels and growth rates

Development literature contains the hypothesis that middle income countries grow faster than other countries. This proposition has been related to a second hypothesis of stages and rates of growth, as well as to an ‘automatic mechanism’ for the reduction of international income disparities. This article examines the relevant evidence and finds the propositions unsupported by either theory or empirical data.     

Structural Convergence in Manufacturing Industries between Leaders and Latecomers

This article uses cross-country panel data on three-digit manufacturing to test for progressive structural convergence in industrial output mix between industrialising and industrialised economies. Regressions based on Logistic and Almost-Ideal models show that industrial deepening entails share losses for light and selected heavy manufacturing, and share gains for engineering and consumer durables. While semi-industrial economies manage to shift into petrochemical and engineering industries, the least industrialised nurture a broad spectrum of non-traditional manufacturing. Diversity in factor endowments and policy notwithstanding, growing similarity in demand and technological diffusion appear to produce weak convergence of industrial structures between developing and developed countries.     

Export instability and the domestic economy: Questions of causality

The conventional view concerning the impact of export instability on the domestic economies of developing countries is one of pessimism. Export instability is thought to adversely affect the short‐run stability and longer‐run growth of income. Empirical evidence on these matters is, however, inconclusive. This article applies a Granger/Sims reduced form approach to examining whether export instability generates short‐run instability in domestic income. For each of a sample of 20 trade‐dependent countries the results obtained strongly support the contention that export instability induces short‐run macroeconomic instability.     

Inequality,Economic Development,and Democratization

Although multiple theories suggest that economic development and inequality somehow affect democratization, these claims have received only limited empirical support. I contend that much of the confusion stems from the implicit assumption held by the literature that development and inequality affect democratization independently of one another. In this paper, I argue that the effect of income distribution on democratization is in fact contingent on the income level: in middle-income countries inequality fosters democratization; in rich countries, however, it harms democratization. Using a data set covering almost all autocracies between 1960 and 2007, I find evidence consistent with my hypothesis.     

PROTECTING PRIVACY ACROSS BORDERS: EUROPEAN POLICIES AND PROSPECTS

This article discusses the attempt to create a system governing the use of personal data within the European Community (EC) and between it and other countries. First, the main issues involved in data protection are reviewed, and the background to current developments in international standard-setting activity is traced. The factors that affect the possibility of harmonization are then examined, and the ability of the EC to establish further convergence in data protection policy is commented upon. It is argued that, while there continue to be notable strides towards a convergence of statutory principles, of scope, and of the powers of regulatory instruments, there will remain significant obstacles to the convergence of practice.     

Globalization and Prison Privatization: Why Are Most of the World's For-Profit Adult Prisons to Be Found in the American South?

For a generation, students of comparative public policy and international politics have argued that global market discipline and the increasing mobility of international "best practices" have given rise to policy convergence at the global level. This paper uses the American case to investigate some of the forces thought to have given rise to the spread of private prisons. It finds that while there are prisons in a number of countries, the evidence of convergence is thin and seems to suggest that the core of the prison privatization is in the American South. It then examines several theories—the political economy of the prison boom and overcrowding, globalization theory, the politics of the new right and the idea of a "prison-industrial complex"—that have been used to explain prison privatization and the extent to which they are consistent with the empirical pattern. Each takes us some way to understanding that pattern, but none can provide a clear theoretical mapping.     

Toward Evaluating the Effectiveness of Regional Partnerships for Economic Development in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

During the past few decades, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of regional partnerships in the United States to enhance economic development across local government jurisdictions. This trend has been mirrored by an increase in regional organizations in Europe, Asia and South America to enhance economic development, usually across national boundaries. While the literature has examined the formation, structure and activities of regional partnerships for economic development in the United States, this is the first study that attempts to measure their effectiveness across a large number of geographical areas using quantitative methods. The findings provide some evidence of their effectiveness in that there is a positive and significant relationship between regional partnerships and employment; the relationship between regional partnerships and income is positive but insignificant. This study may be informative in the further study of regional economic development organizations in other countries as well as regional partnerships and organizations in other policy arenas.     

Tax revenue instability,with particular reference to sub‐Saharan Africa

This article examines the temporal instability of tax revenues across a sample of developed and less developed countries. It is shown that instability is especially high in LDCs and is highest in open economies with low per capita income, high output variance and inflationary problems. Even allowing for these factors, revenue instability appears to be particularly high in sub‐Saharan Africa. Revenue instability can be expected, via the government budget constraint, to be associated with expenditure instability and/or instability in the sources of deficit finance. Cross‐section evidence for LDCs confirms that countries with high tax revenue instability tend also to have high expenditure instability. Time‐series evidence for six African countries however, suggests that revenues and expenditures do not move together in a uniform manner, and the direction of causality is generally ambiguous. There is some evidence however that foreign borrowing is used more to finance expenditure increases than to counteract revenue shortfalls.     

Convergence: The Useful Myth?

Many academics have questioned the thesis (most prominently associated with Osborne and Gaebler's Re-inventing government ) that there is an inevitable and global convergence towards a particular, new style of public management. Yet, despite the ongoing production of scholarly evidence of global diversity, pronouncements of convergence continue to be made by politicians, civil servants and some academics.
In this paper it is suggested that, better to understand this apparent controversy, a more subtle conceptualization of convergence is needed. First, convergence can take place at different stages or levels — for example, there can be convergence in debate, convergence in reform decisions, convergence in actual practices, or, ultimately, convergence in results. There is no automatic succession from one stage to the next: the momentum of convergence can (and frequently does) stall or dwindle at any point. Furthermore, it should be recognized that convergence claims may have a value of their own, whether or not they lead to actual convergence of practice or improvements in outcomes. Convergence, in short, may be a useful myth.