World Economics Journal Archive
The contents of all previous issues of World Economics are listed below. Subscribers have access to the complete back issue archive: click on titles to view abstracts and full text of articles (PDF). If you are not a subscriber, sign-up online now.
Remittances and their Macroeconomic Impact: Evidence from Africa
Mthuli Ncube & Zuzana Brixiova, World Economics, December 2013
This paper examines the macroeconomic trends, drivers and the impact of remittances in Africa. First, it documents the increasing share of remittances relative to other foreign capital flows to Africa, the distribution of remittance inflows across countries, and some ke ... More
African Diaspora Remittances are Better than Foreign Aid Funds: Diaspora-driven development in the 21st century
Adams Bodomo, World Economics, December 2013
In this article, two sources of socio-economic development finance for Africa, African Diaspora remittance funds and Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) funds, are compared. It is argued that Diaspora remittance funds constitute a better alternative to ODA funds for t ... More
Human Resource Development (HRD) and Foreign Remittances: The case of South Asia
Muhammad Abdul Wahab, Vaqar Ahmed & Hamid Mahmood, World Economics, December 2013
This study tries to document linkages between HRD, migration and remittances in South Asia. We have explained in detail the various channels through which HRD promotes migration and remittances, and a case has been made not to consider this process as brain drain – rath ... More
Why India is Vulnerable to Portfolio Investment Movements: Analysis of capital flows between India and the United States
Mandira Sarma, World Economics, December 2013
This paper analyses the trend of capital flows between India and the US during 2000–2012. The US is a major source of foreign capital in India, through both direct and portfolio investment. During this period, portfolio investment from the US to India dominated over dir ... More
The New Transparency in Development Economics: Lessons from the Millennium Villages controversy
Michael Clemens & Gabriel Demombynes, World Economics, December 2013
The Millennium Villages Project is a high profile, multi-country development project that has aimed to serve as a model for ending rural poverty in sub- Saharan Africa. The project became the subject of controversy when the methodological basis of early claims of succes ... More
Managing a Changing World Economy: Challenges and scenarios
Graham Bird, World Economics, December 2013
The world economy has been experiencing a period of great and dramatic change. In part this has been associated with the rapid emergence of China, the BRICs and other newly industrialising economies. Evolution in the world economy is quickly changing the structure of gl ... More
Why Russia Resists Facebook: Domestic social networking sites dominate in former Soviet Union
Piotr Konwicki, World Economics, December 2013
The social media websites phenomenon started in 1997 with SixDegrees.com, which allowed users to create profiles, list their Friends and surf the Friends lists. Facebook launched in 2004 and became synonymous with the growth of this sector, exceeding 1.1 billion active ... More
How The Crown Estate Could Become Britain’s First Sovereign Wealth Fund
Brian Sturgess & Keith Boyfield, World Economics, December 2013
The United Kingdom is one of a few larger economies without a national wealth fund. This paper investigates the feasibility of a recent proposal to turn The Crown Estate, one of Britain’s largest property investment and management businesses, into such a Sovereign wealt ... More
Real Estate and the Great Financial Crisis
Richard Barkham, World Economics, September 2013
Politicians and macro policymakers have identified regulatory weakness in the banking sector as the key cause of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). This allows the easy apportionment of blame and the straightforward, if painful, reforms to banks’ operating procedures. In ... More
Understanding Commercial Property Price indexes
Mick Silver, World Economics, September 2013
The type of database used for the measurement of commercial property price indexes (CPPIs) dictates the potential weaknesses in the resulting indexes and limitations of the methods available for measuring the indexes. Two major types of data are appraisals of the value ... More
Using Reputation to Grow Corporate Value
Simon Cole, Brian Sturgess & Michael Brown, World Economics, September 2013
Corporate reputations rank amongst companies’ most valuable assets. They are delivering substantial proportions of their market capitalisations and are a major source of value generation. Their significance is being felt in a wide variety of business sectors including r ... More
From Stellar Growth to Underperformance: The Abiding Vulnerability of the Indian Economy
Dilip K. Das, World Economics, September 2013
The economic trajectory of the Indian economy has altered several times. After decades of severe underperformance, the Indian economy gradually picked up momentum in the 1980s and 1990s, and turned in a stellar performance during the 2000s. This paper examines the ratio ... More
Asset Poverty in India
Swati Dutta, World Economics, September 2013
In order to formulate policy to target the correctly identified rural poor in India, focus on an income poverty measure alone is insufficient. The purpose of this research is to study a new area of poverty measurement based on data that detail a household’s access to ba ... More
The Economic Impact of Private Equity
Colin Ellis, World Economics, September 2013
Over the past half century, private equity has grown from a tiny part of the financial sector into a powerful industry, often controlling global brands. As the industry has grown, so too has academic interest in the sector. However, the vast majority of empirical resear ... More
Demystifying Youth Unemployment
Terence Tse, Mark Esposito & Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, World Economics, September 2013
Youth unemployment has become an ever increasing serious socio-economic problem, which deserves far more attention that it has so far received. In this article, we examine the causes of this issue. They include 1) countries losing the ability to compete effectively and ... More
Strengthening the Early Warning Exercise: Enhancing IMF and FSB coordination
Bessma Momani, Skylar Brooks, Michael Cockburn, Warren Clarke & Dustyn Lanz, World Economics, September 2013
Following the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, the G20 leaders tasked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the newly created Financial Stability Board (FSB) to jointly undertake Early Warning Exercises (EWEs) in order to identify vulnerabilities within the global ... More
Industrial Rebalancing is Already Here, But Can it Continue?
Nate Taplin, World Economics, June 2013
In mid-2012, as China’s economy decelerated, growth in electricity production – traditionally a good proxy for the health of industry – diverged strongly on the downside from official measures of industrial value added. While many analysts interpreted this incongruence ... More
Poor Economic Statistics Fuel China’s Low Consumption Myth
Jun Zhang & Tian Zhu, World Economics, June 2013
The generally held belief that China’s consumption is too low is a myth based on inadequate theory, a misreading of official statistics and the use of market exchange rates for making international comparisons. Chinese official statistics underestimate consumption expen ... More
How Safe is SAFE’s Management of China’s Official Foreign Exchange Reserves?
Friedrich Wu, Robbert-Jan Korthals & Ng Kuan Khai, World Economics, June 2013
This paper examines whether the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) and its subsidiary SAFE Investment Company (SIC), the sole managers of China’s gargantuan official foreign exchange reserves (OFER) until 2007, have shifted their investment behaviour since ... More
Cross-Border Financial Integration in Asia and the Macro-Financial Policy Framework
Philip R. Lane, World Economics, June 2013
In relative terms, Asia came through the global financial crisis relatively well. In part, this can be attributed to its conservative approach to international financial integration. At the same time, financial globalisation means that Asia cannot be fully insulated fro ... More
The Eurozone: Whatever happened to convergence?
Julian Gough, World Economics, June 2013
This article examines the degree of convergence of the economies of the eurozone since the start of the single currency in 1999. Convergence, both in nominal and real forms, is measured using the coefficient of variation of several economic variables. The results sugges ... More
Maastricht: Union that Foresaw its Failure but Closed its Eyes
Josh Rosner, World Economics, June 2013
As the global financial and economic crisis drags on, European regulators and policy-makers are continuing in their attempts to find a path from crisis towards stability, while balancing the public interests of independent sovereign nations desirous of a deeper financia ... More
Light at the End of the Tunnel: The Eurozone’s sovereign debt problem
Elliot Y. Neaman & Shalendra D. Sharma, World Economics, June 2013
In October 2012, the Norwegian Nobel Committee honoured the EU with the 2012 peace prize for creating a peaceful and stable Europe after the destructive wars and economic crises of the twentieth century. However, it would have been more appropriate to bestow the prize o ... More
The EMU Versus the EPU: A historical perspective on trade, payments and the European financial crisis
Juan Carlos Martinez Oliva, World Economics, June 2013
This article draws upon the analogy between the current European institutional setting, in the face of the current European crisis, and the rules and institutions that were established in the post-war years to achieve trade liberalisation and a multilateral payments sys ... More
Agricultural Statistics: Who benefits from distortions?
Morten Jerven, World Economics, March 2013
In developing economies the data on agricultural production are weak. Because these data are assembled using competing methods and assumptions, the final series are subject to political pressure, particularly when the government is subsidizing agricultural inputs. This ... More
Averting a Global Food Crisis: Policy and data needs
Keith Boyfield, World Economics, March 2013
The World Bank’s Food Price Watch reached a new historic peak in August 2012. High and volatile food prices spell real hardship for the world’s poor, and supply problems due to volatile climatic conditions have exacerbated the surge in global food prices. Investment in ... More
Pastoralism: Africa’s Invisible Economic Powerhouse?
James MacGregor & Ced Hesse, World Economics, March 2013
Many elements of developing economies are missing from their national accounts. This is more than a statistical dilemma. It hampers the development of government policy, results in under-investment in those missing elements and simultaneous over-investment in others, an ... More
Going Beyond Averages: Data, development aid and context
M.G. Quibria, World Economics, March 2013
One of the persistent, unresolved controversies of economic development is the effectiveness of development assistance – whether foreign aid contributes to economic development. This article argues that this controversy is largely an artefact of a methodology that focus ... More
Life after Debt: The Greek PSI and its aftermath
Miranda Xafa, World Economics, March 2013
The Greek debt exchange (PSI) that took place in March 2012 was unprecedented in two ways: it was the biggest sovereign default ever and the first within the euro area. This paper examines the debt exchange and the subsequent debt buyback with a view to drawing lessons ... More
The Liquidity Consequences of the Euro Area Sovereign Debt Crisis
William A. Allen & Richhild Moessner, World Economics, March 2013
We examine the liquidity effects of the euro area sovereign debt crisis on euro area banks as a group, on intra-euro area financial flows and on international liquidity. The lending capacity of the euro area banking system has been much weakened, despite the remarkable ... More
The ‘Good Global Citizen’ Remit of the IMF: Reforming international economic and financial cooperation
Biagio Bossone & Roberta Marra, World Economics, March 2013
In the highly globalized world economy of our times, where markets are tightly integrated, setting domestic economic policy with a view simply to keeping one’s house in order is no longer optimal. New responsibilities follow for each member of the community of countries ... More
The Collapse of Consensus: The contemporary confusion over macroeconomic policy
Graham Bird, World Economics, March 2013
Consensus in macroeconomics helps policymakers formulate a coherent and logically consistent group of policies. At different times in the post-war era there has been consensus around first Keynesian and then monetarist ideas. Economic crises have frequently brought one ... More