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.
Implications of Illicit Financial Outflows for Macro-economic Management and Development Effectiveness in Africa
Hippolyte Fofack , World Economics, December 2016
In Africa, a persistent rise in illicit financial outflows has compounded macroeconomic management challenges and heightened the risks of recurrent balance of payments crises. It has undermined the build-up of fiscal buffers that could have mitigated the macroeconomic i ... More
Now You See Them, Now You Don’t: the Case of the Shrinking Global Economic Imbalances
Graham Bird, World Economics, December 2016
Global economic imbalances in the mid-2000s reached a level that many commentators viewed as unsustainable. The claim was frequently made that the imbalances contributed significantly to causing the world-wide financial and economic crisis at the end of the decade. Sinc ... More
Global Integration and World Migration
Oded Stark, World Economics, December 2016
This paper explores a theory of migration based upon a number of conjectures about the role of digital media. It proposes that a number of factors including rising use of the internet providing widespread access to global information and an intensified communication bet ... More
The Universal Credit Rating Group: Measuring Debt Ethically
Daniel Cash, World Economics, December 2016
The Universal Credit Rating Group (UCRG) is a collection of rating agencies that are aiming to redress what they see as an imbalance in the provision of credit ratings across the global economy. This article describes the UCRG and discuss as its chances of succeeding in ... More
Measuring the Success of Industrial Policy in Australia
Andrew Marks, World Economics, December 2016
Industry policy in the context of trade liberalization has played a critical reinforcing role in re-orienting production in the Australian manufacturing sector from the domestic to international market. In the textile, clothing, footwear and motor vehicle industries thi ... More
Institutions, Economic Growth and Development: A Conversation with Nobel Laureate Douglass North
Brian Snowdon, World Economics, December 2016
This paper is based on the transcript of an interview made by Professor Brian Snowdon with the late Douglass North, Noble Laureate who died in 2015. North was one of the most influential economists and economic historian of the second half of the twentieth century. Alon ... More
Towards a Better Understanding of International Capital Volatility
Graham Bird, World Economics, September 2016
Understanding why capital moves internationally in the way that it does has become increasingly important as capital accounts have been liberalized and as the size of international capital movements has expanded dramatically. International capital movements exert potent ... More
The Creation of the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank: America’s Loss and China’s Gain
Stuart P.M. Mackintosh, World Economics, September 2016
The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) pulled institutions together diplomatically and economically. It clarified options and failures of the past and hastened coordinated reforms. But the GFC also starkly illuminated another geopolitical dynamic: Deals struck in extremis mu ... More
The Political Limits of Independent Monetary Policy
Colin Ellis, World Economics, September 2016
Central banks in advanced economies have adopted a number of less conventional policy measures since the onset of the financial crisis and great recession. However, the efficiency of these measures remains highly uncertain; and, if downside risks crystallize, more radic ... More
Secular Stagnation and Two Articles of Faith of the Conventional Wisdom
Kenneth Austin, World Economics, September 2016
The current discussion of “Secular Stagnation” has generally put disproportionate weight on discussing inadequate investment demand and fiscal stimulus. However, in these discussions two intellectually ungrounded assumptions, or articles of faith, box in mainstream econ ... More
Exploding Debt Syndrome: The Politics of the Greek Debt Crisis
Elliot Y. Neaman & Shalendra D. Sharma, World Economics, September 2016
The economic roots of the Eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis are fairly well understood by scholars and analysts, but the political forces behind the crisis less so, despite the fact that the Eurozone predicament derives fundamentally from an intersection of mostly politi ... More
The Paris Climate Agreement heightens development challenges in Africa
Hippolyte Fofack, World Economics, June 2016
Although the Paris Agreement lacks a binding mechanism for capping carbon emissions, and a legally binding financial commitment to support climate change adaptation and mitigation in the developing world, it establishes a legal framework to accelerate the transition tow ... More
Economics, Science and Climate Change
Julian Gough, World Economics, June 2016
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contends that global warming is largely due to the burning of fossil fuels, leading to increased carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere. This theory is tested with global data from three different period ... More
How Fast Will China Grow Towards 2030: And what about the US?
Jorgen Randers, World Economics, June 2016
Historical data for the last fifty years shows that there is a surprisingly strong correlation between the growth rate of a nation’s GDP per person and its income level. The growth rate declines linearly with income, and this relationship can be used to estimate the fut ... More
China’s GDP Per Capita from the Han Dynasty to Communist Times
Kent Deng & Patrick O'Brien, World Economics, June 2016
This article is a critical survey of the concepts and data utilized by economists and economic historians that purport to measure relative levels and long term trends in GDP per capita from the Han Dynasty to Communist times. We favour attempts to extend macro-economic ... More
Data on Indicators of Governance: Handle with Care
M.G.Quibria, World Economics, June 2016
This article provides a select review of data used as indicators of governance. Despite the popularity and considerable success of the existing body of governance indicators in putting the spotlight on governance inadequacies in developing countries, they are fraught ... More
De-Risking Impact Investing
Neil Gregory, World Economics, June 2016
Despite great investor interest in impact investing, actual investment flows have remained modest. This is largely due to insufficient investment opportunities which offer a financially sustainable risk-return balance. A focus on de-risking impact investments can enable ... More
Japan’s Monetary Policy Misadventure
Masanaga Kumakura, World Economics, June 2016
This paper argues that the Bank of Japan’s decision in April 2013 to formally adopt inflation targeting as the framework of its monetary policy and to embark on a programme of quantitative and qualitative monetary easing was misconceived. The aim of the policy to achiev ... More
The Digital Revolution – New Challenges for National Accounting?
Michael Grömling, World Economics, March 2016
The digital revolution has changed many industries, but measuring these changes from a national accounting perspective causes problems. Generally, in the transition periods during the introduction of new technologies, marked setbacks in the estimation of productivity gr ... More
Measuring Financial Inclusion using Multidimensional Data
Mandira Sarma, World Economics, March 2016
The author notes that the lack of a financially inclusive system is a major concern not only for developing and low-income economies, but for many developed and high-income countries. At the global level, a network of financial regulators from developing and emerging ec ... More
Dissecting China’s Property Market Data
Meiping (Aggie) Sun, World Economics, March 2016
This paper analyses Chinese property market data to evaluate recent trends in the market and to make prognoses for the future. It considers whether or not the existence of high prices and at the same time an enormous rise in residential supply in terms of floor space un ... More
The Indian Economy: From Growth to Stagflation to Liberal Reform
Deepak Lal , World Economics, March 2016
This paper considers the optimistic scenario that India was on a high growth path and would follow China’s path with a lag (as its reforms started in 1991 compared with China’s in 1980) which would produce an economic miracle. This did not happen and since 2011 India’s ... More
Youth Employment Crisis in India
Swati Dutta, World Economics, March 2016
The global financial crisis and the subsequent uneven recovery have underscored the need for Africa’s resilience to output and other shocks originated in the rest of the world. A comparison of two regional economic communities – the East African Community (EAC) and the ... More
How Managerial Incentives Affect Economic Performance
Andrew Smithers, World Economics, March 2016
The impact of managerial incentive structures on corporate behaviour has been a neglected area of economics. New theoretical work by Nobel Prize winning economist Jean Tirole demonstrates that ‘bonus culture’ managerial incentive systems can increase inequality while lo ... More
Fiscal Policy and the Global Crisis
Graham Bird, World Economics, March 2016
Up until the global economic crisis at the end of the 2000s an eclectic approach to fiscal policy seemed to have emerged from the long-standing debates that there had been about it. This largely ruled out using fiscal policy to fine tune the economy. Instead macro polic ... More