O38 - Technological Change: Government PolicyReturn

Mancur Olson wrote his influential study Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk: Why Some Countries are Rich, and Others Poor in 1996. In his paper, Olson claimed that the differ-ences in economic development between countries are caused by only two factors: institutions and policies on the one hand and culture on the other. We attempt to test his conjecture using econometric modelling, combining and comparing it with a broadly defined orthodox production function in an indirect neoclassical notation (Solow-Minhas-Arrow-Chenery's SMAC framework). The "pseudo-production function" obtained is econometrically sound and of explanatory power similar to models including economic variables, although we find strong evidence of interdependence between capital-labour share and institutions and policies and culture. We consider the test, performed on panel data from 154 countries over five-year averages from 1980-2014, to be robust and consistent with Olson's ideas.

In this article, corruption is treated as an expression of human entrepreneurship, which does not fully fit in the commonly accepted moral and legal standards. Despite being negatively perceived, it is persistently present in the public, economic and political life of every country as evidenced by a number of press releases on corruption.
Research literature analysis reveals the existence of two conflicting opinions with regard to the way in which corruption affects innovative activity of companies and economic growth. The more morally correct theory, which can be dubbed the sand-the-wheels theory, assumes that corruption negatively influences innovative activity and economic growth. Whereas, the grease-the-wheels theory, which is inconsistent with the principles of social responsibility of business, argues for the positive influence of corruption on innovative activity of companies and economic growth. This article is a voice in that discussion.

This study investigates the impact of investment incentives on sectoral labour productivity, capital intensity, employment and total factor productivity using data on sixteen manufacturing industry sectors in Turkey during the post-liberalization period. To deal with potential endogeneity of the investment incentives, we apply the system GMM estimation technique to the panel dataset for six five-year periods between 1981 and 2009. Our overall GMM estimations indicate that we fail to find any evidence that investment incentives positively affect anyone of our macroeconomic variables. While investment incentives do not increase the employment growth and total factor productivity growth significantly, they significantly reduce the growth rate of value added per work hour and capital stock per work hour. Given that since the early years of the Turkish Republic, investment incentive systems have always been an important part of the industrialization policies; our results have essential implications for the design and effectiveness of investment incentives.