O40 - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity: GeneralReturn

Motivated by the persistent fall in oil prices due to incessant uncertainty-inducing events in recent years, this study empirically examined if economic growth in Africa's top five oil exporters (Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Libya, and Nigeria) is responding asymmetrically to changes in global economic uncertainty as well as uncertainties from U.S., Europe and China using nonlinear ARDL framework from 1997Q1 to 2021Q4. We find that rising global uncertainty hampers economic growth in these economies, while declining global uncertainty significantly enhances growth in Nigeria, Angola and Libya in the short run, but becomes growth-retarding in the long run. Thus, economic growth responds asymmetrically to global uncertainty, especially in the short run. The findings are robust to U.S., Europe, and China uncertainties, except that economic growth in Libya and Algeria remained unresponsive to U.S. and China uncertainties respectively. We concluded that Africa's oil exporters should embrace policies that can strengthen their resilience to global economic uncertainty as well as uncertainties from U.S., Europe, and China.

This paper examines the effects of public debt on the growth rate, investment and domestic credit provided to private sector using the dynamic panel threshold regression method for a large number of developing countries, namely 53 (48) economies for growth and invest-ment (credit) regressions. Our results suggest that public debt does not have a significant impact on the economic growth rate. Despite a strong negative effect of public debt on the total investment, our results do not support the existence of a (strong) threshold effect of public debt on total (private) investment. On the other hand, we present evidence for a threshold effect of public debt on public investment and credit. More precisely, public debt leads to a reduction in public investment and credit when the public debt exceeds the estimated threshold levels. Since public debt matters for investment and credit, it is important to ensure fiscal discipline and prudence in the long term.

This study revisits the empirical relationship between output volatility and output for twelve OECD countries. An extended AR-EGARCH-M model was used to identify the structural break, asymmetric effect, jump effect and spillover effect. In addition to the classical logarithmic definition of growth, the study uses the Hodrick-Prescott filter to compute the deviations from the long-term trend as the output gap. The empirical results show that (i) the effect of output volatility on output differs across countries under the same model specifications; and (ii) while the in-mean effect and spillover effect are stronger for the output gap-based models, the jump effect has a major effect on output volatility under the classical logarithmic definition.

This paper analyses uncertainty as one of the factors that affect the public debt-growth nexus. We put forward a hypothesis that uncertainty mediates the effect of public debt on economic growth. The empirical examination of the mediating effect is based on the neoclassical growth equation and consistent with specifications previously used to analyse the sources of heterogeneity in the debt-growth relationship. Since one part of the uncertainty is financial risk, which is closely related to the financial sector stability, we use interest rate spread as a main variable, and the risk premium on lending as an alternative one to proxy financial risk and thus, to some extent, uncertainty. Our results show that lower uncertainty is related to a bigger positive effect of debt on growth and a higher turning point in the debt-growth nexus. On the contrary, higher uncertainty leads to a lower positive and more considerable negative effect of debt on growth in both linear and quadratic specifications.

This paper seeks to investigate the effect of financial development on growth in OECD countries during 1999–2014. The aim of the analysis is to study the dependence of growth on given financial development indicators along quantiles of the conditional growth distribution, taking into account the effect played by each country over time. For the purpose of the empirical analysis, it performed the instrumental variable quantile regression panel data (IV-QRPD) model suggested by Powell (2016). The findings of IV-QRPD model indicated that the effect of finance on growth is changing along quantiles of the conditional growth distribution. That is to say, we provide some evidence that high-growth OECD countries react to the changes in financial development less than low-growth countries.

This paper aims to theoretically derive and afterwards econometrically assess the impact of intellectual property protection (IPP) on national economies. The authors’ main hypothesis is that by creating a form of non-market protection, IPP limits free competition and has no positive effects on national economies and the world economy in general. The hypothesis is tested through estimation of relationship between charges for the use of intellectual property and 1) gross domestic product, 2) GDP growth, 3) unemployment, 4) exports of high-tech products, 5) FDI outflow, and 6) expenses on research and development in a panel dataset of 146 countries in years 2005–2014 based Arellano-Bond estimator for dynamic panel models. The data tells us that changes in these charges have not a significant impact on the studied indicators, which counts against claims of positive impact of IPP on economies and growth.

Many economic analyses use employer-employee data to compare wage and productivity differentials across demographic groups. We apply this approach to assess the importance of 'organizational' workers, i.e., managing and marketing personnel. The estimates based on 2000-2006 Czech worker-level data augmented with company balance sheet information suggest that these workers are important for company performance and that they are fairly rewarded for their relative productivity in terms of their relative pay. Foreign-owned companies feature higher shares of such workers who are more productive in these firms (relative to other employees) compared to domestically owned companies.

The paper examines money-output and price-output relations in developed countries between 1980 and 2005. We observe that declines in the nominal monetary base are connected with a moderately below-average behaviour of the real output. The same result applies for small positive growth rates of nominal M1 and M2. High growth rates of money are associated with the above-average product growth. We have some evidence that broader monetary aggregates are more closely associated with the real product than narrower monetary aggregates. As opposed to the money-output connection, we show that low inflation was accompanied by high product growth.

This essay is concerned with the long term period, i.e. what will happen after accession to the EU. For those long term analyses, it is practical to identify different phases after accession to the EU - the period before the anticipated participation in the ERM II, the period of participation in the ERM II and the period of membership in the eurozone. These periods bring different costs, benefits and risks and they allow for different possibilities of economic policy, especially monetary policy (exchange rate policy included). The five following issues are dealt with in this essay: the speed of joining the eurozone after accession to the EU, the danger of speculative attacks on local currencies while participating in the ERM II, instability of public finances and its impact, possible real price shocks with their economic consequences and economic growth for convergence with the EU average.