scholarly journals Calibrating the Economic Impact of a Deficit in the Institutional Quality of Government: The Case of Spain

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Francisco Alcalá ◽  
Fernando Sánchez
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noora Kanerva ◽  
Paulus Torkki ◽  
Ossi Rahkonen ◽  
Johanna Pekkala ◽  
Olli Pietiläinen ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Calhoun ◽  
Anna M. S. Duloy ◽  
J. Quentin Clemens

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minh Tam Schlosky ◽  
Andrew Young

Purpose A number of political economy concerns are associated with the provision of foreign aid to developing economies. These concerns suggest that foreign aid is likely to have harmful effects on a recipient’s institutional quality, and that attempts to give aid conditional on policy and institutional reforms are unlikely to succeed. Established in 1996, the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Initiative is a comprehensive, structured attempt to provide multilateral foreign aid conditional on reforms in recipient countries. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate its effectiveness at affecting institutional reform in participating countries. Design/methodology/approach The authors document how participating countries fared in terms of the quality of their policies and institutions. The authors employ the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World index as a measure of economic institutions, and the Freedom House political rights (PR) and civil liberties indices as measures of PR and protections. Based on these measures, the authors report unconditional statistics (e.g. average changes) and also regressions of changes in the measures on HIPC Initiative aid allocations and other controls. Findings The authors find that most participating countries experienced either meager increases or outright decreases in institutional quality. The regression results provide no evidence that the Initiative affects meaningful reforms. Originality/value The potential for foreign aid to have deleterious effects on the institutional quality of recipient countries has been of increasing concern to students of economic development. Such effects can have important implications for entrepreneurial activity in these countries. The HIPC Initiative is specifically designed to acknowledge and, indeed, overcome these concerns, leading to actual increases in institutional quality of recipient countries. To the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first to assess whether the promise of the HIPC Initiative is being fulfilled.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 59-70
Author(s):  
Saroj Kumar Aryal

Various factors trigger civil war, depending on the society and stages of political development. But analyzing it through the quality of an institution or some provisions of institutions may lead to a possible cause of a civil war. Thus, the primary objective of this article is to investigate institutional quality and its role in triggering a civil war. This paper argues that there is interconnectedness between institutional quality, civil war, and institutional reforms, which occurs as a series of events. Although the article provides many examples, in the second section, the case study of Nepalese decade-long civil war and post-civil war institutional reform has been presented to back the argument made in the paper. By discussing various dynamics of historical institutionalism, the paper mainly analyzes the primary and secondary sources.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (8) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Yusof Ahmad ◽  
Hamid Saad ◽  
Eusoff @Yendo Afgani ◽  
Naeemah Yusof

Quality of Life (QOL) issues have increasingly been the area of attention in cities of newly developing countries including Malaysia. To improve QOL for people of absolute poverty in Malaysia, the Malaysian government have carried out a program known as Agropolitan in the East Coast Economic Region. The three Agropolitan project locations selected for this study are Batu 8 Lepar and Runchang in Pekan, Pahang and Gua Musang in Kelantan. This study carried out a field survey on 254 samples to investigate their experiences throughout the project. This study found that Agropolitan project had remarkably improved the QOL of participants Keywords: quality of life; agropolitan; absolute poverty; government program  https://doi.org/10.21834/jabs.v3i8.278


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fanny Vardon-Bounes ◽  
Romain Gracia ◽  
Timothée Abaziou ◽  
Laure Crognier ◽  
Thierry Seguin ◽  
...  

Abstract Background The long-term fate of severely injured patients in terms of their quality of life is not well known. Our aim was to assess the quality of life of patients who have suffered moderate to severe trauma and to identify primary factors of long-term quality of life impairment. Methods A prospective monocentric study conducted on a number of patients who were victims of moderate to severe injuries during the year 2012. Patients were selected based on an Injury Severity Score (ISS) more than or equal to 9. Quality of life was assessed by the MOS SF-36 and NHP scores as a primary evaluation criterion. The secondary evaluation criteria were the determination of the socio-economic impact on quality of life and the identification of factors associated with disability. Results Two hundred and eight patients were contacted by e-mail or telephone. Fifty-five patients participated in this study (with a participation level of 26.4%), including 78.2% men, with a median age of 46. Significant alterations in quality of life were observed with the NHP and MOS SF-36 scale, including physical and psychological components. This resulted in a major socio-economic impact as 26% of the patients could not resume their professional activities (n = 10), 20% required retraining in other lines of work, and 36.4% had a disability status. The study showed that scores ≤ 85 on the physical functioning variable of the MOS SF 36 scale was associated with disability. Conclusion More than five years after a moderate to severe injury, patients’ quality of life was significantly impacted, resulting in significant socio-economic consequences. Disability secondary to major trauma seems to be associated with a score ≤ 85 on the physical functioning dimension of the MOS SF-36 scale. This study raises the question of whether or not early rehabilitation programs should be implemented in order to limit the long-term impact of major trauma.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 150
Author(s):  
Yuliy A. Nisnevich

<em>The article is devoted to the analysis of the influence of the human factor on the corruption in the public authority. The corruption depends on the institutional quality of the public authority, its ability to withstand the negative manifestations of the human factor, and on the officials’ qualities. The motivation of “going to power” has a big significance. Under the authoritarian regimes, the corruption system is generated by the deformations in the election institution. The managerial lustration expediency for the power purification after the regimes’ changes is substantiated. The institutional measures to combat the corruption have been identified.</em>


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerjes Aguirre Ochoa ◽  
Casimiro Leco Tomas

The so-called self-defense forces in Mexico must be seen as a form of vigilantism generated by an incipient process of democratization that has not produced the institutional quality necessary to contain the activity of organized crime groups driven, essentially, by the high demand for drugs in the United States. Our qualitative analysis of Mexico’s Tierra Caliente (‘Hotlands’) revealed profound processes of institutional deterioration in politics and the economy that have created conditions ripe for vigilantism. In the absence of substantial improvements in the quality of Mexico’s democracy, especially at the levels of state and municipal government, the emergence of other forms of vigilantism and ongoing violence are foreseeable.


Author(s):  
Esteban Colla-De-Robertis ◽  
Sandro Navarro Castañeda

Purpose The paper aims to study the role of local institutions in the establishment of fast-food outlets in urban districts of Peru. In most urban districts, there are no fast-food outlets. The authors, therefore, study the effect of institutional quality on the presence or absence of these outlets and the number of outlets if these are present. Design/methodology/approach The theoretical framework in which this paper is based on is the theory of agglomeration, which establishes that firms benefit from being close to each other. In particular, the paper builds on a model of market entry and competition in geographically independent local markets. An explicit expression was found for the equilibrium number of outlets (including zero) as a function of exogenous determinants of the demand for fast-food in each market, available infrastructure and institutional quality of the district’s government. Principal component analysis was used to construct measures of institutional quality based on administrative and organizational characteristics of district’s municipalities. These measures were incorporated as explanatory variables in a zero-inflated Poisson model, which is appropriate to handle count data and to accommodate excess zeros and which also allows the specification of different models for the zero part and the positive part. Findings Institutional quality mainly affects the presence of fast-food outlets in a district. The quality of urban development management and use of information systems are relevant. An institutional variable particularly relevant in explaining the number of outlets is the presence of an investment programming office in the municipality. The authors confirm the general hypothesis of the paper: institutions have a role in explaining both the presence and number of fast-food outlets in a district. Overall, the results of this paper suggest that institutional quality of a municipal district is related to better infrastructure, which lowers the costs of establishing outlets. Research limitations/implications Limitations in the availability of data at the regional and urban district level did not allow the authors to analyze other factors that affect entry decisions in the fast-food industry in Peru, such as controls to prevent corruption, legal uncertainty or crime. Another limitation was the lack of data on entry costs for each franchisee in each urban district. This forced the authors to use public infrastructure characteristics of the district as (imperfect) proxies of the entry costs. Practical implications The instruments of urban development management and information systems can be effective at attracting investment to a district. These tools operate partly through an indirect effect, namely, the improvement of district infrastructure, which is necessary to reduce the costs of establishing companies. There is also synergy between national government’s programs to attract investment and the good institutional quality in local governments. On the contrary, poor local institutions can be an obstacle to the successful implementation of those national programs. Social implications Foreign direct investment has a positive impact on the economic development of a country through knowledge spillovers. Therefore, any administrative reform to make local government practices more efficient can have an indirect impact on development. Originality/value Principal component analysis is a statistical tool that can be important in building good measures of institutional quality by allowing the combination of different observable characteristics into one component that can be interpreted as an operational restriction. The count model allows the use of the primary, easily observable, dependent variable, namely, the number of outlets. Finally, the two-part model makes it possible to discern the effect of institutional quality on the presence or absence of outlets and the number of outlets if these are present.


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