International Real Estate Review

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Huayi Yu ◽  
◽  
Xiang Tang ◽  
Yinggang Zhou ◽  
◽  
...  

This paper examines why housing and services are more expensive in rich countries than in poor ones. We propose the Rich Neighborhood Housing Effect (RNHE), which explicitly allows for local labor force heterogeneity with a coherent supply- demand framework that incorporates demand-side factors such as the Linder effect. We also develop a contemporary RNHE model that predicts different behavior of the national price level between high-income and low-income countries. These predictions are confirmed by the panel data from 1990 to 2010 and simultaneous equation estimations. These results are compelling evidence in favor of the RNHE model over the Balassa-Samuelson model.


Author(s):  
Maria F. Hoen ◽  
Simen Markussen ◽  
Knut Røed

AbstractWe examine how immigration affects natives’ relative prime-age labor market outcomes by economic class background, with class background established on the basis of parents’ earnings rank. Exploiting alternative sources of variation in immigration patterns across time and space, we find that immigration from low-income countries reduces intergenerational mobility and thus steepens the social gradient in natives’ labor market outcomes, whereas immigration from high-income countries levels it. These findings are robust with respect to a wide range of identifying assumptions. The analysis is based on high-quality population-wide administrative data from Norway, which is one of the rich-world countries with the most rapid rise in the immigrant population share over the past two decades. Our findings suggest that immigration can explain a considerable part of the observed relative decline in economic performance among natives with a lower-class background.



2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keneni Gutema Negeri

Abstract Background The effect of health targeted aid in developing countries is debatable. This paper examines the short run effect of health aid on health status in low income countries of the world. Method The study estimates the short run effect of health aid on health status in low income countries. Infant mortality rate was used as a proxy for health status and a panel data was constructed from 34 countries for the period between 2000 and 2017. For the estimation, first difference GMM and System GMM were employed. Results The estimation results confirm the argument that health aid has a beneficial and statistically significant short run effect on the health status of low income countries: doubling health aid saves the lives of 20 infants per 10,000 live births. Conclusion From the findings of this paper it can be concluded that health aid could be one of the best tools with which the broader health status gap currently observed between high income and low income groups, could be eliminated and hence the target of Universal Health Coverage is met. However, recipient countries need to find ways of promoting domestic factors that have favorable impact on health sector as they cannot persistently relay up on external resources.



2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 2353
Author(s):  
Soohyeon Kim ◽  
Jungho Baek ◽  
Eunnyeong Heo

This study is to investigate whether the multifaceted roles of democracy have a positive relationship with environmental quality. Using a panel data of 132 high- and low-income countries from 2014 to 2016, a random effect (RE) model is analyzed in comparison with cross-sectional analysis. To pursue the current research thoroughly, five elements of democracy that encompass the aspects of democratic institutions (election system, civil liberties, and government function) and the aspects of democratic culture (political participation and political culture) are selected. We find that elements of democracy are positively correlated with the environment in high-income countries. In low-income countries, on the other hand, it is found that the role of democracy in explaining the environmental quality appears to be very weak; only the effect of government function positively relates with the environment.



2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Wagstaff ◽  
Patrick Eozenou ◽  
Marc Smitz

Abstract This paper provides an overview of research on out-of-pocket health expenditures by reviewing the various summary measures and the results of multi-country studies using these measures. The paper presents estimates for 146 countries from all World Bank income groups for all summary measures, along with correlations between the summary measures and macroeconomic and health system indicators. Large differences emerge across countries in per capita out-of-pocket expenditures in 2011 international dollars, driven in large part by differences in per capita income and the share of GDP spent on health. The two measures of dispersion or risk—the coefficient of variation and Q90/Q50—are only weakly correlated across countries and not explained by our macroeconomic and health system indicators. Considerable variation emerges in the out-of-pocket health expenditure budget share, which is highly correlated with the incidence of “catastrophic expenditures”. Out-of-pocket expenditures tend to be regressive and catastrophic expenditures tend to be concentrated among the poor when expenditures are assessed relative to income, while expenditures tend to be progressive and catastrophic expenditures tend to be concentrated among the rich when expenditures are assessed relative to consumption. At the extreme poverty line of $1.90-a-day, most impoverishment due to out-of-pocket expenditures occurs among low-income countries.



2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-64
Author(s):  
Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng ◽  
Frank Edwin

AbstractSurgical care has been described as one of the Cinderellas in the global health development agenda, taking a backseat to public health, child health, and infectious diseases. In the midst of such competing health-care needs, surgical care, often viewed by policy makers as luxurious and the preserve of the rich, gets relegated to the bottom of priority lists. In the meantime, infectious disease, malnutrition, and other ailments, viewed as largely affecting the poor and disadvantaged in society, get embedded in national health plans, receiving substantial funding and public health program development. It is often stated that the main reason for this sad state of affairs in surgical care is the lack of political will to improve matters in the health sector. Indeed, in 2001, the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health concluded that the lack of political will to sufficiently increase spending on health at the sub-national, national, and international levels was perhaps the most critical barrier to improving health in low-income countries. However, at the root of this lack of political will is a lack of political priority for surgical care.



Author(s):  
Giovanni Andrea Cornia

The chapter discusses the reasons whycKeynesian policies and development macroeconomics in low-income countries received any attention relatively late, as well as the factors that led to a gradual acceptance of demand-side measures. It also discusses the data, conceptual, and accounting problems encountered when measuring economic performance in low-income countries, including the importance of self-consumption, barter, unilateral transactions, and unrecorded monetary transactions in the informal economy. All this reduces the impact of monetary and fiscal policies and underline the importance of structural policies. The chapter also discusses the accounting conventions and practices used to overcome such problems, and the impact all this has on the estimates of the main macroeconomic aggregates and the evaluation of the impact of public policies.



2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 260
Author(s):  
Ni Putu Wiwin Setyari ◽  
Surya Dewi Rustariyuni ◽  
Luh Putu Aswitari

One of the core elements of the neoclassical growth theory is that poor countries have low capital-labor ratios but have higher marginal products of capital than the rich countries. This means the low-income countries experience faster growth rates and become a reason for allowing capital, goods, and technology can move across countries. Assuming that the labor intensive countries have higher returns on capital, then investment will flows into those countries and encourage higher economic growth. However, in fact capital flows seems to go in the opposite direction. A country with abundant capital can expand its capital-intensive sectors and export their goods along with trade liberalization. Consequently, the returns to capital in its capital-intensive sectors rise and a greater demand for investment induces higher capital inflows from abroad. Those predictions push developing countries to change their labor intensive industrial structures and become more capital intensive, to encourage their economic growth. This paper examines how capital intensity and openness affect economic growth using data from the ASEAN 5 countries data. The issue of endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity, as major problems in a data panel, are addressed by the fixed effect method and the Feasible General Least Square (FGLS). Capital flows appears to be the most important source of economic growth, whilst trade is found to have a limited role. The interaction between capital intensity and the openness indicator do not indicate significant effects. Generally, there is no evidence that the more outward-oriented countries with high levels of capital intensity experiences higher economic growth.



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