Does Foreign Direct Investment Affect Employment in Guinea: Empirical Assessment

This study shed light on the extent to which foreign direct investment contribute to employment in Guinea. FDI per GDP net inflows and unemployment rate are adopted as key indicators whereas inflation, trade openness, credit to private sector are control variables.  The empirical evidence is computed through ARDL method and the subsequent findings are established: first, foreign investment negatively and insignificantly affects unemployment in the short run. This result may be linked to the fact that a huge portion of FDI in Guinea is resource seeking type which itself does not generate enough jobs in the affiliate firms. Moreover, the interactions between such kind of investment and local suppliers are very limited, mitigating its effect on employment in the supplier’s side. Second, the short term coefficients for inflation and credit to private sector are positive and insignificant, contradicting a popular macroeconomic theory known as Phillips curve.   Overall, government should promote investments that can have transformative effect on domestic economy through linkages and spillovers. Furthermore, special emphasis must be put on human capital (education and healthcare) so that Guinean youth could be more competitive and capable to seize job opportunities offered both by foreign multinationals and local firms.  

Competitively-Issued Convertible Bank Notes in a Theory of Finance: Earl Thompson Meets Fischer Black

In this paper, I show the validity of and the relationship between two previously unrelated claims in monetary theory. The first claim, made by Earl Thompson, is that privately-issued bank notes pay a positive rate of return in a competitive equilibrium. The second claim, made by Fischer Black, is that it is possible to have a gold standard in which the gold reserves of the central bank are near zero. I show that both of these claims are correct under the assumption of complete markets and perfect commitment. The link between these claims is the Black-Scholes equation applied to convertible bank notes. In commodity-based monetary systems, bank notes are perpetual American options. I extend the model to consider the implications of a lack of commitment on the part of the bank and incomplete markets. I show that both arguments break down when banks lack commitment to redemption or markets are incomplete. I conclude with implications for macroeconomic theory.

Structure and Structural Change in Macroeconomic Theory

Macroeconomic models are built on causal structures that reflect choices made with respect to the variables that are solved from the model and those assumed exogenous. These choices are the ‘closures’ of the model. Differences in closures can lead to stark qualitative differences in the model’s solutions of macroeconomic equilibrium, and should therefore reflect the basic structure of the economy. In order to highlight these differences, closures are discussed first in the context of one-sector models. Closing mechanisms become even more consequential for models that formalize economies with multiple sectors. The second part of the chapter thus extends the discussion to multi-sector models and, particularly, to dual economy models. These models are especially relevant for understanding the process of structural change in developing countries and its implications for growth and development.

Cordon of Conformity: Why DSGE models Are Not the Future of Macroeconomics

The Rebuilding Macroeconomic Theory Project, led by David Vines and Samuel Wills (2020), is an important, albeit long overdue, initiative to rethink a failing mainstream macroeconomics. Professors Vines and Wills, who must be congratulated for stepping up to the challenge of trying to make mainstream macroeconomics relevant again, call for a new multiple-equilibrium and diverse (MEADE) paradigm for macroeconomics. Their idea is to start with simple models, ideally two-dimensional sketches, that explain mechanisms that can cause multiple equilibria. These mechanisms should then be incorporated into larger DSGE models in a new, multiple-equilibrium synthesis – to see how the fundamental pieces of the economy fit together, subject to it being ‘properly micro-founded’. This paper argues that the MEADE paradigm is bound to fail, because it maintains the DSGE model as the unifying framework at the center of macroeconomic analysis. The paper reviews 10 fundamental weaknesses inherent in DSGE models which make these models irreparably useless for macroeconomic policy analysis. Mainstream macroeconomics must put DSGE models, once and for all, in the Museum of Implausible Economic Models – and learn important lessons from non-DSGE macroeconomic approaches.

Implications for Regional Science of the “Rebuilding Macroeconomic Theory Project”

The inability of macroeconomists to anticipate the Global Financial Crisis or reproduce it in their models has led to an important stock-taking of deficiencies in, and necessary modifications to, theories and models used pervasively by researchers and taught to graduate students. This stock-taking—the so-called “Rebuilding Macroeconomic Theory Project,” organized by David Vines and Samuel Wills—has provided an opportunity for economy-wide modelers (who include regional scientists) to consider whether the theories and models they employ are adequate and appropriate to the tasks to which they put them. In this paper I provide a brief report on the project, retrace the development of macroeconomics, and summarize responses by prominent macroeconomists to a set of questions posed by organizers of the project, while drawing implications of these questions and responses for regional science. I then offer original suggestions from a regional scientist’s perspective on what is missing from the “benchmark” macro-model, how financial frictions can be introduced, how behavioral foundations might be modified, how heterogeneity of agents might be captured, and what new stylized facts need to be explained. I proceed to illustrate how several of the suggested changes can be integrated in economy-wide models by drawing on a study of the impacts of monetary policy on consumption by different income groups in Indonesia. I close the paper by posing a number of “big-picture questions” on the implications of the RMTP for economy-wide modelers and regional scientists to ponder and by offering a brief reflection and aspiration.

ESSENCE AND QUANTITATIVE EVALUATION OF THE EXPORT POTENTIAL OF THE ENTERPRISE

Today, there is an objective need to study foreign economic activity in terms of developing methodological approaches to assessing its effectiveness, especially export-import operations, which are its basis. The existing system of traditional indicators of economic analysis, the basis for calculating, which is the financial statements of the enterprise, gives an incomplete understanding of the activities of the enterprise to increase the efficiency of management. The first step in analyzing the problem of the study is to consider the economic category "export potential". Historically, the first is the resource concept of potential formation, originating from macroeconomic theory, which focuses on the transformation of resources within the economic system. The next step is an effective concept. The concept of the export potential of the enterprise is quite complex, since it combines the interpretation of such economic categories as «competitive potential», «production potential», «potential of export activity», as well as «financial potential». In its study, it will be necessary to proceed from the fact that the export potential of the enterprise is a set of available resources and opportunities to produce competitive products, its implementation and maintenance and foreign markets both in the short and long term. These factors have a significant impact on the competitiveness of the enterprise, its ability to produce goods in specified volumes. To assess the export potential, methods of sum of all warehouses of exports of the enterprise and the "system of eight indicators" were proposed, including: efficiency of export products production, share of profit from export of products in the total volume of profits of the enterprise, profitability of export sales, share of exports in the total volume of sales of the enterprise' products, competitiveness of the manufacturer, share of products certified according to international standards, share of innovations products, the share of products sent to foreign countries. According to the first approach, quantitative assessment of export potential (EP) is defined as the sum of all ingredients of the company's exports in value terms.

Experimental macroeconomics: a role-playing experience among bachelor students

This current innovative education project has the main goal of introducing students to experimental economics to help them better understand complex macroeconomic concepts. For this purpose, it is used an online experimental platform to develop a role-playing dynamic with which students become real economic agents. This gamified technique allows students to interact with each other in the goods and production factors markets and, thus, generate a circular flow studied as one of the main macroeconomic principles. The online platform is conceived as a two-sided website: on one hand, students are assigned a role and asked to make decisions; and, on the other, professors can instantaneously access results in order to explain participants the consequences of their choices. This innovation had a three-step approach. In the first place, students participated in the internet-based experiment according to the instructions provided by the teaching team. Subsequently, there was a discussion around the main results and their connection with macroeconomic theory. Secondly, students were asked to analyze both the experience and the learning outcomes through a report following well-defined guidelines. Lastly, students evaluated themselves as a co-evaluation practice. This horizontal evaluation promotes students’ understanding of the topic due to empathy development and raising awareness of other fellows’ efforts. To evaluate the effectiveness of the activity, a survey using a Likert scale was conducted as well as an examination of co-evaluation procedures. Results show high levels of engagement, enhanced motivation due to role-playing and satisfaction due to this gamified experience that raises students’ levels of attention by incorporating competition and reward-based mechanisms.