The Developing Economies
Volume 42, Number 1 (March 2004)
■ The Developing Economies Volume 42, Number 1 (March 2004)
■ B5
■ 105pp
■ March 2004
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CONTENTS
Genuine Savings Measurement and Its Application to the United Kingdom and Taiwan (753KB) / Grace T. R. Lin and Chris Hope
Method of Analyzing Business Cycles in a Transition Economy: The Case of Slovenia (1.5MB) / Timotej Jagric and Rasto Ovin
The Potato Marketing System and Its Changes in Bangladesh: From the Perspective of a Village Study in Comilla District (922KB) / Khondaker Golam Moazzem and Koichi Fujita
Determinants of Demand for Fiji's Exports: An Empirical Investigation (562KB) / Seema Narayan and Paresh Kumar Narayan
Book Reviews
Competition Policy for Small Market Economies by Michal S. Gal (113KB) / Hiroki Nogami
Abstract
Grace T. R. Lin and Chris Hope, "Genuine Savings Measurement and Its Application to the United Kingdom and Taiwan," pp. 3-41.
The genuine savings index (GSI) is a simple indicator that can be used to assess an economy's sustainability. It defines wealth more broadly than orthodox national accounts, and recalculates national savings figures based on this new definition. Genuine savings aim to represent the value of the net change in the whole range of assets that are important for development: produced assets, natural resources, environmental quality, and human resources. This paper takes the broad framework developed in previous studies and tests its application with respect to the United Kingdom and Taiwan between 1970 and 1998, with the goal of assessing the feasibility of using such measures quite broadly as indices of sustainable development. The paper shows that both the United Kingdom and Taiwan have positive genuine savings rates over the period in question, with the United Kingdom registering lower ones than Taiwan.
Timotej Jagric and Rasto Ovin, "Method of Analyzing Business Cycles in a Transition Economy: The Case of Slovenia, " pp. 42-62.
In this paper, we studied cyclical patterns in a transition economy. We introduced a dynamic perspective into the analysis by applying multivariate wavelet analysis. The wavelet covariance and wavelet correlation were defined and applied to the analysis of business cycles as an alternative to the traditional cross-spectrum analysis. The main findings indicated that there is a significant business cycle component in aggregate economic activity and that business cycles are asymmetric and highly synchronized with the EU cycle. Additionally, it was found that three distinctive periods of business cycle synchronization exert an important impact on the properties of a business cycle.
Khondaker Golam Moazzem and Koichi Fujita, "The Potato Marketing System and Its Changes in Bangladesh: From the Perspective of a Village Study in Comilla District," pp. 63-94.
This paper analyzes the marketing system of potato in Bangladesh, especially the economic relations among farmers, traders, and cold storage owners and elucidates the structural changes in the rural economy through a village study. Investment in the potato market is capital-intensive and risky, and is often considered to be vertically linked. The present study shows that farmers and cold storage owners do not invest in trading because of lack of time and "skill" to deal with urban traders. Besides, farmers face capital constraints and the amount of potatoes produced is too small to meet the demand of urban areas. Cold storage owners are confronted with increasing competition, which forces them to attempt to reach the storage capacity. Traders invest in the risky potato-storage business. The return from it is declining but still high due to the "cheap" credit supply from the cold storage owners. There is no tied relation among the market agents any more.
Seema Narayan and Paresh Kumar Narayan, "Determinants of Demand for Fiji's Exports: An Empirical Investigation," pp. 95-112.
Fiji is no exception to the rule that exports are an important source of growth and development. In this light, it is important to know the determinants of exports. However, there is no empirical study on Fiji's export demand. This paper uses the modern econometric techniques---in particular, the autoregressive distributed lag approach to cointegration---to investigate whether the standard export demand variables, viz., trading partner income, export price, and competitor price, have a long-run cointegration relationship with Fiji's real exports for the period 1970 to 1999. In addition, the long-run results are also estimated by using the dynamic ordinary least squares and the fully modified ordinary least squares. The empirical results indicate the existence of a cointegration relationship among the variables. The long-run foreign income, own-price, and cross-price elasticities are found to be 0.7 to 0.8, -1.3 to -1.5, and 2.1 to 2.2, respectively.