State Capacity and Economic Development

State Capacity and Economic Development
Author: Mark Dincecco
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2017-10-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108335985

State capacity - the government's ability to accomplish its intended policy goals - plays an important role in market-oriented economic development today. Yet state capacity improvements are often difficult to achieve. This Element analyzes the historical origins of state capacity. It evaluates long-run state development in Western Europe - the birthplace of both the modern state and modern economic growth - with a focus on three key inflection points: the rise of the city-state, the nation-state, and the welfare state. This Element develops a conceptual framework regarding the basic political conditions that enable the state to take effective policy actions. This framework highlights the government's challenge to exert proper authority over both its citizenry and itself. It concludes by analyzing the European state development process relative to other world regions. This analysis characterizes the basic historical features that helped make Western Europe different. By taking a long-run approach, it provides a new perspective on the deep-rooted relationship between state capacity and economic development.

State Building in Latin America

State Building in Latin America
Author: Hillel David Soifer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2015-06-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1316301036

State Building in Latin America diverges from existing scholarship in developing explanations both for why state-building efforts in the region emerged and for their success or failure. First, Latin American state leaders chose to attempt concerted state-building only where they saw it as the means to political order and economic development. Fragmented regionalism led to the adoption of more laissez-faire ideas and the rejection of state-building. With dominant urban centers, developmentalist ideas and state-building efforts took hold, but not all state-building projects succeeded. The second plank of the book's argument centers on strategies of bureaucratic appointment to explain this variation. Filling administrative ranks with local elites caused even concerted state-building efforts to flounder, while appointing outsiders to serve as administrators underpinned success. Relying on extensive archival evidence, the book traces how these factors shaped the differential development of education, taxation, and conscription in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

State Institutions and Tax Capacity: An Empirical Investigation of Causality

State Institutions and Tax Capacity: An Empirical Investigation of Causality
Author: Olusegun Ayodele Akanbi
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 38
Release: 2019-08-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1513511548

Would better state institutions increase tax collection, or would higher tax collection help improve state institutions? In the absence of conclusive guidance from theory, this paper searches for an empirical answer to this question, using a panel dataset covering 110 non-resource-rich countries from 1996 to 2017. Employing a panel vector error correction model, the paper finds that tax capacity and state institutions cause and reinforce each other for a wide range of country groups. The bi-directional causality results suggest that developing tax capacity and building state institutions need to go hand in hand for best results, particularly in developing countries. Based on the impulse response analyses, the paper also finds that the causal effects in advanced economies are generally low in both directions, while in developing countries, both tax capacity and institutions shocks have larger positive impacts on institutions and tax capacity, respectively.

States in the Developing World

States in the Developing World
Author: Miguel A. Centeno
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 493
Release: 2017-02-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107158494

An exploration of how states address the often conflicting challenges of development, order, and inclusion.

Long-Run Economic Growth

Long-Run Economic Growth
Author: Steven Durlauf
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3642612113

One of the most enduring questions in economics involves how a nation could accelerate the pace of its economic development. One of the most enduring answers to this question is to promote exports -either because doing so directly influences development via encouraging production of goods for export, or because export promotion permits accumulation of foreign exchange which permits importation of high-quality goods and services, which can in turn be used to expand the nation's production possibilities. In either case, growth is said to be export-led; the latter case is the so-called "two-gap" hypothesis (McKinnon, 1964; Findlay, 1973). The early work on export-led growth consisted of static cross-country com parisons (Michaely, 1977; Balassa, 1978; Tyler, 1981; Kormendi and Meguire, 1985). These studies generally concluded that there is strong evidence in favour of export-led growth because export growth and income growth are highly correlated. However, Kravis pointed out in 1970 that the question is an essen tially dynamic one: as he put it, are exports the handmaiden or the engine of growth? To make this determination one needs to look at time series to see whether or not exports are driving income. This approach has been taken in a number of papers (Jung and Marshall, 1985; Chow, 1987; Serletis, 1992; Kunst and Marin, 1989; Marin, 1992; Afxentiou and Serletis, 1991), designed to assess whether or not individual countries exhibit statistically significant evidence of export-led growth using Granger causality tests.

Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers

Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers
Author: Robin W. Boadway
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 624
Release: 2007
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0821364936

The design of intergovernmental fiscal transfers has a strong bearing on efficiency and equity of public service provision and accountable local governance. This book provides a comprehensive one-stop window/source of materials to guide practitioners and scholars on design and worldwide practices in intergovernmental fiscal transfers and their implications for efficiency, and equity in public services provision as well as accountable governance.

Public Finances

Public Finances
Author: Universities-National Bureau Committee for Economic Research
Publisher:
Total Pages: 536
Release: 1965
Genre:
ISBN:

Effective Governance Under Anarchy

Effective Governance Under Anarchy
Author: Tanja A. Börzel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2021-04-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107183693

Democratic and consolidated states are taken as the model for effective rule-making and service provision. In contrast, this book argues that good governance is possible even without a functioning state.