This paper begins by documenting a significant challenge for macroeconomic policy-makers in China, namely a spatial dimension that sees considerable asynchronization in business cycle fluctuations across the country’s 31 provinces. This asynchronization points to potential benefits from...

It is widely accepted that research in the high-tech sector is considered a key to maintain advanced economies’ competitiveness at the face of their emerging counterparts’ rising technological sophistication. Yet, the impact of research on high-tech output has never been...

This paper re-examines the impact of demographic factors on the current account balance. To this end, we develop an analytical framework that is more general than the one commonly used in the literature in three aspects. First, it accounts for the facts that the world current account balance...

This paper examines the dynamic effects of taxation and investment on the growth path of an economy. A simple neoclassical growth model with different tiers of government is developed. The initial focus is on governments that aim to maximise their citizens’ welfare and economic...

This paper analyses the impact of fiscal decentralisation on the Australian economy at both the aggregate and state levels. Attention is given not only to economic growth but also to a number of important macroeconomic variables which may influence growth. The results suggest that there is no...

This paper proposes a multivariate unobserved components model to simultaneously decompose the real GDP for each of the G-7 countries into their respective trend and cycle components. In contrast to previous literature, our model allows for explicit correlation between all the contemporaneous...

This paper investigates the financial and housing wealth effects on aggregate private consumption in Turkey for the period 1987-2007. Given the lack of data, the study proposes an innovative method to construct a proxy for the housing wealth series. A long-run equilibrium relationship between...

This paper develops an improved measure of human capital. Using a Mincer specification of human capital, the improved measure takes into consideration rates of returns to schooling, education quality, and school dropouts. The paper applies the improved measure to evaluate national and global...

In a neoclassical growth model with public consumption, we show the following Pareto optimal tax rules. The government should tax leisure and private consumption at the same rate, and subsidize net investment at the same rate it taxes net capital income. Also, it should tax capital income more...

This paper studies optimal pay-as-you-go social security with positive bequests and endogenous fertility. With an investment externality, a competitive solution without social security su?ers from under-investment in capital and over-reproduction of population. We show that social security can...