- Home
- Sustainable Development Goals
- Reduced Inequalities
Reduced Inequalities
Deaths at sea in the Pacific Islands: Challenges and opportunities for civil registration and vital statistics systems
Accurate and reliable death statistics produced by civil registration and vital statistics systems are essential for health planning and programme evaluation. The quality of death registration data in Pacific island countries and territories remains suboptimal. Data on deaths occurring at sea are especially limited. While coastal and oceanic activities are the norm and essential to the livelihoods of Pacific island populations such activities pose risks for accidents at sea especially those involving small-scale vessels. In this paper the scale of deaths at sea associated with small vessels in three Pacific island countries or territories over the period 2008-2017 is investigated using data from the health civil registry and police and fisheries departments and reports produced by national statistics offices ministries of health the Pacific Community the World Health Organization and media sources. Data on deaths at sea were found to be fragmented among multiple sources and missing key information on age sex and cause. Standardized procedures for reporting deaths and accidents at sea and harmonized data sharing between local communities and government agencies are urgently needed to improve civil registration and vital statistics systems and sea safety in the Pacific island subregion.
The Economic Impact of Migration in the Russian Federation: Taxation of Migrant Workers
The article contains an outline of migration and taxation in the Russian Federation. The characteristics of migration the legal and regulatory situation of migrant workers with regard to taxation actual practices in this regard and the steps required to bridge the gap between potential tax payments from migrants and actual taxation practices are considered. Attention is paid to the reasons for irregular migration and informal employment from the points of view of both employers and migrant workers. Finally overall conclusions and policy recommendations are provided for improving the situation and decreasing irregular migration and tax underpayment.
Remittances in North and Central Asian Countries: Enhancing Development Potential
The article addresses the impacts of remittances in recipient countries in North and Central Asia noting the high level of dependence of many countries of the subregion on remittances. While remittances are found to produce positive short-term benefits related to the reduction of transitory poverty they also can contribute to negative impacts such as “Dutch Disease” dollarization public and private moral hazard. Few recipients make use of formal means of saving remittances due to the lack of dedicated remittance-backed products low levels of development of and trust in the financial sector and lack of financial literacy among recipients of remittances. Measures to address this situation are proposed and assessed for their relevance to countries of the subregion.
Impact of Remittance Outflows on Sending Economies: The Case of the Russian Federation
The literature on remittance flows has relatively little information on the impacts of remittance outflows on countries. The Russian Federation consistently ranks among the top remittance senders in the world however the Russian case remains a largely unstudied area. This article addresses this gap. The findings show that remittance outflows are still very small compared with GDP and that the Russian economy will continue to need foreign labour. So-called push factors in neighbouring countries will also continue to make the Russian Federation an attractive workplace for foreign workers. The authors encourage the Government of the Russian Federation to take pre-emptive measures for both political and economic reasons such as offering more investment opportunities for expatriate workers.
Gender Dimension of Migration from Central Asia to the Russian Federation
The article considers the relationship between migration from Central Asia to the Russian Federation and gender relations. In particular the paper describes the age-sex composition of the migration flows from three countries of the subregion (Kyrgyzstan Uzbekistan Tajikistan) and discusses the case of Kyrgyzstan with its active female migration. Male migrants are more often employed in construction and are paid more than female migrants who work mostly in trade and services. However men and women show almost no difference in complying with migration laws vulnerability in interactions with the state relations with employers and apartment owners as well as transnational practices. The article also considers possibilities for family reunification and gendered differences in inter-ethnic communication. The article concludes that further studies are required and that assistance mechanisms are required for women who do not receive financial assistance from their migrant husbands. The article also finds that migrants’ sexual and reproductive behaviour is characterized by limited access to information about risks and also requires thorough study.
Dynamics of structural transformation in South Asia
External sector liberalization, financial development and income in South Asia
The paper provides an analysis on the impact of external sector openness and financial sector development on per capita income in the South Asian economies of Bangladesh Bhutan India Nepal Pakistan and Sri Lanka. For the annual series from 1980 to 2015 the instrumental variable model using a generalized method of moments (GMM) approach is estimated. The results show that liberalizing the external sector raises per capita income conditional on the level of financial sector development. The large-economy influence analysis shows that India will benefit the most from external sector liberalization and other economies involved in this study still need to focus on financial sector development as opposed to on liberalizing capital flows. It further indicates that premature external liberalization in small and poor economies tends to be beneficial to the large neighbouring economy which in this case is India leading to resource exploitation. Accordingly unless financial markets and institutions are strong enough to effectively deal with domestic resource mobilization opening up the external sector alone may impede the economic development process.
Impact of food inflation on headline inflation in India
A commonly held belief in the 1970s was that price indices rise because of temporary noise and then revert after a short interval (Cecchetti and Moessner 2008). Accordingly policy should not respond to the inflation because of these volatile components of the price indices. This led to the development of the concept of core inflation (Gordon 1975) which is headline inflation excluding food and fuel inflation. It was strongly believed that in the long run headline inflation converges to core inflation and that there are no second round effects (that is an absence of core inflation converging to headline inflation). In recent years however major fluctuations in food inflation have occurred. This has become a major problem in developing countries such as India where a large portion of the consumption basket of the people are food items. Against this backdrop in the present paper an attempt is made to measure the second round effects stemming from food inflation in India using the measure of Granger causality in the frequency domain of Lemmens Croux and Dekimpe (2008). The results of empirical analysis show significant causality running from headline inflation to core inflation in India and as a result the prevalence of the second round effects. They also show that food inflation in India is not volatile and that it feeds into the expected inflation of the households causing the second round effects. This calls for the Reserve Bank of India to put greater effort in anchoring inflation expectations through effective communication and greater credibility.
Valuing the digital economy of New Zealand
The present paper provides estimates of the value of the digital economy of New Zealand through the use of the supply-use tables. By design no changes are made to the production boundary as the products being assessed are already included within the production boundary and gross domestic product (GDP). The approach is a practical attempt at using the framework first presented in the paper entitled “Measuring digital trade: towards a conceptual framework” and in particular the “nature” component of the framework. This is extended to the whole economy to identify “digital” transactions in the country’s National Accounts Commodity Classification. The main finding from this paper is that the “digitally ordered” and “digitally delivered” aspects of the framework were able to be broadly applied. However the significant material assumptions and the broad nature of the product classification at the aggregate level meant that our estimates were not of high quality. For the year ending March 2015 the estimate of the value of gross output of New Zealand that can be delivered digitally was 27.9 billion New Zealand dollars (NZ$) (US$18.8 billion) while for digitally ordered gross output it was NZ$109.2 billion
Cheating the government: Does taxpayer perception matter?
Do people cheat because they can get away with it or because they feel that the rules are unfair? This paper addresses this question in the context of tax evasion. Specifically taxpayer perception is incorporated into a widely used consumption-based method for estimating income tax evasion. Compared to the standard method which distinguishes taxpayers only by their occupational or income type as a way of measuring their “ability” to misreport income the refined method introduces taxpayers who may be “able but unwilling” to cheat because they feel fairly treated with respect to public services and as compared to other taxpayers. Applied to a longitudinal data for the Republic of Korea (2007–2015) the standard method yields a uniform tax evasion rate of 13 per cent but the refined method provides a range of 7 to 25 per cent based on taxpayer perception. This implies that strategies for improving tax compliance must be tailored to different motivations for tax evasion.
The major unresolved issues in the negotiations on the UNCTAD Code of Conduct for the transfer of technology
Ten years after the appearance on the international agenda of the issue of technology transfer a consensus seems to be emerging among the parties concerned —both technology suppliers and technology importers— that:
The impact of foreign direct investment on income inequality: a panel Autogressive Distributed Lag approach for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation developing economies
In the present paper the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows on income inequality in Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies is investigated by using annual data for the period 1990–2015. The variables used are the Gini coefficient FDI inflows gross domestic product (GDP) per capita trade openness and human capital. Also panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and panel heterogeneous non-causality tests are used in this study. The panel ARDL results suggest that in the long run FDI inflows decrease income inequality. This supports the argument that encouraging FDI inflows does not harm the distribution of income in APEC economies. The results also confirm that GDP per capita and trade openness help reduce income inequality while human capital widens income inequality. The results from this study suggest that APEC authorities could implement sound policies to attract more FDI as evidence indicates that those inflows would narrow income inequality in APEC economies.
The export of manufactures
The development of the manufacturing sector has an important role to play in Latin America in relation to a long list of economic variables all of which aim at changing the economic characteristics of the region in aspects such as the diversification of production Structure of employment and production growth of income and the average wage and attenuation of the fluctuations in prices and export earnings as will be seen in the following pages. Hence all measures tending to develop and consolidate this sector whether through import substitution or exports of manufactures merit special attention in the economic policy of the Latin American countries and the developing countries in general.
International economic reform and income distribution
Latin America on the threshold of the 1980s
With the end of the 1970s at hand by way of drawing up a general balance the author sketches the main features of Latin American development in the recent past and notes the main challenges which the region will have to face in the years to come. He begins by recognizing that since the war and especially during the 1960s and the beginning of the present decade Latin America achieved vigorous economic growth but he stresses that this did not succeed in solving some of the most serious social problems while it also brought with it a growing internationalization of the economies of the region with a consequent increase in their external vulnerability. Furthermore towards the middle of the 1970s there was a reversal of the expansive cycle as a result of the flagging performance of the central economies the changes in the international prices of some goods especially oil and the internal difficulties faced by the national development patterns themselves.
Mortgage loans and access to housing for low-income households in Latin America
On the basis of a study on mortgage loan options available in eight Latin American countries this article identifies two pending tasks for most of the countries: the need to make long-term funds available to mitigate the risk of a mismatch of maturities and rates and the need to harmonize profitability criteria for lenders with the criterion of access to credit for the low-income population. The paper recommends the creation of linkages between the housing finance market and the capital market through secondary mortgage markets for which the housing finance market must use instruments other than subsidies. In addition the paper proposes a number of options to ensure that the State helps to create mortgage markets that will provide the low-income population with better access to housing.
The relations between different levels of government in Argentina
This article deals with the fiscal and financial relations between the national government and the provincial governments in Argentina during the last 15 years identifying the factors which help to explain the high degree of conflictivity of those relations. In view of the institutional roots of the conflict a historical review is made in order to place the recent problems and future discussion in a long-term context. First of all the development of federalism in Argentina and the evolution of the various forms of autonomy of the provinces is examined followed in the central section of the document by a review of the options that have dominated the changes in the functions and incomes of the different levels of government in recent decades. Those options have to do not only with the distribution of taxes but also with the process of decentralization and the changes in functions among levels of government.
Public-debt management: The Brazilian experience
This paper analyses public-debt management in Brazil and considers the main recent theoretical models and the possible effect that the strategy adopted by the Treasury from 1999 onwards could have on the base interest rate. The findings show that the public-debt-management strategy adopted by Brazil was based on the recommendations of Calvo and Guidotti (1990). The average maturity of public debt the proportion of shares linked to the Special System of Clearance and Custody (SELIC) and the public-debt-to-GDP ratio all play a significant role in determining the base interest rate. Government efforts to restructure public-debt maturities and reduce the negative effect on the interest rate are key in this regard.
Less advanced sectors in the Latin American fertility transition
Demographic change in Latin America has been driven by the behaviour of the middle and upper strata. Given that fertility and mortality in these groups are now relatively low. future changes will mainly come from the behaviour of less advanced sectors. This paper analyses the contribution of these less advanced groups to the decline in fertility distinguishing between the “distribution effect” and the “rates effect’. In less advanced sectors the desired number of children is lower than the actual number with early marriage and limited use of modern contraceptives continuing to be the rule. Even so these groups have entered the demographic transition. A number of countries have recently seen falls in their fertility rates due to the contribution of women with low levels of education: in the late transition countries behaviour is heterogeneous while in the advanced transition countries the greatest contribution is being made by women with primary education.
The human capital endowment of Latin America and the Caribbean
Although there are a great many theoretical and empirical studies which use the concept of human capital there is no generally accepted definition of this term and in many cases it is simply equated with formal education. This article will try to clarify the concept of human capital more precisely with special reference to the ways in which it can be acquired. It will also provide an international indicator that takes account of all the shades of meaning of the definition proposed here which are usually left out of the traditional indicators. Thus the proposed indicator will take into account health formal and informal education and experience. Analysis of the human capital endowments of the Latin American and Caribbean countries reveals a certain backwardness with respect to other regions. It should be noted however that there are big differences between countries although these have been reduced in the last few decades through a process of regional convergence.