Growth In Less Developed Countries Research Articles

Corruption in least developed countries and ESG (responsible) investment: Standard Chartered Bank in Nepal

PurposeThis study aims to explore the effects of responsible international investment in a least developed country (LDC) on ethics and corruption in the local industry. While investment growth in least developed countries (LDCs) is essential to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, international investment in LDCs poses challenges, including corruption. The authors explore perspectives from relevant stakeholders on the influence, if any, on an LDC’s banking sector, of investment in the LDC by a multinational bank with an environmental, social and governance focus – using a case study of Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) in Nepal.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted thematic analysis on: focus groups with current and former SCB Nepal management; semi-structured interviews with Nepal banking regulator representatives; senior staff from SCB global divisions; and management of other commercial banks in Nepal.FindingsKnowledge transfer, organisational enablers and constructive international competition contributed to the dissemination of best practices within the Nepal banking sector, supporting the notion of beneficial spill-over effects of multinationals on LDC host countries.Practical implicationsPractical insights will aid LDC governments, international businesses, investment funds and donor organisations seeking to invest in/assist LDCs with economic development.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this may be the first case study on ethics and anti-corruption practices of a multinational bank in a LDC. Through a practice-driven focus, the authors provide “on-the-ground” insights to better understand the complex nature of corruption.

The resource curse in least developed countries: The roles of foreign direct investment, energy efficiency, and electricity access

Extensive research exists on the link between natural resource rents and GDP growth, yet the roles of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and energy efficiency are less studied. As such, this study aims to bridge this research gap by investigating the relationship among natural resource rents, FDI, and GDP growth in the context of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). In addition, the potential influences of energy efficiency and electricity access are considered. Using time-series methodologies like the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) unit root test with structural breaks, Bayer-Hanck Cointegration, and regression methods such as FMOLS, DOLS, and CCR, the study explores the defined variables. Robustness checks are conducted using Robust and Simple Least Squares without breaks. The results reveal that most variables, barring mineral rents and long-run cointegration between growth and explanatory variables, are stationary at first difference D(1). Findings show that LDCs are susceptible to the resource curse, with forest and mineral rents and FDI negatively impacting economic growth. However, enhanced energy efficiency and electricity access can foster sustained growth in LDCs. The robustness check results corroborate the primary findings. The study concludes by proposing policy recommendations for sustainable resource use, regulation of FDI, and improving energy efficiency and electricity access.

The effects of debt dependence on economic growth in less-developed countries, 1990–2019

Recent years have witnessed a dramatic increase in debt servicing for developing countries. Drawing on the theoretical insights of dependency theory, I investigate the relationship between debt dependence and economic growth in less-developed countries. Results from two-way fixed effects estimation of an expansive country-level dataset on 103 less-developed countries from 1990 to 2019 indicate that debt dependence exerts a harmful effect on economic growth, net of relevant statistical controls. I conclude by discussing the theoretical and policy implications of the empirical analyses.

Waste Haven Transfer and Poverty-Environment Trap: Evidence from EU

This paper tests the extent to which the migration of "waste haven" causes a "poverty-environment trap". That is to say, imported waste caused the mid-income trap of the less developed European countries. Using Spatial Durbin Model on waste carbon dioxide emission of 28 EU countries from 2001 to 2018, we estimate the carbon footprint of imported wastes of the European Union (EU) members. The result shows an inverted "U" shape curve between GDP per capita and imported waste carbon footprint, confirming an Environment Kuznets Curve of "waste haven" transfer. It hinders the inbound of high-quality FDI. In the further mechanism test, we found industrial structure, FDI, industrialization, and urbanization are responsible for the spatial-temporal transfer of "pollution haven" and "environmental-poverty trap". The results also show that "waste haven" may accelerate the economic growth of less developed countries to some extent, however, with a higher percentage of dirty industries, FDI in the pollution-intensive sectors of these countries worsens their environmental conditions. It reinforces pollution haven effects and created a vicious circle of "poverty-environment trap" for low-income countries in the EU.

Da li međunarodna trgovina doprinosi dohodovnoj konvergenciji između Evropske unije i zemalja Zapadnog Balkana?

Income convergence is an issue that has occupied the attention of economists for a long time, especially as the main goal of poorer and less developed countries is to catch up with rich ones. Income convergence is the situation when, due to difference in development level, income gap between less developed and developed countries is decreasing. The faster growth of less developed countries is a consequence of reduced return on capital, which is the basic premise of the neoclassical growth model. The subject of this paper is to test the eff ECT of international trade on income convergence, in the European Union member states and in the Western Balkan states. Regression model was used to test whether international trade affects income convergence. Observed period is from 1995 to 2019. Research results showed that higher volume of international trade leads to income convergence.

Benefits of Vaccination

Vaccines in routine use around the world have been shown to be clinically well-tolerated and in double-blind randomized prospective controlled field trials – to be efficacious. Furthermore, they have been proven to be effective in routine vaccination programmes worldwide. They have had an excellent safety profile. Vaccinated individuals will face a greatly reduced danger of contracting the targeted disease with a minimal risk of serious side-effects. Should the vaccine fail to give complete protection, the severity of the "breakthrough" disease and its accompanying complications will, in most cases, be less than among the unvaccinated. Mortality, if a possible outcome, will also be greatly reduced. Mass vaccination of children in developed nations have brought many vaccine-preventable diseases under control or even eliminated them. Vaccines have made erstwhile lethal infectious diseases so rare that they have become "victims of their own success" to the point that uninformed people query the necessity of continuing to use them. Unless a disease is eradicated on a global scale – as has been achieved for smallpox and will soon be for poliomyelitis – vaccination cannot cease since the pathogen will quickly reappear and spread with dire consequences. Elimination of disease has many socio-economic, educational, and geo-political advantages. Healthy children grow to become well-educated and productive citizens that live longer. Increased life-expectancy brings prosperity and wealth buys health. Reduced infant mortality will put a brake on population growth in less developed countries and ease pressure on land and food – a determinant of belligerence. Vaccines are a powerful tool to foster equity and peace in the world.

Can better business environments promote trade partners’ economic growth?

ABSTRACT This study empirically examines the impact of business environments on trade partners’ economic growth using the Ease of Doing Business Score of the World Bank’s Doing Business project for 2004–2018. The results show that with a threshold level of economic development, business environments have a significant positive impact on trade partners’ economic growth, which is the spatial spillover effect of the business environment. Further, we find that this effect is heterogeneous, and it is much easier for a more developed country to drive the economic growth of less developed countries.

U-Net-Id, an Instance Segmentation Model for Building Extraction from Satellite Images—Case Study in the Joanópolis City, Brazil

Currently, there exists a growing demand for individual building mapping in regions of rapid urban growth in less-developed countries. Most existing methods can segment buildings but cannot discriminate adjacent buildings. Here, we present a new convolutional neural network architecture (CNN) called U-net-id that performs building instance segmentation. The proposed network is trained with WorldView-3 satellite RGB images (0.3 m) and three different labeled masks. The first is the building mask; the second is the border mask, which is the border of the building segment with 4 pixels added outside and 3 pixels inside; and the third is the inner segment mask, which is the segment of the building diminished by 2 pixels. The architecture consists of three parallel paths, one for each mask, all starting with a U-net model. To accurately capture the overlap between the masks, all activation layers of the U-nets are copied and concatenated on each path and sent to two additional convolutional layers before the output activation layers. The method was tested with a dataset of 7563 manually delineated individual buildings of the city of Joanópolis-SP, Brazil. On this dataset, the semantic segmentation showed an overall accuracy of 97.67% and an F1-Score of 0.937 and the building individual instance segmentation showed good performance with a mean intersection over union (IoU) of 0.582 (median IoU = 0.694).

THE ROLE OF FIRST-BEST GOVERNANCE INSTITUTIONS ON GROWTH IN LEAST DEVELOPED COUNTRIES

The study addresses the issue of the low level of GDP per capita growth in Least Developed Countries (LDCs), with special emphasis on the role of first-best governance institutions as a main determinant of growth. LDCs can be characterized by a clear deficit in first-best governance institutions compared to high-income OECD countries supporting the argument that economies that are different for a variety of reasons will differ both in their institutions and in their income per capita. The contribution of the study is to fill the gap in the new political economy of growth by establishing the mechanism of how first-best governance institutions affect growth through the political, economical, administrative and democratic channels. Although the adoption of first-best governance institutions of advanced countries to LDCs is not a panacea to sustainable economic growth, improvement of first-best governance institutions in LDCs significantly induce growth, since investments in governance institutions are subject to diminishing returns, so that the benefits are most pronounced for smaller and developing economies.

Economic Development, Foreign Aid and Poverty Reduction: Paradigm in Nigeria

Foreign aid supplements internal resources required for economic development and growth in less developed countries (LDCs). Foreign inflows have bolstered a number of economic recuperation, reconstruction efforts and structural adjustment programs organized to haul the Africa economy out of a precarious decay. Discussions of foreign aid have concentrated on Africa since it has gotten the best measure of help on per capita premise than some other area; yet economic performance has been the weakest. In any case, economic development, foreign aid and poverty reduction has not enjoyed such interest in literature as it is ordinarily subsumed. This paper tries to build up a model between economic development, foreign aid and poverty reduction and decide if there is even a nexus between these three ideas by analyzing data from Nigeria. Utilized time series secondary data from World Development Indicators (WDI) mulling over Nigeria for the period which data were accessible. The study went on to perform correlation and regression analysis using GNP per capita as proxy for economic development as the dependent variable and poverty headcount(proxy for poverty reduction), gross capital formation, foreign aid, GDP per capita growth, inflation rate and growth of government expenditure as independent variables. It was observed that only gross capital formation have statistically significant relationship with GNP per capita while growth of government expenditure has the effect on GNP per capita. The results reveal that there is a positive relationship between economic development, foreign aid and poverty reduction. This implies foreign aid promotes economic development and poverty elimination. The government has a responsibility to battle against poverty and its efforts at predictable strategic economic development are significant in poverty reduction by spending the aid money for direct production programs. Keywords: foreign aid, economic development, poverty reduction.

Merger Control and Economic Growth of LDCs: Some Observations and Recommendations

The aim of this paper is to evaluate merger control as a segment of competition policy in less developed countries (LDCs) and to propose desirable regimes, using economic growth as the evaluation standard. Three regimes of merger control are recommended, depending on the level of institutional and economic development: for LDCs with low levels of both, the absence of merger control is suitable; for LDCs with intermediate levels of both, very restricted merger control is recommended; this should evolve into somewhat restricted merger control for the remaining LDCs. Advocacy is recommended as the main substitute activity of the national competition authorities.

ЭКОНОМИКА, КУЛЬТУРА И СЧАСТЬЕ: ЕСТЬ ЛИ ВЗАИМОСВЯЗЬ?

Economic development and culture are important factors affecting happiness. The paper discusses the impact of economic and cultural factors on the cross-country differences in happiness levels. Various approaches to international ratings of happiness appeared recently. The author focuses on the Better Life Index, the Happy Planet Index, and the Ranking of Happiness from the World Happiness Report while analyzing the effect of ecological consequences of economic development, relative income, economic growth, and level of inequality in society on the estimates of happiness. The author agrees with those economists who believe that cultural values play the most important and stable role in cross-country differences in life satisfaction. It is shown how various cultural factors differ in their effects on happiness. It is stressed that people in an individualist culture have higher levels of subjective well-being than those in a collectivist culture. Special attention is paid to East-Asian happiness gap and its reasons, including racing for money, excessive competitiveness, conformity, concentration on unpleasant emotions, and emphasis on outward appearance. Basing on the economics of happiness statements, the author suggests the economic policy measures for increasing subjective well-being. Despite the existing problems in economic growth in less developed countries strengthening democracy and raising gender equality are important for happiness in all over the world. Also, the author shares the ideas of libertarian paternalism about the welfare-improving influence on the human preferences through more public spending in such areas as infrastructure, environment, education, research, and public health. Public spending in these areas may be generally effective because of rising happiness level despite of its some unavoidable inefficiency.&nbsp

The effects of foreign aid on economic growth in developing countries

Decades of research regarding the effect of foreign aid on economic growth in less developed countries have produced inconclusive results. Research in this literature has been plagued by a variety of empirical impediments. Among them, measurement and endogeneity issues, sparse sets of control variables that may be correlated with both foreign aid and economic growth such as institutional quality, and disagreements regarding the appropriate econometric methodology. This paper highlights a further issue: the heterogeneous effects of foreign aid on growth across less developed countries. Previous studies have pooled all of the developing countries together, treating them as homogenous, despite that developing countries are vastly different across both observable and unobservable dimensions. Developing countries differ in their stages of development, per capita income, socio-economic, financial, and political characteristics. For this reason, the World Bank (2012) broadly classifies the developing countries into two categories: low income developing countries (LIDCs) and high income developing countries (HIDCs) based on per capita income. Our hypothesis is that the relationship between foreign aid and economic growth should be different among LIDCs and HIDCs. For this reason, we analyze the relationship between foreign aid and economic growth separately for LIDCs and HIDCs, producing estimates using samples which are more likely to be homogenous. Integrating the fullest set of control variables thus far in the literature such as unemployment rate, capital formation, government budget surplus, inflation rate, degree of trade openness, and corruption, and using GMM methodology in a dynamic setting we find that foreign aid has positive effects on growth in high-income developing countries and negative effects on growth in low-income developing countries. We also find that higher unemployment rates, higher inflation, and higher levels of corruption reduce economic growth in both LIDCs and HIDCs. Additionally, higher level of capital formation, a larger budget surplus, and higher degrees of trade openness contribute positively to economic growth in both LIDCs and HIDCs. We do not find any evidence that time trends in the data affect our results. The result remains after accounting for endogeneity concerns and when a measure of institutional quality proxied by corruption. The finding implies that foreign aid has beneficial effects in high-income developing countries which are at latter stages of development. This suggests that countries need to gain some traction before foreign aid can help.

Does Manufacturing Matter for Economic Growth in the Era of Globalization?

This study adjudicates between two competing perspectives regarding the importance of manufacturing employment for economic growth with the onset of the most recent round of economic globalization. Established economic theories link shifts toward industrial activities to higher growth due to increases in aggregate productivity. While some scholars argue that the global restructuring of manufacturing in the era of globalization presents novel opportunities for development in the South, others suggest that the importance of manufacturing employment for economic growth in less developed countries declines during this period as competitive pressures increase and barriers to entry decline. I use difference models and a broad sample of both developed and less developed countries in the time period 1970–2010 to examine the effects of manufacturing share of employment on economic growth and how these effects have changed over time. First, I find that manufacturing employment has strong positive effects on economic growth net of neoclassical controls for all countries. Second, I find that for less developed countries, the importance of manufacturing share of employment for growth has declined through the course of the time period studied, particularly after 1990. In contrast, my results do not show a similar decline for developed countries. These findings are robust across alternative estimation strategies. I conclude by considering the theoretical implications of these results.

Construction and demolition waste generation rates for high-rise buildings in Malaysia.

Construction and demolition waste continues to sharply increase in step with the economic growth of less developed countries. Though the construction industry is large, it is composed of small firms with individual waste management practices, often leading to the deleterious environmental outcomes. Quantifying construction and demolition waste generation allows policy makers and stakeholders to understand the true internal and external costs of construction, providing a necessary foundation for waste management planning that may overcome deleterious environmental outcomes and may be both economically and environmentally optimal. This study offers a theoretical method for estimating the construction and demolition project waste generation rate by utilising available data, including waste disposal truck size and number, and waste volume and composition. This method is proposed as a less burdensome and more broadly applicable alternative, in contrast to waste estimation by on-site hand sorting and weighing. The developed method is applied to 11 projects across Malaysia as the case study. This study quantifies waste generation rate and illustrates the construction method in influencing the waste generation rate, estimating that the conventional construction method has a waste generation rate of 9.88 t 100 m-2, the mixed-construction method has a waste generation rate of 3.29 t 100 m-2, and demolition projects have a waste generation rate of 104.28 t 100 m-2.

Foreign direct investment flows and the global economic crisis

In recent years, Foreign Direct Investment has become an increasingly important feature of the globalized economy. The importance of FDI flows raises several of important questions. First of all is the question of the impact of FDI on host and home countries. Second crucial question is about FDI flows during the recent financial crisis and the role of FDI flows in promoting growth in less developed countries. Then,what can host countries do to become more attractive to foreign investors, and benefit from their activities?

Analysis of Major Problems Faced by Small Firms in North India

Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) have been noted to play a significant role in promoting economic growth in less developed countries, developing and also in developed countries. Worldwide, the micro and small enterprises have been accepted as the engine of economic growth of any nation. Small and Medium Enterprises are the backbone of the economies, because it trigger employment, output, export, poverty alleviation, economic empowerment, economic development etc. in developed as well as in developing countries. It is more important to developing countries as the poverty and unemployment are burning problems. MSMEs have been playing a momentous role in overall economic development of a country like India where millions of people are unemployed or underemployed. Therefore, the growth of small sectors is essential for the growth in the GDP, employment generation, total manufacturing production and export. India, being one of the fastest growing economies of the world, needs to pay an honest attention for the utmost growth of MSMEs for its increased contribution in above areas.

Low Income and Diminishing Productivity in Nigerian Public Sector

A critical function that an organization should perform is that of getting its employees motivated. Every country, be it a capitalist or socialist, developed or developing aims at securing maximum productivity in every sector of its economy in order to sustain its economic viability. This article discovered that most countries with low productivity growth experienced this due to inadequate motivation of employees. While wages and salaries play an important role in determining productivity growth in less developed countries, low income ceases to have a significant effect on productivity growth in highly developed countries due to other motivational incentives and modern technological facilities made available to their employees. Nigerian public sector has low productivity as measured by its output in relation to its capital and labor inputs. This problem is majorly predicated on government non sustainability action towards labor and its insensitivity towards the unprecedented poor wages and incentives given to public workers. This article is to gear up the government to take a pro-active step that will enhance sustainable development which includes: formulation and implementation of good policies on wages and salary review, corruption and mismanagement of funds, good governance, and national development plans.

Freedom of movement for workers

Most developed countries have foreign aid programs that aim to alleviate poverty and foster economic growth in less developed countries, but with very limited success. A large body of evidence indicates that the root of the economic development problem is cross-country differences in the productivity of labor. If workers are much more productive in one country than in another, the obvious way to help people in less developed countries is to allow them to help themselves by moving to places where they can be more productive. Yet immigration laws severely constrain such movement.

Relevance of Krugman-Eichengreen Effect, Theory of Comparative Advantage and Theory of Competitive Advantage for the Enlarged Europe Convergence Process

Long term prospect and perspective of well-being of the enlarged Europe depends to great extent form the efficiency of convergence process between wealthy and more or less (relatively speaking) poor members of the EU. Mainstream economic dogma speaks in favor of trade liberalization and globalization as main driver for economic growth of less developed countries in particular. On such a postulate one can expect that Hands off sort of economic policy, followed by total trade openness of the economies of less developed members of the EU, is going to stimulate economic convergence of those members with the old club members. Theory of Comparative Advantage supports and does not supports such a claim Theory of Competitive Advantage may and may not support the same main stream expectations. And Krugman-Eichengreeen's effect argues against trade openness and full economic liberalization between countries with different levels of economic development and well-being exposed in the same time to hands off sort of economic policy. What could be the position and future of Enlarged Europe depends to a great extent from the understanding of the afore-said theories and arguments, we will try to elaborate in the paper.