Percent Of National Income Research Articles

FEATURES OF THE HIDDEN ECONOMY IN THE NETHERLANDS

This paper presents survey results on the size and structure of the hidden labour market in The Netherlands. According to the results total income from hidden work is at least 1 percent of national income. The hidden income is shared by more than one million participants (nearly 12 percent of the corresponding population). This result is lower than various other estimates of the magnitude of the hidden economy. Some definitional and methodological issues are discussed in order to explain the difference from the other estimates.The most notable results of the survey refer to the structure of the hidden labour market. At one end of this market are people with a high wage rate, working relatively few hours. They have the characteristics which given them a favourable position in the formal labour market. At the other end are people with low hidden wages, who work more hours. They have difficulty in finding a formal job. The income from hidden labour is distributed in very much the same way as income from formal activities. There is no evidence that the hidden labour market compensates those who are worse off in the formal economy.

On the Evolution and Changes of Individual Economy and Countermeasures

How individual economy remains in existence and moves forward [in our country] is a tortuous experience. In 1952 the absolute majority of China's farming population were individual peasants. And there were 8.83 million individual [or self-employed] laborers residing in cities and towns. The sector of individual economy made up 72 percent of the entire national income. Through the socialist transformation in 1956, individual peasants rapidly moved onto the path of cooperativization, and individually owned industrial and commercial operations in urban areas also switched to cooperative economy. In consequence, the individual economic sector plunged to only 7.1 percent of the national income, and individual laborers in cities and towns were reduced to a measly 160,000. During the three years of adjustment, the ranks of individual laborers bounced back to over 2 million. An even more leftist policy was enforced in the period of the Cultural Revolution, which brought individual economy in town and country to...

The Yield of Land and the Structure of Investment

One means of accelerating the rate of socioeconomic development is improving investment and structural policy. The acceleration of the nation's development is ultimately manifested in the growth rate of national income. According to calculations, it must grow by at least 4 percent, compared with 3.1 percent during the Eleventh Five-Year Plan. (At the present volume of production, the additional percentage point will amount to approximately 6 billion rubles.) Twenty-eight percent of national income is created in agriculture, and the acceleration of [national income] growth naturally depends to a large extent on the rate of that branch's development.

Ranking countries according to economic, social and political indicators

Despite its inadequacies, the GNP is still the best known and most widely used economic indicator to measure development. A number of authors have considered otherrelevant indicators, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy and so on, as measures of development. In this paper we offer a composite index that touches more on the quality of life to measure the degree of development of the nations of the world. The criteria used here are: GNP per capita, physical quality of life, percentage of national income received by the poorest 40%, population density in agricultural areas, political rights and civil liberties, No. of telephones per capita and No. of drug-related offenses. We then used absolute measurement to obtain a composite index for each of nearly two dozen nations. The U.S.A. ranked second to Australia.

Monopoly Welfare Losses under Uncertainty

With the publication of the Harberger [ 10] estimates of the welfare losses due to monopolistic misallocation of resources in the United States, came a series of articles purporting to explain a downward bias allegedly contained in these estimates [24; 13]. Since then, a wide variety of estimates have been produced, some of which fall short of the original ones of approximately a tenth of a percent of GDP, but most of which indicate clearly higher losses.' The estimates now range from Siegfried and Tiemann's [23] .07 percent to Kamerschen's six percent of national income. The wide variation can mainly be attributed to differences in two of the assumptions on which estimation is based, namely (1) the method of determining demand elasticities, and (2) the definition of the competitive rate of return. Where studies reporting high welfare losses-in the one to six percent regionmostly assume price elasticities given by the inverse of the price-cost margin and low competitive rates of return, studies reporting losses of fractions of a percent usually assume elasticity constant and mostly unitary, while setting the competitive rate of return equal to the average return.2 In a recent article commenting on a paper by Cowling and Mueller [7], Littlechild [16] noted that within their framework profit is due to monoply, and necessary implies a serious welfare loss. The equilibrium model precludes any neutral or socially beneficial interpretation of profit. The same is, to a lesser degree, true for all papers based on the Harberger methodology. Irrespective of how the competitive rate of return is defined,

Collectivization in Hungarian Agriculture

GRICULTURE plays an important role in the Hungarian economy. In the thirties, 49 per cent of the population was engaged in agricultural pursuits, in 1949, 48 per cent, and in 1955, 44 per cent; while the percentage of national income stemming from agriculture was 36 in 193637, and 30 in 1955.1 Prewar Hungary was characterized by extensive cultivation and by an uneven distribution of landownership. Large estates and dwarf holdings were predominant and about 35 per cent of the agricultural population were landless peasants. Sweeping changes were brought about by the 1945 land reform, which affected 3.2 million hectares, about one-third of the country's land area. Large estates over 576 hectares were expropriated, holdings between 57.6 and 576 hectares were reduced to

The Bell Trade Act and the Philippine Economy

T HE Philippines is fortunate in being a country with frontiers to conquer and new lands to open. Surveys indicate a vast amount of idle resources that are available for exploitation in order to increase the nation's wealth. The rate of literacy is one of the highest in Asia: in I948, 59.8 per cent of all persons ten years or more of age were literate.' The training of a skilled labor force should therefore present no insurmountable difficulties. One would expect the country to be relatively self-sufficient in many things. And yet, if the facts are examined, it is disconcerting to find that a large proportion of the country's demands must be met from imports rather than from domestic production. The immediate postwar years were of course not illustrative of this condition because they spanned a period in which the country was recovering from the ravages of conflict. However, a certain measure of normalcy returned to the economy in I948 and I949, which may be considered the most representative of recent years. (Later years cannot serve as valid examples because of the imposition of strict trade controls and the outbreak of the Korean war.) In these two years, twenty-three per cent of the national income was expended on imports. In I948, CIF imports totaled PI,3Ii.8 million and the national income amounted to P5,7I3 million; in i949, CIF imports were PI,3I3.5 million and the national income stood at P5,646 million. It is interesting to note that, prior to the imposition of trade controls, about seventy per cent of these imports consisted of consumption goods.2 The high percentage of national income spent for imports indicates the existence of a fundamental defect which prevents the Philippine

Capital Goods—A Puzzling Paradox

During the postwar period, of course, expenditures for new plant and equipment, which I take as an adequate yardstick of capital goods creation, ascended sharply to levels far above previous records. Here arose the first problem: how to deflate this time series for the changing level of costs and prices to deflate it, by the annual figure of national income, which, being also expressed in current dollars, ought to serve to put the two series on roughly the same basis. Dividing through gives for each year the percentage of national income spent by business for new plant and equipment.