Share Of World Income Research Articles

An Assessment of Grant‐based Multilateral Funding Flows from 2014 to 2016

AbstractThis paper presents a global snapshot of how all countries, plus the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, allocated approximately $63 billion per year across 54 major multilateral organizations during the 2014–16 period. We assess direct funding to United Nations and non‐UN organizations to examine three key questions. First, how much does each funder contribute to each organization? Second, what is the relative importance of each funder to each organization? Third, how do funding allocations compare to objective benchmarks like share of donor country income, share of world income and share of world population? We find that a small number of countries provide a majority of total funding and a small number of organizations account for a majority of total resources received. Only a handful of countries are the top funders to at least one organization, but a variety of mid‐ and smaller‐sized economies play larger relative roles in some smaller organizations. Estimating funders’ flows across organizations allows for assessment of their revealed preferences among multilateral priorities and enables comparison against objective benchmarks for burden‐sharing. To our knowledge, this is the first study to provide a comprehensive mapping of all countries’ recent annual grant funding across the majority of large multilateral institutions.

El deterioro de la relación de intercambio : algunas perspectivas

The terms of trade have a major impact on the share of world income corresponding to developing countries. Therefore, it is not surprising that they have insisted on placing it at the top of the international economic agenda. The purpose of this article is not to examine the policy aspects of the terms of trade problem. Instead, it focuses on the debate on the theory of the deterioration hypothesis and on the statistical evidence that corroborates this hypothesis. Then we ask whether the one-dimensional criterion of the terms of trade, as conventionally defined, can even in principle bear the burden imposed on it, and attempts are made to improve it by adding more dimensions to it.

China, India and the US

Despite developing countries accounting for an increasing share of world income and exports, no significant shift in the ranks of the 25 largest economies by GDP has occurred between 1965 and 2007. And only China, and perhaps India but none of the other large developing economies, would account for a significantly higher share of world income by 2025 or 2050. Furthermore, in terms of per capita income, India would continue to remain relatively poor. We then find that there was no significant shift in economic power between 1990 and 2005 on the basis of an index formed from about 20 indicators of economic power. Next we measured how far countries were from the US on the basis of these indicators. Practically all countries, particularly the European ones, had substantially reduced the lead of the US. But China and India starting far away had moved only slightly closer to the US. The ability to generate new technology is a major factor in the power rankings. China had reduced the lead of the US in technology generating factors whereas India had almost stagnated. Consequently, China’s prospects of increasing its power were better than India’s.

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Book Review

The Revealed Competitiveness of U.S. Exports

The U.S. share of world merchandise exports has declined sharply over the last decade. Using data at the level of detailed industries, this paper analyzes the decline in U.S. share against the backdrop of alternative measures of the competitiveness of the U.S. economy. We document the following facts: (i) only a few industries contributed to the decline in any meaningful way, (ii) a large part of the drop was driven by the changing size of U.S. export industries and not the size of U.S. sales within those industries, (iii) in a gravity framework, the majority of the decline in the U.S. export share within industries was due to the declining U.S. share of world income, and (iv) in a computed structural measure of firm productivity, average U.S. export productivity has generally maintained its high level versus other countries over time. Overall, our analysis suggests that the dismal performance of the U.S. market share is not a sufficient statistic for competitiveness.

L'Occidente e il Resto del Mondo nell'economia mondiale: un'interpretazione Maddisoniana e Malthusiana dal 1000 al 2030

- This paper analyses the forces determining per capita income levels of nations over the past millennium and the prospects to 2030. In the year 1000, Asian countries were in the lead. By 1820, per capita GDP in western Europe and the US was twice the Asian average. The divergence had grown much bigger by 1950, but by the 1970s, several Asian countries- Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Hong and Singapore had achieved considerable catchup. Since then, there has been a major surge in China and the beginning of a similar phenomon in India. As a result, the Asian share of world income has risen steadily and by 2030, will be fairly close to what it was in 1820. I conclude by comparing my analysis with the Malthusian interpretation of Oded Galor.

Factor Content of Trade: Nonhomothetic Preferences and 'Missing Trade'

Recent empirical work has documented that the measured factor content of trade is too small compared to the theoretical prediction: missing trade. This misprediction may arise from the strong assumption that each country consumes services of factors in proportion to its share of world income. By incorporating nonhomothetic preferences into the model, this paper provides a simple resolution for the puzzle. The traditional Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek theorem consistently overpredicts factor content of trade compared to the model with nonhomothetic preferences. This result holds to the extent that income-elastic factors are on average abundant in rich countries and income-inelastic factors in poor countries.

THE ECONOMICS OF MUNICIPAL SOLID WASTE

This article examines the generation and management of municipal solid waste through the lens of economics. The authors estimate that the global burden of municipal solid waste amounted to 1.3 billion metric tons in 1990, or two-thirds of a kilogram of waste per person per day. Industrial countries account for a disproportionately high share of the world's waste relative to their share of world population, while developing countries account for a disproportionately high share of the world's waste relative to their share of world income. Analyses across countries and over time reveal that the generation of municipal solid waste is positively related to variations in per capita income and that the generation of municipal solid waste per capita does not vary with population size among countries with comparable per capita income. Practices for collecting, processing, and disposing of municipal solid waste vary widely across countries, generally in accord with the nature of the waste stream and key environmental and economic features. The least efficient practices tend to be found in developing countries, creating serious threats to local environmental quality and public health. Although considerable evidence indicates that the generation and management of waste is sensitive to income and price variables, natural incentives to overuse common property and the presence of inter- generational externalities both suggest that private economic behavior will not yield socially optimal outcomes in this area. Community intervention may be needed to promote the social good, with evidence accumulating in support of arrangements involving the participation of private firms. The authors' calculations also suggest that improvements made now in the handling of hazardous waste will be far less expensive in discounted terms than undoing in the future the damage being caused by current practices. Addressing these issues from a rational societal perspective will become increasingly urgent in the future, especially in the developing countries, where the authors project that municipal solid waste will increase at an annual rate of 2.7 percent through the year 2010.

Must high commodity prices depress the world economy? An application of a world model system

The impact of higher primary commodity prices on the world economy is central to the North-South dialogue. The less developed countries are seeking a way to obtain a larger share of world income. In the context of current discussions of commodity price stabilization, UNCTAD's “integrated programme” for example, this is likely to mean higher commodity prices. A critical question is then, “Must higher prices for primary commodities depress the industrial economies?” The cyclical swing of 1973–1975 would seem to support the thesis that high primary commodity prices lead to recession in the industrial countries. Yet this experience is not conclusive evidence. Many complex forces, some natural and others policy induced, accounted for the recession. The impact of primary commodity prices must be considered in a full system, recognizing not only the direct costs, but also the resulting demand feedback. Under different circumstances, higher payments to the commodity producing LDCs may well increase demand for manufactures and stimulate exports and industrial activity in the developed countries. This paper uses a version of the LINK world model system to examine the linkages between commodity prices and world economic activity. In the first part we examine the demand feedback in a simple theoretical model of the interrelationships between commodity consumer countries and the commodity producers. In the second part we use an empirical system, COMLINK, the version of the LINK system that incorporates commodity models and commodity price linkages, to simulate various types of commodity price impacts.