Although the poverty rate in Indonesia has been declining in the last several years, the rate of poverty decline is slowing down. In order to achieve its poverty reduction target within the stipulated time period, the government has stepped up efforts to enhance the contribution of the financial sector towards poverty reduction. This study aims to empirically explore the interlinkages between financial sector development and poverty reduction in Indonesia. Focusing on annual data covering the period from 1980 to 2015, the study adopts the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) cointegration approach to examine the long-run relationship between the variables. The study found that there is a long-run relationship between financial development, economic growth, and poverty reduction in Indonesia. It also documented a unidirectional causality running from the financial sector to poverty reduction and a bidirectional causality between economic growth and poverty reduction. Therefore, policies to ensure the conducive growth of the financial sector would go a long way in promoting the economy, creating employment opportunities, and consequently accelerating poverty eradication.
This paper uses the Panzar-Rosse H-statistic to provide empirical evidence on the impact of competitive behaviour of banks on risk-taking, using the Fixed Effects Vector Decomposition Method on panel data of banks in 15 Central and South-Eastern Europe countries during the period 1999-2009. The findings suggest that banking sector competition has had a negative impact on banks’ risk-taking implying that competition contributed to the improvement of the loan-portfolio quality. However, the results differ significantly when distinguishing between the EU and non-EU countries of the CESEE region. While for the EU countries the relationship between banking sector competition and risk-taking remains negative, this relationship is positive for the non-EU countries of the region, suggesting that an increase of competition in the non-EU countries may be detrimental for the stability of the banking sector in these countries. These results are robust to different model specifications and measures of competition.
The paper investigates the statistical regularities of industry dynamics in a transition economy and its manufacturing industry over a six-year period of recession. The static analysis of distributions supports several established stylized facts on firm size and growth-rate distributions. The growth rate distribution featured a sequential, year-by-year procyclical change of the left side of distribution, suggesting that the more years an economy spends in a recession, the greater the decline in the revenue of its firms. On the “growing” side, the recession opened increasing growth opportunities for a small subset of small firms, while it diminished growth opportunities for medium and large firms. The segregation of sectors by technological intensity gives evidence that the high-tech sectors show upward trend of the growth rate distributions’ right side of as the recession unfolded. Sectorial concentration ratios mostly increased, while changes in the unimodality of the firm-size distribution occurred at the end of the economic downturn.
Institutional reforms in the countries of Central Eastern and South Eastern Europe (CESEE) brought about a redefinition of the role of the state, the market and the business sector. We assess the effects of various dimensions of the institutional environment on the labour productivity of manufacturing firms in selected CESEE countries by employing a multilevel model. Our findings reveal that the curbing of corruption and the provision of inter-industrial externalities through the development of a commercial and professional infrastructure have beneficial effects on firm productivity. At the same time, a stricter political and legal framework and the provision of R&D infrastructure have an adverse effect. Such a finding is typical for producers of standardised products in countries with low levels of legal framework development for which R&D and legal adjustments incur cost disadvantages. The implication is that institutional development should be accompanied by a strengthening of firms’ absorptive capacity in order for businesses to benefit from such changes.
This paper uses a DEA-VRS methodology for the estimation of municipal efficiency to provide empirical evidence of the impact of decentralization in BiH under the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) on overall municipal efficiency. In particular, the paper focuses on the analysis of the overall efficiency of 33 new municipalities established under DPA. The findings suggest that the average municipal efficiency in BiH is rather low, and only 23 or 16% of municipalities in BiH are efficient. The average efficiency achieved is around 0.71. This means that with the same level of inputs (budget revenue) outputs may be increased by almost 30%, on average. The results of DEA-VRS efficiency estimation suggest that new municipalities have lower average efficiency (0.60) in comparison to “older” municipalities (0.74). In our sample, only six percent of newly created municipalities are efficient, 12% exhibit some level of efficiency, while the remaining 82% are inefficient, with significant share (39%) of very inefficient municipalities.
This paper examines whether or not feedback trading strategies are present in the Athens (ASE) and Cyprus Stock Exchanges (CSE). The analysis employs two econometric models: the feedback trading strategy model, introduced by Sentana and Wadhwani (1992), and the exponential autoregressive model, proposed by LeBaron (1992). These two theoretical frameworks, separately, were joined with the FIGARCH (1, d, 1) approach. Both models assume two different groups of traders – the “rational” investors that build their portfolio by following the firms’ fundamentals and the “noise” speculators that ignore stock fundamentals and focus on a positive (negative) feedback trading strategy. The empirical results revealed that negative feedback trading strategies exist in the two underlying stock markets.