Globalization, Democracy and Child Health: Asia vs. Latin America

Child mortality in an important indicator of shortcomings in health provisions to the most vulnerable segments of the society i.e., children under five. In this highly connected world, the trends in child mortality need exploration within the context of institutional change and global connectivity. This study explores the effect of globalization on child health in Asia and Latin America. These two regions over the last three decades have undergone waves of liberalization as well as an inconsistent drive towards democratization with very different outcomes in terms of child mortality, making for apt comparison in the context of this study. The study also examines how the level of democracy changes the relationship between globalization and child health in the two regions for the time-period 1970 to 2016 using System GMM estimation technique. The results indicate that economic globalization improves child health in Asia while social and political globalization show different results for infant and child mortality. In Latin America political globalization was found to be most effective in reducing infant mortality, while all dimensions of globalization were found to be either insignificant or increasing under-five mortality. That said, the interactions between dimensions of globalization and democracy were found to be consistently significant and mortality reducing. This result signifies the existence of complementarity between democracy and globalization in improving child health outcomes.

Household Demand Analysis for Pakistan: Recent Evidence

The objective of this study is to analyze household demand system for Pakistan by estimating various elasticities of demand. This study combines nine different rounds of Household Integrated Economic Survey data to estimate Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS). Household level data are supplemented with rich price information available for all the twelve months of the nine years. This approach yields efficient estimates of income and price elasticities, which are non-linear combinations of the parameters of AIDS. Standard errors for all the elasticity estimates are computed on the basis of Monte-Carlo simulations. The results show that household demand responses to income changes are similar between rural and urban households, while the response to price changes differ considerably. On average, rural households are found to be more responsive to price changes than the urban households. The study recommends that on equity grounds transport and communication and miscellaneous non-food goods and housing can be taxed more heavily as compared to other goods.

Financial Sector Development, Trade Openness and Economic Growth Nexus: Evidence from SAARC Countries

To boost economic growth, SAARC countries resorted to trade liberalization policies since mid-1980s, therefore, now it is high time to evaluate the outcomes of this outward-oriented trade regime. Available literature confined the potential gain with the trading country’s status of the financial sector development. This study therefore empirically investigates the complementarity between domestic financial sector and trade openness for its growth effectiveness in the case of SAARC region. The empirical analysis basis upon the panel of six SAARC countries, using panel co-integration technique for the period 1980-2014. The empirical estimates of FMOLS and DOLS indicate that countries holding relatively developed domestic financial sectors enjoy larger gains from trade openness, which finally translates into economic progress. To be exact, the country’s domestic financial sector plays a complementary role between openness and growth in SAARC countries. Results hence suggest that SAARC countries need to lay higher emphasis on the development of the domestic financial sector.

Strategic Competition Between Private Labels and National Brands in a Vertically Linked Market

Over the past decades, the rapid emergence of private labels (PL) has created stiff competition for many established manufacturers of national brands (NB). Retailers are using PL products as a competitive weapon against NB. The present study develops and tests different theoretical models of competition under different retailer-manufacturer production arrangements for private labels using the Non-Nested Model Comparison (NNMC) approach and their impact on the pricing strategies of PLs and NBs in the Canadian retail market. The theoretical model shows that a retailer earns the highest profit when it behaves as a leader and makes the least profit when it behaves as a follower; a similar relationship holds for the NB manufacturer under different PL production arrangements. The total industry profit is the highest when the retailer and NB manufacturer behaves in a Bertrand Nash manner. Empirical results of the study show no consistent pattern of competitive interaction under various production arrangements of PL products.

An Investigation of Employment Choice in the Rural Sector of Pakistan

Agricultural sector remained the focus of policy makers in an attempt to improve the rural incomes and reducing rural poverty among highly populated but less developed countries. The paper analyzes the workers’ choice between farm and nonfarm sectors in the rural sector. The study provides a theoretical framework where the employment decision of rural household member in the farm and nonfarm sectors depends on its physical assets including landholding and human capital development. The empirical analysis uses data for Pakistan obtained from PIHS 2001-02 and PSLM 2010-11. The results of the empirical model show that landholding is the major factor that drives the individual towards the farm activity while, education and public policy incentives including connectivity, market access and information spur the nonfarm employment. The findings of the study favor the development of nonfarm sector in order to cope with excessively increasing number of rural semi-skilled young workers. The findings suggest that focus of the policy should be on education and training to provide an enabling environment for sustained earnings of individuals. Nonfarm sector employment may ensure sustainable income of the rural labor as well as production of exportable surplus from rural to urban areas. This is inevitable due to poor economic conditions of rural workers and limited absorption capacity of farm and the urban job markets in the country.

Profiling Crime in Pakistan: An Aggregated and Disaggregated Socioeconomic Analysis

Crime is more than just a sociological and psychological phenomenon. The economic effects of any criminal activity are intriguing and vice versa. This paper attempts to profile crime scenario in Pakistan in the socio-economic context at aggregated and disaggregated level. Three crime supply models have been constructed using formal econometric techniques i.e., aggregated crime, crime against person and crime against property. These models depict the various socioeconomic variables effecting different crimes. The paper also captures the deterrence effect but on a very limited scale using police strength as proxy. The paper has drawn many conclusions indicating effects of social and economic injustices making people choose illegal activities over lawful ways of earnings and the role of government to intervene and promote socio-economic equity. Government should introduce effective social security programs to create more jobs and to minimize income inequalities. Policing and effective justice system is key to control crime.

The Relationship Between Unemployment and Economic Growth in South Africa: VAR Analysis

This article aims to study real GDP, inflation rate, exchange rate and their impacts on the unemployment rate in South Africa by considering the annual time-series data covering the period 1980-2018. The findings of the Johansen approach to co-integration concluded that there was no evidence of a long-run connection among the variables. The findings of Granger causality reported that there was bidirectional causality between the pairs of real GDP vs. unemployment rate, exchange rate vs. unemployment rate, and inflation rate vs. unemployment rate; however, a unidirectional causality was found in the pairs of real GDP vs. exchange rate and inflation rate vs. exchange rate. The findings of impulse-responses demonstrated that there was a negative significant response of the exchange rate to the unemployment rate in the long-run; conversely, the response of real GDP to the unemployment rate was positive significant in the long-run. Furthermore, the findings of variance decompositions reported that all regressors strongly predict the unemployment rate both in the short and long-run. The study suggested that the government should provide job-readiness skills, business awareness, technological knowledge, and training programs to its population to ascertain unemployment reduction. The study also suggested that the South African government should create a supportive environment and flexible labor market policies that attract small businesses and private-sector investment which ultimately strengthen the entrepreneurial activity with new entrepreneurial actors in order to create job opportunities and absorb a large pool of unemployed youth.

Measuring Crop Productivity Index of Agro Ecological Zones of Punjab and Its Relationship with Climate Factors

measure of crop productivity index and test its validity for climate variables in agricultural ecological zones (AEZs) of Punjab province. Our study followed the FAO’s definition of AEZs in this regard. Crop productivity index is developed with the application of principal component analysis, including major crops like Maize, Sugarcane, Rice, Jowar, Cotton and Wheat. The data on crops from the year 1981-2018, are used. To develop productivity indices on AEZs with same ecological conditions is one of novel features of the present study. Study reveals diverse empirical results. The zones 2, 4 and 6 are ranked as highest productive areas. These zones include D.G. Khan, Rahimyar Khan, Multan and Muzaffargarh areas. The empirical findings confirm the validity and stability of this new construct. Among the climate factors, average maximum temperature plays a significant role for productivity.