Suchergebnisse

Chapter 1 provides an introduction and preliminary comparisons of economic and human development indicators to present current differences in levels of development between different countries grouped by their income level. Since World War II foreign aid has proved to be one of the main instruments for the developed countries to promote and increase economic development in less developed parts of the world. Chapter 2 will give a brief chronological overview of economic theories about economic growth and development and highlight recent approaches in development research. It will be shown that the focus of development policies has changed several times since its emergence. Given positive and negative growth experiences in developing countries, the development research literature is still inconclusive concerning the effects of development assistance and foreign aid on economic development. The gap in economic performance between developing and developed countries remains considerable, even in the face of constant flows of foreign aid and continuously changing policy prescriptions addressing pressing issues and obstacles of development. Chapter 3 uses sub-nationally disaggregated data to assess the importance of recipient countries' governance on the allocation of aid projects within recipient countries. The results show that incumbent presidents' birth regions do not signiffcantly attract more project aid than other regions in a country. Accounting for levels of governance in recipient countries does not change the results. On the other hand, capital city regions appear to attract more project aid. Higher levels of governance seem to have a negative effect on the allocation of aid projects in capital city regions, which might be driven by clientelistic and corrupt motives of political decision makers. Considering the results from the research literature and from Chapter 3 one may wonder how different sub-national distributional patterns of aid projects and foreign aid influence regional and spatial inequalities within recipient countries. If the sub-national allocation of foreign aid follows certain ethnic, political or economic considerations, instead of addressing poverty or alleviating human misery, then foreign aid might further deepen regional inequalities in recipient countries. Thus, Chapter 4 first elaborates on different theories and highlights existing empirical evidence about regional inequality. The chapter additionally presents trends and levels of different measures of regional inequality in sub-Saharan Africa. Chapter 5 assesses the relationship between foreign aid and regional inequality. First, different measures of regional inequality and necessary considerations for proper interpretation are discussed. Secondly, using sub-nationally disaggregated GDP data these measures of regional inequality in sub-Saharan Africa are calculated to further discuss their patterns and levels over the years 1998 to 2015. The data shows that regional inequalities vary largely within and between countries and that the pattern is on average highly persistent in the entire sample. The empirical analysis to understand the effects of foreign aid on regional inequality first provides estimation results using a static panel estimation approach. However, due to serious endogeneity concerns, especially between foreign aid and regional inequality, these results need to be taken cautiously. The empirical analysis further uses dynamic panel estimation methods such as system GMM to account for endogeneity issues and for the high persistence of regional inequalities. The results indicate that foreign aid does not increase regional inequalities, but instead even reduces regional inequalities in some specifications. Interestingly, higher trade ratios significantly reduce regional inequalities in all specifications. Furthermore, the estimation using the decomposition of regional inequalities by within and between capital and non capital city regions could not detect any significant effects in almost all specifications. This results from the limited instrument set due to fewer countries in the sample and the higher persistence of within and between regional inequalities. As a results, the analysis provides no support for the assumption that foreign aid increases regional inequalities. The uneven distribution of aid projects sub-nationally does not appear to affect overall regional inequalities.

Abstract
It is well established in the literature that international courts make law and develop norms. Yet there is no systematic analysis of how adjudication refashions a given norm's trajectory. This article addresses this gap by combining legal analysis with social science methods. It takes a closer look at the European Court of Human Rights and provides a framework for understanding how court rulings develop norms – that is, how judicial decisions modify norms' content or scope. The framework is composed of a typology of court characters (arbitrator, entrepreneur and delineator) and the distinct modes of norm development that each character typically generates (incremental/inconspicuous, pronounced and peripheral development). The typology is informed by interviews carried out at the Court as well as the literature on judicial review and, in particular, the debate on judicial activism and restraint. Unlike the concepts of judicial activism and restraint, these characters are not antithetical, but complementary. I show how court characters complement one another by looking at the case of the norm against torture under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. I examine 157 judgments issued between 1967 and 2006. I find that the percentage of entrepreneur rulings considerably decreased in the post-1998 period, while arbitrator rulings increased by nearly the same amount. My analysis of nearly four decades of jurisprudence not only sheds light on how the Court operates but also furthers our understanding of how it refashions codified norms.

Der Beitrag versteht sich in erster Linie als eine konzeptionelle Idee für eine zukünftige Forschung zum Thema Flucht und stellt dabei die Relevanz einer kontrapunktischen Lesart in den Mittelpunkt, die sich mit einer erkenntnistheoretischen Wende verbindet.

The purpose of the study to reveal how interest rates on loans offered to consumers by banks in Turkey are affected by macroeconomic factors. For this purpose, the personal loan interest rate is considered as the consumer loan interest rate, mortgage loan interest rate and vehicle loan interest rate. Macroeconomic factors, inflation, gold, exchange rate and money supply are included in the analysis. Three models have been established using monthly data for the period January 2009-June 2020. Firstly, cointegration test was applied to the models and it was determined that there is at least one cointegration relationship in each model. Long-term estimation results for the models are obtained by using the FMOLS method. In general, it was observed that the increase in the exchange rate tended to increase the bank loan interest rates, while the increase in the money supply lowered the bank loan interest rates. As a result of the causality analysis, bidirectional causality relationship from consumer loan interest rate to money supply and inflation, unidirectional causality from interest rate to gold price, unidirectional causality relationship from exchange rate to interest rate was determined. Unidirectional causality relationship from mortgage loan interest rate to money supply, unidirectional causality from exchange rate to interest rate was found. While it was determined that there is a bidirectional causality relationship between vehicle loan interest rate and money supply, gold price and inflation. It is expected that these results may guide banks and policymakers to determine interest rate policies. ; peer-reviewed