Suchergebnisse

This paper presents a broad diagnostic of the level of institutional development in Portugal in the legal, corporate governance and financial systems. A comparative assessment suggests that Portuguese institutions are less developed than their European Union and EastAsian counterparts, more developed than Greek institutions and on a level similar to that of Spanish institutions.We use data for a wide cross-section of countries since 1960 and correlate indicators of institutional development with the long-term average growth rate, identifying issues where reform is likely to significantly affect economic growth. We construct three new indices that measure the potential of institutional reform – the impact of reform on growth, the required reform effort and the efficiency of reform index – by taking into consideration the institutional "distance" between Portugal and the European Union. These indices measure, respectively, which reforms have the most payoff in terms of growth, which are "less costly" to undertake and which deliver the most growth per required effort. Our results strongly suggest that in a large number of issues, institutional reform may translate into substantially higher rates of economic growth. Of the ten most promising reforms, six are in the legal area, irrespective of which of the indices is considered. Whereas legal reform is promising at the aggregate and the microeconomic levels, in the financial sector aggregate indicators offer the wider scope for productive reform, while in the corporate governance area it is indices at the micro level that hold the most promise. These results support the view that a comprehensive reform effort is likely to deliver higher rates of growth in Portugal, allowing faster real convergence with the rest of the European Union. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

This paper tests the implication of the Stolper-Samuelson theorem that capital-poor individuals prefer more trade openness in poor (capital-scarce) countries and less trade in rich (labor-scarce) countries, by using a broad panel of countries and new exogenous determinants of trade openness. According to the seminal work in Mayer (1984), capital-poor individuals prefer more trade openness in poor (capital-scarce) countries and less trade openness in rich (labor-scarce) countries. We use the level of political rights as a proxy for the relative capital labor endowment of the median voter so that an increase in political rights should have asymmetric effects in poor and rich countries: an increase in political rights should lead to more openness in capital poor countries and less openness in capital rich countries. Our results show that, while both income per capita and political rights are positively associated with import intensity, their interaction has a negative and very robust negative association with openness. Increases in political rights lead to sizeable decreases in import intensity after a given income per capita threshold has been surpassed. Our results are robust to the inclusion of structural, geography and cultural determinants of openness, different estimation methods and different proxies for country endowments. ; N/A