Consumption Smoothing and Borrowing Constraints: Evidence from Household Surveys of Iran

The choice between private and government provision of a productive public good like infrastructure (public capital) is examined in the context of an endogenously growing open economy. The accumulation of public capital need not require government provision, in contrast to the standard assumption in the literature. Even with an efficient government, the relative costs and benefits of government and private provision depend crucially on the economy's underlying structural conditions and borrowing constraints in international capital markets. Countries with limited substitution possibilities and large production externalities may benefit from governments encouraging private provision of public capital through targeted investment subsidies. By contrast, countries with flexible substitution possibilities and relatively smaller externalities may benefit either from governments directly providing public capital or from regulation of private providers. The transitional dynamics also are shown to depend on the underlying elasticity of substitution and the size of the production externality.

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Borrowing Constraints and its Impact on The First-Time Buyer Market in Britain

10.15396/eres2003_103 ◽

2003 ◽

Keyword(s):

Borrowing Constraints ◽

First Time

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Well-being and inequality in comparative perspective: the case of Poland and Ukraine

Sociology: Theory, Methods, Marketing ◽

10.15407/sociology2019.01.032 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 32-55

Author(s):

Natalia Kovalisko ◽

Serhii Makeev

Keyword(s):

Tax Evasion ◽

Shadow Economy ◽

Free Market ◽

Well Being ◽

Household Surveys ◽

Cheap Labour ◽

Catching Up ◽

Public Opinion Polls ◽

Opinion Polls

Socio-economic trajectories of Poland and Ukraine have been considerably diverging since the last decade of the 20th century. The former has been advancing and catching up with Western European countries in terms of the quality of life — whereas in Ukraine, the 1990s recession gave way to unsustainable economic growth, which interrupted in the second half of the 2000s and in the 2010s. The comparison of official statistics, along with the data of household surveys and public opinion polls, makes it possible to conclude that a progressive and sustainable transition from a command economy to free market, as exemplified by Poland, is accompanied by moderate deepening of economic inequality. However, an abnormal transition (deviating from the “Polish rule”) entails excessive concentration of wealth and gives rise to corruption as a mechanism of income redistribution among different categories of population. This also results in a more noticeable stratification of opportunies for meeting vital and existential needs. Owing to a large proportion of shadow economy and undeclared work, Ukrainians remain a source of cheap labour in both the domestic and international labour markets; in addition, a persistent subculture of tax evasion is being formed in this country.

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