Nihal Bayraktar

Foreign Bank Entry, Performance of Domestic Banks, and Sequence of Financial Liberalization

The openness or internationalization of financial services is a complex issue because it is closely related to structural reforms in the domestic financial sector with some perceived implications for macroeconomic stability. The authors investigate the impact of foreign bank entry on the performance of domestic banks and how this relationship is affected by the sequence of financial liberalization. Their data set is constructed from the BANKSCOPE database, including 30 industrial and developing countries, and covering the period from 1995 to 2002. The authors apply panel data regressions by pooling all countries together, and by grouping countries according to the sequence of their financial liberalization. One observation based on descriptive analysis is that the degree of openness to foreign bank entry varies a great deal, which is not correlated with average income levels or with GDP growth. Second, the sequence of financial liberalization matters for the performance of the domestic banking sector: After controlling for macroeconomic variables and grouping countries by their sequence of liberalization, foreign bank entry has significantly improved domestic bank competitiveness in countries that liberalized their stock market first. In these countries, both profit and cost indicators are negatively related to the share of foreign banks. Countries that liberalized their capital account first seem to have benefited less from foreign bank entry compared with the other two sets of countries.

Banking sector openness and economic growth

Banking sector openness may directly increase growth by improving the quality of financial services and increasing funds available, or indirectly by improving the efficiency of financial intermediaries, both of which may reduce the cost of financing, in turn, increase capital accumulation and economic growth. The objective of this paper is to empirically reinvestigate these direct and indirect links, using a more advanced econometric technique (generalised method-of-moments [GMM] dynamic panel estimators). An illustrative model is presented to link financial market development with investment. The empirical results support the presence of direct and indirect links, thus encouraging countries planning to open their financial markets.

Foreign Direct Investment and Investment Climate

Abstract The changing direction of foreign direct investment (FDI) from developed countries towards developing ones, especially after the crisis, has started to attract more attention in the literature. In this paper, the link between FDI and “ease of doing business” indicators, as one possible source of the changing direction of FDI, is investigated. The data source is the World Banks Doing Business Database. The study covers the years from 2004 to 2010. Because the paper includes the years right before the economic and financial global crisis, as well as the crisis period, the impact of changing “ease of doing business” on the changing direction of FDI towards developing countries can be better evaluated. The initial results show that countries which have better records of “doing business” tend to attract more FDI. The improvement in “ease of doing business” indicators in developing countries can have a partial explanatory power in determining higher FDI flows to these countries.

A macroeconomic framework for quantifying growth and poverty reduction strategies in Niger

The authors apply the dynamic macroeconomic framework developed by Agenor, Bayraktar, and El Aynaoui (2004) to Niger. As in the original model, linkages between foreign aid, public investment (disaggregated into education, infrastructure, and health), and growth are explicitly captured. Although the nominal exchange rate is fixed, the relative price of domestic goods is endogenous, thereby allowing for potential Dutch disease effects associated with increases in aid. The authors assess the impact of policy shocks on poverty by using partial growth elasticities. They perform various policy experiments, including an increase in the level of foreign aid, a reallocation of public investment toward infrastructure, and neutral and non-neutral cuts in tariffs. The simulations show the dynamic tradeoffs that these policies entail with respect to growth and poverty reduction in Niger.

Specification of Investment Functions in Sub-Saharan Africa

It is a well-known fact that one of the most important determinants of growth is private investment. But in the developing country context of widespread poverty, the effects of initial conditions on the process of capital accumulation have seldom been investigated. This paper highlights heterogeneity in the process of capital accumulation across different countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, and derives a formal specification of investment functions in the primary, industry, and service sectors in the region using a variation of the combined Tobins Q Theory and the neoclassical models of investment. The results highlight a more rapid accumulation of capital in the relatively high income subpanel and a widening public-private capital accumulation gap. A functional specification points to the significance of aggregate profitability shocks, the financing cost of investment, and public capital stock in estimating the growth rate of private capital accumulation. These results are supported empirically, as highlighted by the relatively small absolute deviation between actual and predicted value distributions.

Investment, alternative measures of fundamentals and revenue indicators

This article investigates the significance of revenue management in determining firm-level fixed capital investment when investment opportunities are controlled for by two of the recent empirical fundamentals: profitability shocks and the mandated investment rate. The data set includes US-based manufacturing firms. The results show that financial variables are important determinants of investment but they are not as significant as claimed by some studies. The explanatory power of financial variables in the investment process declines with increasing significance of fundamentals. Another result is that investment by expected to be financially constrained firms tends to be less sensitive to changes in financial variables.

The Composition of Public Expenditure and Growth: A Small-Scale Intertemporal Model for Low-Income Countries

This paper presents a small-scale intertemporal model of endogenous growth that accounts for the composition of public expenditure and externalities associated with public capital. Government spending is disaggregated into various components, including maintenance, security, and investment in education, health, and core infrastructure. After studying its long-run properties, the model is calibrated for Haiti, using country-specific information as well as parameter estimates from the literature. A variety of policy experiments are then reported, including a reallocation of spending aimed at creating fiscal space to promote public investment; an improvement in fiscal management that leads to a reduction in tax collection costs; higher spending on security; and a composite fiscal package.

Post-Hipc Growth Dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa

Access to debt relief under the Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative enhanced the growth performance across Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the subset of debt-ridden low-income countries. Over the past few years, these Completion Point countries have enjoyed significantly higher investments and growth rates, primarily fueled by the expanding fiscal space of the post-Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative era. They are also weathering the adverse effects of the global crisis much better than their non-Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative counterparts. Despite these growth rebounds, the region is not likely to meet the Millennium Development Goals, however. Long-term growth projections from a simple macroeconomic model, which is applied to Ethiopia, suggest that prospects for reversing the widening income gaps with other regions of the developing world are limited. Under the baseline scenario, assuming current growth trends, the estimates show that it could take more than five decades for per capita real income to double in Ethiopia. However, even these gloomy prospects are likely to be undermined by the looming risk of another sovereign debt crisis. In effect, the experiments show that lowering interest rates on external debt would not bridge the widening income gap with other regions of the world, unless it is accompanied by a rapid expansion of capital accumulation financed by sustained inflows of foreign aid.

Micro efficiency and macro growth

This paper is about micro foundations of productivity and growth. There are several studies on productivity for advanced economies but relatively few for developing countries. Using data from the investment climate surveys of the World Bank, estimation results from 45 developing countries, complemented by extended analysis at firm and industry levels for Brazil and India for the period 2002-05, indicate the following: (i) confirmation of the importance of total factor productivity at firm, industry and national levels, but total factor productivity progressively tapers off at each level of aggregation implying that there is a less than one-to-one relationship between micro-efficiency, sector growth, and macro growth; (ii) capital accumulation is more important at the macro level than the micro level; (iii) productivity at the micro level is driven by research and development, the capacity utilization rate, and adoption of foreign technology (all of which involve management decisions), and is negatively related to corruption and instability, tax, and financial regulations; and (iii) confirmation of the lower contribution of total factor productivity to output growth in developing countries than in developed economies. Management decisions are involved in a lot of day-to-day operations at the firm level and therefore management is an unmeasured input. In developing countries, at the firm level, there is a need to understand the contribution of quality of inputs (management quality, education and labor quality, training, experience of workers, use of computers at work) and also the role of external agglomeration (for example, location in a booming city, competitive pressures from new firms, trade competition, and regulations).

Changing International Trade Linkages in Sub-Saharan Africa: BRIC versus OECD Countries

This chapter uses country-level exports and imports data for 42 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries to establish a link between changing international trade linkages in SSA and growth. The comparative analysis shows that the share of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) in SSA’s trade has been increasing significantly relative to that of OECD member countries. Further, the findings support the existence of a significant link between the higher growth rates recently observed in SSA and changing trade linkages.