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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the viability for Bolivia of attaining the United Nations millennium development goal established in year 2000, of halving extreme poverty by 2015.

The study is based in numerical simulation with a model of the Bolivian economy. The model pertains to the (widely defined) family of dynamic input‐output models, and represents in detail income distribution, by size and socioeconomic class.

The millennium development goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015 seems to be a difficult, but attainable goal for Bolivia. Given the expected debt reduction agreed with international creditors, the goal can be attained by a combination of investment and redistribution policies.

It is implied that a new approach to development strategy is adopted. A new policy consensus is assumed to supplant the Washington Consensus. The new consensus model is based on objectives such as policy autonomy, structural change, and distributive justice. Poverty reduction strategy is a combination of policies associated with these objectives, viz. foreign debt policy, investment policy, and income distribution policy.

The study shows that capital account regulation, investment planning and redistributive policies might conform effective strategies for attaining the millennium development goals.

The study represents a different approach to poverty reduction strategy, which explores the economy‐wide effects of new policy instruments, particularly on growth capacity, output structure, and income distribution.

This chapter advances a panel vector autoregressive/vector error correction model (PVAR/PVECM) framework for purposes of examining the sources and determinants of cross-country variations in macroeconomic performance using large cross-country data sets. Besides capturing the simultaneity of the potential determinants of cross-country variations in macroeconomic performance and carefully separating short- from long-run dynamics, the PVAR/PVECM framework advanced allows to capture a variety of other features typically present in cross-country macroeconomic data, including model heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence. We use the PVAR/PVECM framework we advance to reexamine the dynamic interrelation between investment in physical capital and output growth. The empirical findings for an unbalanced panel of 90 countries over the time period from at most 1950 to 2000 suggest for most regions of the world surprisingly strong support for a long-run relationship between output and investment in physical capital that is in line with neoclassical growth theory. At the same time, the notion that there would be even a long-run (let alone short-run) causal relation between investment in physical capital and output (or vice versa) is strongly refuted. However, the size of the feedback from output growth to investment growth is estimated to strongly dominate the size of the feedback from investment growth to output growth.

There is now a large, if rather contentious and inconclusive, cross-country empirical literature on the effectiveness of aid in contributing to economic growth. Surprisingly, perhaps, there are very few country studies of aid effectiveness, and none of which we are aware that adopt a time series econometric approach to analyzing the impact of aid on growth. This chapter is an attempt to fill that gap, through a study of Kenya over the period 1964–2002. The core hypothesis underlying our approach is that aid does not have a direct effect on growth, but can have indirect effects through mediating channels. Given the requirements of time series techniques, we focus on two channels for the aid-growth relationship, one through effects on government fiscal relationship (as aid finances public spending) and another through effects on investment (as aid finances public investment). The analysis is no more than indicative but suggests a number of reasons why aid has not been effective in Kenya: reliance on aid loans to finance unanticipated budget deficits, low productivity of public investment and adverse effects of government behavior on private investment. Addressing these deficiencies is necessary if Kenya is to be enabled to utilize aid to improve its poor economic performance.

This paper examines the application of real option theory to sequential investment decision-making. In an effort to contribute to the development of criteria that discriminate between investments that confer growth options from those that confer deferral options, we introduce a conceptual model that explains technological adoption as a sequence of embedded options. Upon the introduction of each successive technological generation, a firm may either defer investment and wait for the arrival of a future generation or invest immediately to obtain experience that provides a claim on adoption of subsequent generations. We propose that deferral and growth option value is dependent on the magnitude, frequency, and uncertainty of inter-generational change, and the nature of rivalry.

This paper analyzes the effect of institutional quality and economic freedom on investment and economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

Focusing on a panel of 27 countries, the study employed the panel fixed and random effect models to analyze data spanning from 2005 to 2018. The study also employed the Wu–Hausman test to determine if the endogeneity problem exists in the model.

The findings of the study show that individually, an improvement in economic freedom stimulates economic growth while the improvement in institutional quality is effective in spurring investment. However, the interaction effect of improvement in institutional quality and economic freedom is the stimulation of both investment and economic growth. The findings are robust to alternative model specifications.

The study implies that for SSA countries to effectively achieve higher investment and economic growth outcomes, there is the need to simultaneously strengthen institutional quality and improve economic freedom. Focusing on either of the factors without the other leads to less desirable growth and investment outcomes.

The study examined the combined influence of institutional quality and economic freedom on investment and growth in SSA. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study has investigated this in the context of SSA.

The purpose of this paper is to assess both short and long-term influences of public investment on economic growth and test the hypothesis that whether public investment promotes or demotes private investment in Vietnam.

The authors use the approach of autoregressive distributed lag model and Vietnam’s macro data in the period of 1990-2016, to evaluate the short and long-term effects of public investment on economic growth and private investment. The model evaluates the impact of public investment on economic growth and private investment based on the neoclassical theories. The public investment which strongly affects economic growth is also reflected by aggregate supply and demand. Public investment directly impacts aggregate demand as a government expenditure and aggregate supply as a production function (capital factor).

The results from this research indicate that public investment in Vietnam in the past period does affect economic growth in the pattern of an inverted-U shape as of Barro (1990), with positive effects mostly occurring from the second year and negative effects of constraining long-term growth. Meanwhile, investment from the private sector, state-owned enterprises, and FDI has positive effects on short-term economic growth and state-owned capital stock has positive impacts on economic growth in both the short and long run. The estimated influence of public investment on private investment also shows a similar inverted-U shape in which public investment have crowding-in private investment short-term but crowding-out in the long run.

The empirical findings in this study can be used for conducting a more efficient policy in restructuring the state sector investment in Vietnam.

The main contributions in this study are: to evaluate the impacts of public investment on economic growth and private investment, the authors extracted public investment in infrastructure from aggregate investment of state sector (as previous studies used); the authors also uses state-owned capital stock variable including cumulative public investment and state-owned enterprises investment suggesting that this could control for the different orders of integration between the stock and flow variable and improve the experimental characteristics of the equation to a higher degree.

Since the 1970s productivity growth in most economies slowed, while information and communication technology expenditures increased: the “information technology (IT) productivity paradox.” Some researchers reported an end to the paradox, but this is most likely due to IT industry growth approaching the Year 2000 phenomenon. The purpose of this paper is to update IT productivity paradox research.

For comparability this research replicates methods employed by previous studies but employs a two-level approach: first macroeconomic indicators; second labor and multi-factor productivity.

Findings suggest IT investment has high positive correlation with gross domestic product growth, but not labor or multi-factor productivity. This ambiguity suggests the paradox is still poorly understood.

The findings are not conclusive; the authors cannot confirm or reject the existence of the productivity paradox. The global recession and banking crisis makes it prudent to wait until recovery before analyzing data from that period.

Lack of convincing evidence supporting positive effects from IT investment suggests some firms benefit from IT investment, but not others, and that IT investment has questionable returns.

Firm level studies might find IT investment benefits some firms, but lack of convincing macroeconomic level evidence of positive effects of IT investment suggests the paradox still exists.

This research updates the IT productivity paradox demonstrating the phenomenon is still poorly understood and thus worthy of further study, questioning the benefits of IT investment for industry and national economies.

The increasing debate on the viability of broad-based productive employment in stimulating the participatory tendencies of growth makes it instructive to inquire how the African “Big Five” have fared in their quests to ensure growth inclusiveness through public investment-led fiscal policy.

Time varying structures and nonlinearities in the government investment series are captured through the non-linear autoregressive distributed lag, asymmetric impulse responses and variance decomposition estimation techniques.

Study findings show that positive investment shocks stimulate growth inclusiveness by enabling access to opportunities through job creation and productive employment for the populace; this result is evident for Morocco and Algeria. However, there is a non-negligible evidence that shocks due to decline in the government investment manifest in insufficient capital stocks and limited investment opportunities, impede access to opportunities by the populace, hinder labour employability and make growth less inclusive. Furthermore, all short-run findings corroborate long-run results regarding the reaction of inclusive growth to positive investment shocks with the exclusion of South Africa; which, unlike its long-run finding, shows that shocks due to increases in investment can foster growth inclusiveness. Also, in respect to short-run negative investment shocks, Nigeria is the only country that does not align its long-run findings.

That public investment shocks make or mar inclusive growth effectiveness shows the need for appropriate fiscal policy consolidation and automatic stabilization guidelines to ensure buffers against shocks and to enhance government investment generation efficiency for a sustainable inclusive growth process that is more participatory in Africa.

This study is the first to accommodate possibilities of shocks in the inclusivity of growth analysis for the five biggest African economies which jointly account for over half of the recorded growth in the continent. As such, there is quantitative evidence that government investment is a potent determinant of growth inclusiveness and it is susceptible to structural changes and time variation of shocks.

Purpose: In reality, financial decisions are made under conditions of asymmetric information that results in either favorable or adverse selection. As far as financial decisions affect growth of the firm, the latter must also be affected by either favorable or adverse selection. Therefore, the core objective of this chapter is to examine the determinants of each financial decision and the effects on growth of the firm under conditions of information asymmetry.

Design/Methodology/Approach: This chapter uses data for the non-financial firms listed in S&P 500. The data cover quarterly periods from 1989 to 2014. The statistical tests include linearity, fixed, and random effects and normality. The generalized method of moments estimation method is employed in order to examine the relative significance and contribution of each financial decision on growth of the firm, respectively. Standard and proposed proxies of information asymmetry are discussed.

Findings: The results conclude that there is a variation in the impact of financial variables on growth of the firm at high and low levels of information asymmetry especially regarding investment and financing decisions. A similar picture emerges in the cases of firm size and industry effects. In addition, corporate dividen d policy has a similar effect on firm growth across all asymmetric levels. These findings prove that information asymmetry plays a vital role in the relationship between corporate financial decisions and growth of the firm. Finally, the results contribute to the vast literature on the estimation of information asymmetry by demonstrating that the classical and standard proxies for information asymmetry are not consistent in terms of the ability to differentiate between favorable or adverse selection (which corresponds to low and high level of information asymmetry).

Originality/Value: This chapter contributes to the related literature in two ways. First, this chapter offers updated empirical evidence on the way that financing, investment, and dividends decisions are made under conditions of favorable and adverse selection. Other related studies deal with each decision separately. Second, the study offers new proxies for measuring information asymmetry in order to reach robust estimates of the effects of financial decisions on growth of the firm under conditions of agency problems.