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To sum up our findings we come to the following statements. - During the period from 1973 to 1993 inequality of the personal distribution of equivalent pre-government income increased to some extent, as was to be expected given the enormous rise in unemployment. - Inequality of post-government income also increased slightly, but was much lower than inequality of pre-government income due to the equalizing effect of the German tax and transfer system. - In 1993 inequality of pre-government income was higher, and inequality of post-government income was considerably lower in East Germany than in West Germany; the West German tax and transfer system that was transferred to East Germany after reunification - with some additional but temporary minimum regulations - seems to have had a stronger equalizing effect in the East than in the West. - A decomposition into three age groups, the young and the middle-aged group sub-divided further according to whether household members were affected by unemployment, showed that within-groups inequality explained by far more of overall inequality than between-groups inequality. - The relative positions of the two young groups as well as of the middle-aged group with unemployed members deteriorated with respect to their equivalent pre-government and post-government incomes. - During the first period with rising unemployment (1973 to 1978), the development of within-groups inequality and of between-groups inequality contributed to about the same extent to the increase of overall inequality of pre-government income. But this was fully compensated by the tax and transfer system as there were only a negligible change in inequality of equivalent net income and very slight effects of the (four) components of change which nearly compensated each other. - During the last period from 1988 to 1993 the equalizing effect of the German tax and transfer system seems to have weakened, at least in the western part of Germany. The increase in inequality of equivalent net income is mainly due to developments of within group inequalities.
This paper fits within a broader research programme concerned with the processes that link labour market precarity and social exclusion. Labour market insecurity manifests itself most directly in the form of unemployment, and other elements in the programme seek to measure the impact of precarity, and unemployment in particular, on poverty and social exclusion in the eight countries covered. One of the principal concerns of the programme is however the extent to which institutional differences across countries with respect to the labour market and social protection are a significant factor mediating the relationship between labour market precarity and social exclusion. This paper focuses on the effectiveness of cash transfers, the central element of social protection systems, in alleviating the effects of unemployment on income poverty. The structures of social protection systems vary greatly across European Union member states, and in many cases have altered significantly in recent years in response to high unemployment (see Hauser et al, 1998). Using data from the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s for six member countries, the paper compares the effectiveness of different systems in lifting or keeping the unemployed out of poverty, and how this has been affected by the way systems have responded to the challenges produced by developments in the labour market in the past decade. The specific role of social insurance-based unemployment-linked transfers versus other cash transfers is also considered, to assess the extent to which social insurance has been able to cope with changes in the labour market over the period. The data come from a variety of national large-scale household surveys. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses the data and methods to be employed in measuring the impact of cash transfers on poverty risks for the unemployed. Section 3 looks at the overall risks of poverty for the unemployed before and after cash transfers, and how these changed between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. Section 4 looks at the role of social insurance-based unemployment payments versus other cash transfers. Section 5 examines the extent to which the impact of transfers varies by gender and by duration of unemployment. Section 6 highlights the key patterns identified and what these tell us about the relationship between the type of welfare regime a country operates and effectiveness in alleviating poverty among the unemployed.
It appears astonishing to me that none of the papers and discussions at this conference on "Financial Flows to Developing Countries" have even touched upon an important category of international financial relationships which involves direct flows and links to the so-called developing countries. Specifically, none of the contributions have dealt with “development finance”, which is a broad term covering various kinds of activities carried out in the framework of development assistance. This is a particularly striking omission, given that until fairly recently the volume of official aid exceeded the volume of private capital flows to the developing and transition economies (IMF, 1998, p. 60). Moreover, it is conceivable that, in terms of both their developmental impact and their contribution to the alleviation of social problems, the flows financed by official aid may be more important than private capital flows. Thus, I felt that, at the very least, my fellow conference participants should be made aware of this gap in the range of topics addressed by the conference, and it was with this goal in mind that I prepared the present paper as a contribution to the concluding session of the conference. The first section of the present paper defines the concept of “development finance” and seeks to show how its content and meaning has changed over time. In the second section, I discusses a broad trend in banking regulation which has recently emerged in many developing and transition countries and which has, in my view, highly problematic implications for the potential to create financially sound and developmentally relevant “microfinance institutions”.
The main argument in this paper is that new information and communication technologies (ICT) in the financial industry will increase specialisation and competition within the European financial centre system and thereby lead to a ‘re-bundling’ of functions of the various financial centres. Frankfurt plays an interesting role in this development as it is one of the main development centres for ‘financial technology’. With these technologies, remote access to the Frankfurt stock exchange and inter-bank payment system is now feasible from most European cities. This leads to a reduced need for physical presence, which opens up new possibilities for the financial sector’s spatial organisation. However, as financial production is information- and knowledge-intensive, spatial and other types of proximity between financial actors and clients are still essential in many stages. We examine the value chains of three different products (advisory, lending, trading) with regard to different proximities, in order to identify possible patterns of their spatial (re)organisation. From these findings, inferences are drawn for a ‘new’ role for Frankfurt in the European financial centre system.
This paper examines whether an exogenous anticipated monetary shock causes real economic effects, i.e. whether anticipated money is neutral. A major finding is that an anticipated monetary shock can in fact be massively non-neutral in the shortrun, if the economic environment is characterized by strategic complementarity. If the environment is characterized by strategic substitutability, anticipated monetary shocks are largely neutral.
During the last years the relationship between financial development and economic growth has received widespread attention in the literature on growth and development. This paper summarises in its first part the results of this research, stressing the growth-enhancing effects of an increased interpersonal re-allocation of resources promoted by financial development. The second part of the paper seeks to identify the determinants of financial development based on Diamond's theory of financial intermediation as delegated monitoring. The analysis shows that the quality of corporate governance of banks is the key factor in financial system development. Accordingly, financial sector reforms in developing countries will only succeed if they strengthen the corporate governance of financial institutions. In this area, financial institution building has an important contribution to make. Paper presented at the First Annual Seminar on New Development Finance held at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, September 22 - October 3, 1997
The paper analyzes the incentive for the ECB to establish reputation by pursuing a restrictive policy right at the start of its operation. The bank is modelled as risk averse with respect to deviations of both inflation and output from her target. The public, being imperfectly informed about the bank’s preferences uses observed inflation as (imperfect) signal for the unknown preferences. Under linear learning rules - which are commonly used in the literature - a gradual build up of reputation is the optimal response. The paper shows that such a linear learning rule is not consistent with efficient signaling. It is shown that in a game with efficient signaling, a cold turkey approach - allowing for deflation - is optimal for a strong bank - accepting high current output losses at the beginning in order to demonstrate its toughness. JEL classification: D 82, E 58
Individual financial systems can be understood as very specific configurations of certain key elements. Often these configurations remain unchanged for decades. We hypothesize that there is a specific relationship between key elements, namely that of complementarity. Thus, complementarity seems to be an essential feature of financial systems. Intuitively speaking, complementarity exists if the elements of a (financial) system reinforce each other in terms of contributing to the functioning of the system. It is the purpose of this paper to provide an analytical clarification of the concept of complementarity. This is done by modeling financial systems as combinations of four elements: firm-specific human capital of an entrepreneur, the ability of a bank to restructure the borrower's firm in the case of distress, the possibility to appropriate private benefits from running the firm, and the bankruptcy law. A specific configuration of these elements constitutes one financial system. The bankruptcy law and the potential private benefits are treated as exogenous. They determine the bargaining power of the contracting parties in the case that recontracting occurs. In a two-stage game, the optimal values for the other elements are determined by the agents individually - by investing in human capital and restructuring skills, respectively - and jointly by writing, executing and possibly renegotiating a financing contract for the firm. The paper discusses the equilibria for different types of bankruptcy law and demonstrates that equilibria exhibit the sought-after feature of complementarity. Three particularly significant equilibria correspond to stylized accounts of the British, German and the US-American financial system, respectively.
We analyze incentives for loan officers in a model with hidden action, limited liability and truth-telling constraints under the assumption that the principal has private information from an automatic scoring system. First we show that the truth-telling problem reduces the bank’s expected profit whenever the loan officer cannot only conceal bad types, but can also falsely report bad types. Second, we investigate whether the bank should reveal her private information to the agent. We show that this depends on the percentage of good loans in the population and on the signal’s informativeness. Though we had to define different regions for different parameters, we concluded that it might often be favorable to not reveal the signal. This contradicts current practice.