by Chiara Candelise, Università di Torino e OEET
The next two issues of the newsletter “Emerging Economies” will present contributions from the latest XXth Scientific Conference of the Italian Association for the Study of Comparative Economic Systems (AISSEC), held in October 2018 at the Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin.
The conference focus has been on the mission of the association (AISSEC): the comparison of economic systems. It hosted a range of national and international research papers dealing with both theoretical and applied research work on several topics ranging from macroeconomics and sustainable development in emerging and developing countries, to comparative studies of advanced economies. For the purpose of the next two newsletter contributions have been selected among those dealing more explicitly with emerging and developing countries. They have been grouped along two themes: 1. A macroeconomic perspective with contributions addressing growth, inequality and sustainable development; 2. A microeconomic theme with focus on gender issues and human development.
While the second theme will be addressed in the December 2018 “Emerging Economies” newsletter, this newsletter, November 2018, presents an overview of selected research articles addressing the first theme: growth, inequality and sustainable development. It begins with a cross country analysis of A. Savoia and M.N. Asadullah of what can facilitate poverty reduction, showing that institutional context and quality of government do matters: countries with greater state capacity have reduced poverty at a higher speed and are more likely to achieve Millennium Development Goal 1 of halving poverty. Then, an article of M. Boario which compares Myanmar with neighbouring countries Vietnam and Thailand to argue whether the country can be considered an emerging economy: despite being one the fastest economies in the region the country’s sustainability of growth and improvement of living is endangered by the presence of a conflict trap, compounded with poverty and resource trap. The contribution by M. S. Klasen, C. Lo Bue and V. Prete explores how shocks can affect the distributional patterns of growth and, in turn, poverty reduction, using empirical illustrations based on longitudinal survey data from Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and South Africa. A comparative study of the impact of Chinese public funding versus traditional donors on African countries, led by M. Marson and I. Savin, concludes that Chinese funding has similar impacts on development of African countries, when compared with traditional donors. Finally, O. Demidova presents results of an examination of gross regional product per capita convergence of 80 Russian regions across the 2000-2014 period, showing significant differences across regions and the factors affecting them.
