Volume 16, Number 4, 2024

EN:

Parental encouragement improves a child’s academic performance, which reflects the individual accumulation of human capital and can prevent the child from becoming poor in the future. We provide a model to clarify the mechanism by which parental encouragement influences the child’s efforts by considering parental time preference, wages, and background. We find that parents who have a child with low innate ability, high wages, strong time preference, and were given little encouragement from their parents in the past hesitate to encourage their child and tend to give them assistance for survival. We also imply that the influence of parental encouragement to children’s academic performance is strong in early grades rather than in late grades. Moreover, we indicate that educational institutes such as schools and local governments can reduce parents’ time preference and provide information about opportunities that stimulate children's efforts at schools. These actions urge the parents who hesitated to encourage their children to begin to encourage them. Furthermore, these actions increase the effectiveness of parental encouragement and realize the child's efforts at school, which results in improving their wages in the labor market in the future.

EN:

The study examined the impact of structural transformation to inequality using a panel of low- and middle-income countries from 1996 - 2018. The system generalised method of moments was used to determine the effect of value-added of each sector to income inequality for the countries in the study. Increase in value-added for the mining and construction sectors reduces inequality whilst inequality increased with an increase in value-added for the agriculture and manufacturing sectors. Thus, for the countries in this study mining and construction driven structural transformation has an inequality reducing effect whereas there is a possibility that further structural transformation has no effect to reducing inequality. This implies that there is a probability of an increase in inequality due to further structural transformation. The implication for policy is a consideration of a channel of structural transformation that is suitable for a specific economy.

EN:

The disruption of supply chain due to Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine, render the prediction of agricultural output a determinant factor of economic life. We consider the predictability of agricultural output based on a set of explanatory variables, that include agricultural input, prices and consumer demand among others, for Greece and explore the usefulness of these variables compared to standard, univariate, forecasting methods. We evaluate the impact of using combined information in the form of principal components, and the use of averaging for producing accurate forecasts. Our results indicate that agricultural output is predictable and, moreover, we identify the factors that, for the case of Greece, lead to such predictability. Our outcomes can be used in a variety of ways, the least of which can be scenario analysis that might be very useful in real-world policy making.

EN:

It is often argued that immigration flows depend positively upon the GDP (a migratory pull factor) and negatively upon the exchange rate depreciations (a migratory push factor) in the destination country. However, we show that both effects depend crucially on the corruption level, and, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the impact of migration’s determinants depends on the level of corruption and therefore, migratory flows are found to be corruption dependent. In fact, we show that high corruption in the destination country could lead to a decoupling of the net migration flows from both effects (GDP and PPP exchange rate). The policy implications of our findings suggest that corruption, and its interactions with other migration factors, should in principle be examined in migration studies. We employ net migration flows, defined as immigrants minus emigrants, for the case of Greece as destination country where migration-flows direction has changed sign two times in the post-war era. The data are obtained from the World Bank. Our findings remain robust [1] to a series of alternative specifications with the world governance indicators (WGIs) and, [2] to the use of several estimators.