1、 1 中文 3257 字 本科毕业论文外文翻译 外文题目： Services Policy Reform and Economic Growth in Transition Economies 出 处： The Kiel Institute 作 者： Felix Eschenbach and Bernard Hoekman 原 文： Services Policy Reform and Economic Growth Transition Economies Felix Eschenbach and Bernard Hoekman Abstract Major changes have occ
2、urred in the structure of former centrally planned economies, including a sharp rise in the share of services in GDP, employment, and international transactions. However, large differences exist across transition economies with respect to services intensity and services policy reforms. We nd that re
3、forms in policies toward nancial and infrastructure services, including telecommunications, power, and transport, are highly correlated with inward FDI.Controlling for regressors commonly used in the growth literature, we nd that measures of services policy reform are statistically signicant explana
4、tory variables for the post-1990 economic performance of transition economies. These ndings suggest services policies should be considered more generally in empirical analyses of economic growth. 1. Introduction One of the stylized facts of economic development is that the share of services in GDP a
5、nd employment rises as per capita incomes increase (Francois and Reinert 1996). This reects increasing specialization and exchange of services through the market 2 (outsourcing)with an associated increase in variety and quality that may raise productivity of rms and welfare of nal consumers, in turn
6、 increasing demand for services. It also reects the limited scope for (labor) productivity in provision of some services, implying that over time the (real) costs of these services will rise relative to merchandize, as will their share of employment (Baumol 1967； Fuchs 1968).Services are increasingl
7、y becoming tradable as a result of the greater mobility of people and technological change. This further increases the scope for specialization in production and trade. The competitiveness of rms both domestic enterprises operating on the local market and exporters on international marketsdepends im
8、portantly on the availability, cost, and quality of producer services such as nance, transport, and telecommunicates ations. Services industries were generally neglected under central planning.Marxist thinking emphasized the importance of tangible (material) inputs as determinants of economic develo
9、pment, and classied employment in the services sector as unproductive. The lack of producer services was reected in transport bottlenecks, queuing for and low quality of telecommunications, the absence of efcient nancial intermediation, and muchlower employment in services than was the case in OECD
10、countries (less than 1 percent of the labor force was employed in nance and insurance). Many of the services that are critical to the functioning of a market economy simply did not existnot just a nancial sector that could allocate investment funds efciently, but also design, advertising, packaging,
11、 distribution, logistics, management, after sales services, etc. 2. Shifts in the Structure of Services in Transition Economies The share of services in GDP and employment has grown signicantly since 1990 in almost all transition economies. Compared to the high income OECD average in 1990 when the s
12、hare of services in employment and GDP was around 63 percent transition countries in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) lagged far behind: services accounted for 3040 percent of GDP and employment. As of 2003, services shares had increased substantially. The greatest growth is observed in the Baltic Stat
13、es, which have almost converged on the OECD average of 68 percent in terms of GDP shares, although employment shares remain lower (Figure 1). The Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that acceded to the EU in 2004 have also converged to a large extent. Much less progress has been made by the
14、 Central Asian 3 countries, where natural resource-based activities continue to constitute a major share of GDP. There is also a distinct pattern in labor productivity performance. The CEE, South-East European (SEE) and Baltic states register an increase in productivity, both overall and within serv
15、ices (broadly dened to include government).Conversely, for those other countries where data is available, there has been a decline in the measured value of services output per employee. These countries also have not increased their overall labor productivity performance in the last decade. Noteworth
16、y is the performance of the Baltic countries, where labor productivity in services outpaced the productivity increase in other sectors of the economy. Convergence with respect to high-income OECD countries in terms of productivity levels is still far from being achieved, however. 3. Services Reforms
17、 and Growth Performance The forgoing snapshot of trends in the share of services in GDP, employment, output perworker, trade, and FDI reveal both substantial convergence toward European countries, but also a distinct difference between Central European/Baltic states and Central Asian and CIS (Common
18、wealth of Independent States) economies. Given that trade and FDI in services can be expected to be associated with the acquisition of new technologies, higher service standards and more effective delivery, these differences should help explain the observed higher labor productivity performance in s
19、ervices in the former. The question explored in the rest of this paper is whether these services developments are determinants of the aggregate growth performance of countries. The services outcome variables are of course endogenous, inuenced by the policy stances of governments, so that the focus i
20、s on the impact of services policy reforms. While signicant progress has beenmade by many transition economies in services reforms, there is also substantial cross-country heterogeneity in terms of liberalization and the quality of the regulatory framework for key “ backbone services. Differences in
21、 policy reforms are reected by differences in FDI in services.This is conrmed by the correlation coefcients in the Appendix Table A1 relating investment climate and the combined service sector reform variables to the stock of FDI as a share of GDP.The higher coefcient for the services reformvariable relative to the investment climate indicator is suggestive of the
