Evaluation of Financial Liberalization : A General Equilibrium Model with Constrained Occupation Choice

Gine, Xavier ; Townsend, Robert M.

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: FINANCIAL LIBERALIZATION;    AGGREGATE VARIABILITY;    GROWTH PATTERNS;    OCCUPATIONAL CHOICE;    INTERMEDIATION;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-3014
RP-ID  :  WPS3014

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

The objective of this paper is to assessboth the aggregate growth effects and the distributionalconsequences of financial liberalization as observed inThailand from 1976 to 1996. A general equilibriumoccupational choice model with two sectors, one withoutintermediation, and the other with borrowing and lending, istaken to Thai data. Key parameters of the productiontechnology and the distribution of entrepreneurial talentare estimated by maximizing the likelihood of transitioninto business given initial wealth as observed in twodistinct datasets. Other parameters of the model arecalibrated to try to match the two decades of growth as wellas observed changes in inequality, labor share, savings, andthe number of entrepreneurs. Without an expansion in thesize of the intermediated sector, Thailand would haveevolved very differently, namely, with a drastically lowergrowth rate, high residual subsistence sector,non-increasing wages, but lower inequality. The financialliberalization brings welfare gains and losses to differentsubsets of the population. Primary winners are talentedwould-be entrepreneurs who lack credit and cannot otherwisego into business (or invest little capital). Mean gains forthese winners range from 17 to 34 percent of observedoverall average household income. But liberalization alsoinduces greater demand by entrepreneurs for workersresulting in increases in the wage and lower profits ofrelatively rich entrepreneurs of the same order of magnitudeas the observed overall average income of firm owners.Foreign capital has no significant impact on growth or thedistribution of observed income.