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- All Subjects: Economics
- Creators: School of Politics and Global Studies
- Creators: Vereshchagina, Galina
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
- Resource Type: Text
One of the most pressing questions in economics is “why are some countries richer than others?” One methodology designed to help answer the question is known as “Development Accounting,” a framework that organizes the determinants of income into two categories: differences in inputs and differences in efficiency. The objective of our work is to study to what extent differences in the levels of pollution can help explain income differences across countries. To do this, we adjusted a factor-only model to allow us to enter PM2.5, a measure of pollution that tracks the concentration of fine particulate matter in the air and looked to see if the model’s predictive power improved. We ultimately find that we can improve the model’s success in predicting GDP by .5 - 6%. Thus, pollution is unlikely to be a major force in understanding cross-country income differences, but it can be used with other economic factors to potentially magnify its impact with other additions in the future.
- John F Kennedy
For over a century now, the United States has publicly professed a commitment to upholding human rights around the world, yet to this day economically supports numerous dictatorships and undemocratic regimes that flout human rights on a daily basis. The rhetoric of American politicians would imply that human rights and democracy are a priority in America's foreign policy, yet given US support for autocracies, both of these principles seem forgotten. If not respect for democracy and human rights, what is truly influencing America's relationship with these countries? I hypothesize that a country's resource availability will be the best predictive factor for its economic relationship with the US, followed by its military involvement with the US, and finally, human rights records will be the least predictive factor. The study found that a country's military cooperation with the US is the best predictive factor regarding our economic relationship, resource availability comes with a weak correlation, and human rights abuses very rarely substantively impact our economic relationships.