Pacific Rim economic conferences.

Brada, Josef C.

For the past 3 years, the Association for Comparative Economic Studies has cooperated with the Japanese Association for Comparative Economics, the Korean Association for Comparative Economics and the Society for the Study of Emerging Markets to organize conferences dealing with the economic problems facing the economies bordering on the Pacific Ocean. The first conference was held in Honolulu, Hawaii, the second at Seoul National University and the third in Waikoloa, Hawaii. A number of papers from these conferences were published individually in previous issues of Comparative Economic Studies and others in a symposium in the Journal of Comparative Economics in May 2014.

In this symposium, we present two papers that are based on the keynote presentations at the third Pacific Rim Conference held in May 2014 and one paper that was presented at the conference. The first paper, by Jan Fait and Vladimir Tomsik, is entitled 'Impact and Implementation Challenges of the Basel Framework for Emerging, Developing and Small Economies'. While the Basel III framework for bank regulation is intended to strengthen the global financial system, its design was in many ways driven by the experiences and needs of banks in large developed economies. The authors discuss how the application of the Basel III framework is to be achieved in small, less developed countries, many of which are to be found in the Pacific Rim region, and the special problems that banks and regulators in these countries will face as they begin to implement the new regulatory regime.

The second paper, by Michael Alexxev and Andrey Cerniavsky, examines the effects of oil revenues on economic growth. In order to hold institutions and taxes constant, a problem that bedevils inter-country comparisons, they use data for oil-producing and non-oil producing states in the United States and for regions of Russia. Their paper, 'The Effect of Oil on Regional Growth in Russia and the US: A Comparative Analysis' shows that, because oil revenues in US states are not taxed away by the Federal government, these states enjoyed faster growth as a result of their oil resources. In Russia, however, the central government taxed away the marginal gains in oil revenues, and oil-producing regions did not experience greater growth as the result of booming oil prices. The paper thus represents an innovative and important contribution to the literature linking natural resource abundance and economic growth. The third paper, 'Effects of Privatization on Exporting Decisions: Firm-Level Evidence from Chinese State-Owned Enterprises' is by Yasuyuki Todo, Tomohiko Inui and Yuan Yuan. The authors use firm-level data for a panel of Chinese firms to investigate whether privatization increases the likelihood that firms will undertake export activities. They identify a number of channels through which privatization can influence firms' export decisions, some of which encourage exports and others which retard them. Nevertheless, it appears that idiosyncratic firm-specific characteristics are more important than privatization in increasing firms' propensity to export.

We hope to publish additional papers from the Pacific Rim Conferences in future issues of Comparative Economic Studies.

doi:10.1057/ces.2014.32

JOSEF C BRADA

Department of Economics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-3806, USA.

E-mail: josef.brada@asu.edu