The impact of globalization and regionalization on the transmission of economic growth from developed countries to less developed countries

This dissertation will examine in detail the transmission of real economic growth from: (1) OECD countries to less developed countries (LDCs); (2) United States to Western Hemisphere LDCs; (3) Japan to East Asian LDCs; (4) United States to selected Western Hemisphere countries; (5) Japan to selected East Asian countries.; The data used is time-series data of the real growth rates in the OECD countries, LDCs, Western Hemisphere LDCs, Asian LDCs, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines between 1961 and 2000.; The methodology is to develop a framework for the application of transfer functions relating growth rates of LDCs to those of developed countries. The advantage of this framework is that we first model the process of growth in developing countries as an ARIMA model capturing both autoregressive and moving average elements of the process. Then we introduce the effect of growth in developed countries to the model in order to gauge their effects above and beyond the internal workings of the growth process in developing countries. This framework will insure the proper application of the ARIMA model in analyzing the relationship between the real growth rates of the developed countries and the developing countries.; The conclusions are the following: (1) The breakdown of the Bretton Woods Accord had an impact on the structural changes occurring globally in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During the period of the Bretton Woods Accord OECD real growth rates had a much stronger impact on the LDC real growth rates than was true after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods Accord. (2) In the period leading up to the Latin American debt crisis both the real growth rates of the OECD and the United States impacted Latin American real growth rates but Japan's real growth rates were not related to Latin America. (3) Japan's influence on East Asian growth was relatively weak in the 1960s but their influence continued to strengthen over the decades reaching its height in the 1990s when their relationship was extremely strong. (4) The Japanese economic slump of the 1990s occurred just when their real growth rates were having their greatest impact on East Asia leading into the East Asian crisis of 1997. (5) The United States was slumping in the 1970s. Japan was booming in the 1970s. The United States was booming in the 1990s. Japan was slumping in the 1990s. Therefore the economic cycles of the United States and Japan were not synchronized. Diversification works best to dampen business cycles when the factors that influence those business cycles are moving in opposite directions. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...