Three essays on Asian economies (Thailand, Japan, United States)

Essays one and two apply dominance techniques to analyze and rank inequality, welfare, and poverty in Thailand during the 1990s. The principle focus is on the effects of the severe economic contraction of 1997. Essay one examines welfare, poverty, and inequality in Thailand as a whole. The analysis reveals that in the period before the contraction, Thailand experiences rapid economic growth with equity. First-order dominance of deflated consumption expenditures shows increases in economic well-being before the contraction and declines in welfare during and after the crisis. In addition, truncated quantile functions of deflated consumption expenditures suggest a decrease of poverty in the period before the crisis and an increase in poverty during the periods of contraction and recovery. However, first-order Engel food share dominance suggests that welfare improved and poverty declined during the recovery between 1998 and 2000. Lorenz dominance of consumption expenditure distributions reveals that inequality diminished in the contraction and increased in the period of recovery.; Essay two focuses on regional welfare, poverty, and inequality in Bangkok, Central, Northern, Northeastern, and Southern regions of Thailand. Lorenz dominance is employed to assess inequality, while first-order Engel food share dominance is applied to rank welfare across time and among regions. Poverty is evaluated by comparing truncated food-share quantile functions. The evidence reveals that the economic crisis of 1997 seems to have affected inequality in Bangkok (the richest region) more than the Northeast (the poorest region), with the most dramatic changes occurring in the North and South. Welfare was unambiguously higher in Bangkok than in other regions both before and after the economic contraction. In fact, the contraction changes the rankings of economic well-being and poverty only in the North, South, and Northeast.; Essay three applies a threshold cointegration methodology to explore the properties of long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) in Pacific-rim nations. Using Japan and the United States as base countries, long-run PPP holds for most Asian countries, and the adjustment mechanism is asymmetric. In contrast to symmetric adjustments, asymmetric adjustments of nominal exchange rates play an important role in eliminating deviations from long-run PPP.