This paper analyzes the immediate, delayed and group responses of 20 commodity prices in four commodity groups (foods and livestock, crops, energy and metals) to macroeconomic "news" (unexpected announcements)...
Technical, scale and allocative inefficiency are widely believed to plague the industrial sectors of developing countries. This paper presents a way to measure this inefficiency with imperfect data. There...
Most literature suggests that voluntary export restraints (VER) are not very harmful for the exporting country. This paper argues that this view is misconceived. Most work has focused on the welfare loss...
This paper reviews 70 estimates of the price elasticity of demand for many different transport modes and market situations. The paper presents figures separately for passenger and freight transport and...
The idea behind patent policies is to increase the output of commercially useful innovations by creating a transitory propertyy right that allows the inventor to appropriate part of the returns from his...
This paper presents a pricing model for secondary market debt designed to assess the market value of various forms of guarantees and the impact of debt reduction on the value of remaining claims. The model...
Economic deregulation and financial liberalization are important for a country to develop a viable and robust financial system. But deregulation will remove the protections previously afforded the banking...
Senegal is in a long-term economic crisis. Senegalese industry suffers from a highly adversarial system of industrial and labor relations, excessive government regulations in some areas and inadequate...
This report is an attempt to develop a method for projecting mortality trends in all countries into the future, both over the short term (for one or two decades) and over the long term (for one or two...
To solve the puzzle of attitudes toward debt buybacks, the authors use a model that combines considerations of debt overhang with the possibility of asymmetrical information between debtor countries and...
As cities in developing countries grow, the need to meet increasing demand for urban infrastructure services has become an important policy problem. Failure to respond adequately affects productivity and...
By populism, this paper refers to an economic approach that emphasizes growth and income redistribution and deemphasizes the risks of inflation and deficit finance, external constraints and the reaction...
Implicit in standard macroeconomics of adjustment is the assumption of well-integrated labor markets that are responsive to relative prices. But segmentation of the labor market is usually said to be an...
This paper discusses the theory that less politics makes better economics. It argues that this perspective on politics misrepresents the dynamics of policymaking in developing countries and is seriously...
Earmarking is the practice of assigning revenues from specific taxes or groups of taxes to specific government activities or to broader areas of government activity. As such, it contrasts with general...
The banking crisis in Chile in 1981-83 was widespread - representing about 60 percent of the banking system's total portfolio. The crisis arose because of macroeconomic problems and was exacerbated by...
This paper is a contribution to the understanding of global interconnections through the evaluation and validation of the capabilities and properties of MULTIMOD, a multiregional macroeconomic model, developed...
This paper reviews current investment theories, recent models linking macroeconomic policies and private investment, and the effect of uncertainty and credibility on irreversible investment decisions...
Westeners often complain that laws are not enforced in developing countries. "Good" laws are on the books, but in reality individuals and firms evade them with impunity. For example taxes are uncollected...
The objective of this paper is to apply a framework for macroeconomic consistency to Zimbabwe. Using annual data for 1981 and 1987, the paper illustrates the usefulness of imposing consistency on the flow...