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This timely volume addresses three important recent trends in the internationalization of United States equity markets: extensive market integration through foreign investment and links among stock prices around the world; increasing securitization as countries such as Japan come to rely more than ever before on markets in equities and bonds at the expense of banks; and the opening of national financial systems of newly industrializing countries to international financial flows and institutions, as governments remove capital controls and other barriers. Eight essays examine such issues as the current extent of international market integration, gains to U.S. investors through international diversification, home-country bias in investing, the role of time and location around the world in stock trading, and the behavior of country funds. Other, long-standing questions about equity markets are also addressed, including market efficiency and the accuracy of models of expected returns, with a particular focus on variances, covariances, and the price of risk according to the Capital Asset Pricing Model.
Legal and other barriers limit foreign investors' access to emerging stock markets. Empirical evidence suggests that countries could lower the (risk- adjusted) cost of capital by removing formal barriers to such access.
To date, the record of economic transition has decidedly been mixed. The worldwide political climate is still in favor of economic reform and the process continues to have considerable momentum. On the other hand, this process now faces a number of formidable obstacles. There appears to be general agreement that in many countries the promise of a better standard of living which economic transition offers to the mass of the citizenry has failed to produce the rapid and dramatic results hoped for. There is an increasing conflict of interest between multinational firms and the national business community. Moreover, many transition economies have experienced a slowing of economic growth in real terms and social services have been severely cut.This book deals with the development of those forces that have played a major role in the successes and failures of economic transition. Its distinctive feature is that it does this from the perspective of economic, political and social analysis, taking into account both theoretical constructs and economic realities for those countries which have attempted the grand experiment with economic transition.
This paper examines the volatility and predictability of emerging stock markets. A range of measures suggests that, despite perceptions to the contrary, the volatility of emerging markets may have fallen rather than risen on average. Also, although the autocorrelations in emerging market returns appear to turn negative at horizons of a year or more, the magnitude of these return reversals is not that much larger than reversals in some mature markets. One interpretation of the results would be that emerging markets have not consistently been subject to fads or bubbles, or at least no more so than in some industrial countries.
Recent developments at both the international and national levels - including the globalization of financial markets and the wave of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization- have pushed the issue of financial markets to the forefront of the development agenda. This book, edited by Said El-Naggar, comprises the proceedings of a seminar held in Abu Dhabi in January 1994. It provides a comprehensive analysis of various aspects of capital markets in general and particularly in the Arab countries.
Recognizing that technological progress is a necessary ingredient of development, the World Bank has invested substantial resources in agricultural research and extension. This review is divided into two parts to examine Bank-supported projects that were operational in the 1980s and early 1990s. The first part focuses on agricultural extension, highlighting the extension subsector and an overview of Bank lending, the impact of extension investments, and regional performance. The second part looks at agricultural research. Chapters address investment issues, Bank lending, and portfolio performance and present conclusions and recommendations.
This book, first published in 1997, offers up-to-date research about publicly regulated pensions for old age.
Developments in East Asia have progressed rapidly in terms of regionalism since the 1997 crisis. The end of the Asian miracle called into question not only the capacity of regional states to meet the needs of their attendant peoples, but also challenged the viability of regional organizations, such as ASEAN, to adapt and respond to the changing circumstances. Advancing East Asian Regionalism looks at the ways in which ASEAN has expanded since the crisis, and evaluates the potential of East Asia to come together in a regional formation - one capable of representing the region as a whole - akin to the European Community. It draws upon the knowledge and perspectives of academics and policy makers actively engaged in the contradictory issues of regionalism. Coupling case study material on regionalism, institutions, and sectoral cooperation, with theoretical debates on regionalization, this book is an invaluable resource that pushes our understanding of East Asian regionalism forward.
An institutional approach to explaining countertrade and barter in international trade and domestic trade in transition economies. Difficulties in contract enforcement impede international transactions in the world economy and domestic transactions in transition economies. In Contracts in Trade and Transition, Dalia Marin and Monika Schnitzer explain how barter as an economic institution can facilitate contract enforcement across national borders in international trade and within borders in transition countries. The authors show that international countertrade—tying an export to an import—emerged in the 1980s in response to the international debt crisis when Western creditors refused to ...
This book is a vision of how economic policy will evolve in developing countries over the next three-to-five years, delivered by renown practitioners working at the world's leading development institution.