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Managing Economic Volatility and Crises
Economic volatility has come into its own after being treated for decades as a secondary phenomenon in the business cycle literature. This evolution has been driven by the recognition that non-linearities, long buried by the economist's penchant for linearity, magnify the negative effects of volatility on long-run growth and inequality, especially in poor countries. This collection organizes empirical and policy results for economists and development policy practitioners into four parts: basic features, including the impact of volatility on growth and poverty; commodity price volatility; the financial sector's dual role as an absorber and amplifier of shocks; and the management and prevention of macroeconomic crises. The latter section includes a cross-country study, case studies on Argentina and Russia, and lessons from the debt default episodes of the 1980s and 1990s.
Restructuring Uganda's Coffee Industry
After experiencing a boom during the mid-1990s, the performance of Uganda's coffee industry has been disappointing. Most existing analyses see the sector's problems as quality deterioration, poor marketing position in the global market, weak regulatory framework, and poor infrastructure. Recommendations range from setting up a coffee auction to increasing the share of specialty coffees. This paper concludes that such advice has been largely inconsistent with the stylized facts of the Ugandan coffee industry. It argues that the coffee wilt disease and the effectiveness of the coffee replanting program are the two key issues on which policymakers and the donor community should focus their activities and allocate their resources.
Global Agricultural Trade and Developing Countries
Global Agricultural Trade and Developing Countries presents research findings based on a series of commodity studies of significant economic importance to developing countries. The book sets the stage with background chapters and investigations of cross-cutting issues. It then describes trade and domestic policy regimes affecting agricultural and food markets, and assesses the resulting patterns of production and trade. The book continues with an analysis of product standards and costs of compliance and their effects on agricultural and food trade. The book also investigates the impact of preferences given to selected countries and their effectiveness, then reviews the evidence on the attemp...
The Impact of Urban Spatial Structure on Travel Demand in the United States
The authors combine measures of urban form and public transit supply for 114 urbanized areas with the 1990 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey to address two questions: (1) How do measures of urban form, including city shape, road density, the spatial distribution of population, and jobs-housing balance affect the annual miles driven and commute mode choices of U.S. households? (2) How does the supply of public transportation (annual route miles supplied and availability of transit stops) affect miles driven and commute mode choice? The authors find that jobs-housing balance, population centrality, and rail miles supplied significantly reduce the probability of driving to work in citie...
The Investment Climate and the Firm
The importance of a country's "investment climate" for economic growth has recently received much attention. Hallward-Driemeier, Wallsten, and Xu address the general lack of appropriate data for measuring the investment climate and its effects. The authors use a new survey of 1,500 Chinese enterprises in five cities to more precisely define and measure components of the investment climate, highlight the importance of firm-level data for rigorous analysis of the investment climate, and investigate empirically the effects of this comprehensive set of measures on firm performance in China. Overall, their firm-level analysis reveals that the main determinants of firm performance in China are international integration, entry and exit, labor market issues, technology use, and access to external finance. This paper--a product of Investment Climate, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to understand the investment climate using firm-level datasets.
An Introduction to Financial and Economic Modeling for Ultity Regulators
The most effective regulators in developing countries are following remarkably similar approaches. The main common element across "best practice" countries is the use of relatively simple quantitative models of operators' behavior and constraints to measure the impact of regulatory decisions on some key financial and economic indicators of concern to the operators, the users, and the government. The authors provide an introduction to the design and use of these models. They draw on lessons from international experience in industrial and developing countries in ordinary or extraordinary revisions and in the context of contract renegotiations. Simplifying somewhat, these models force regulator...
Challenges to Globalization
People passionately disagree about the nature of the globalization process. The failure of both the 1999 and 2003 World Trade Organization's (WTO) ministerial conferences in Seattle and Cancun, respectively, have highlighted the tensions among official, international organizations like the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, nongovernmental and private sector organizations, and some developing country governments. These tensions are commonly attributed to longstanding disagreements over such issues as labor rights, environmental standards, and tariff-cutting rules. In addition, developing countries are increasingly resentful of the burdens of adjustment placed on them...
The IMF and the World Bank at Sixty
'The IMF and the World Bank at Sixty' presents a selection of essays prepared for the Group of Twenty-Four Developing Nations (G24), by some of the foremost authorities in their fields, which address these challenges and suggest the need for reform in several areas. These essays have one fundamental aim: to improve the functioning of the global economy and to better enable developing countries to share in the prosperity of recent decades.
Productivity and Externalities
A model for export- led growth that captures structural change, growth in productivity, and growth in the share of trade.
