Individuals and business owners engage in an increasingly complex array of financialdecisions that are critical for their success and well-being. Yet a growing literature documentsthat in both developed and developing countries, a large fraction of the population is unpreparedto make these...

Recent research has demonstrated that while government expenditures are countercyclical inmost industrialized countries, they tend to be procyclical in developing countries. We develop adynamic political economy model to explain this phenomenon. In the model, public expendituresprovide insurance...

Utilizing a new database of tax rates, tax revenues and tax income-elasticities we contribute to the debate on the effects of …fiscal policyon economic activity in a number of ways. First, using both panelGMM and panel VAR methods, we …find that the effects of tax cuts onGDP growth are...

A large empirical literature claims that …fiscal policy in developingcountries is procyclical, in contrast to high-income countries where it is countercyclical. Some authors, however, have questioned this …finding because theliterature has typically ignored endogeneity problems. To settle this...

Die Weltlandwirtschaft ist durch vielfältige staatliche Markteingriffe geprägt. In reichen Ländern sind die Erzeugerpreise meist über dem Weltmarktniveau gehalten worden, während die Regierungen der armen Länder dazu tendieren, die Nahrungsgüterpreise unterhalb des Marktpreises...

Die Agrar- und Ernährungsorganisation der Vereinten Nationen (FAO) hat jüngst die Öffentlichkeit alarmiert, weil die Reduzierung des auf dem Welternährungsgipfel 1996 formu-lierten ambitiösen Ziels, die Anzahl der mangelernährten Menschen auf der Welt zu halbieren, in sehr weite Ferne...

An importexceeds a "normal" level. This paper identifies various internal and external factors that can contribute to the emergence of agricultural import surges in developing countries and discusses their relevance. External factors play a rather minor role. Internal policies, whether carried...

The EU has notified the WTO of 21 bilateral trade agreements that are currently in force with nonmember countries (WTO, 2005). Under these agreements, the EU grants almost unlimited access to its industrial markets, but only limited preferential access to its agricultural markets for various...

As a pragmatic definition applied throughout this paper, an import surge is considered a situation in which the quantity or value of imports suddenly exceeds a "normal" level. This somewhat loose concept leaves questions as to how "suddenly", "normal" and "excess" should be defined precisely,...

Neben Mangelernährung augrund fehlender mene an Nährstoffen zählen qualitative Defizite in der menschlichen Ernährung zu den bedeutendsten Risiken für Krankheit und vorzeitigen Tod in Entwicklungsländern. Wichtige qualitative Risikofaktoren sind die Kontamination von Nahrungsmitteln mit...