This paper provides an overview of the political economy of oil in the CIS. It briefly situates the region's oil sector potential in the global context, before analysing the structural features of the oil sectors by country. It examines the ways in which CIS oil industries have been organised...

We develop a positive theory of the adoption of child-labour regulation, based on two key mechanisms. First, parental decisions on family size interact with their preferences for child-labour regulation. Second, the supply of child labour affects skilled and unskilled wages. If policies are...

Based on an endogenous growth model, we show that intermediate goods markets imperfections can curb incentives to improve productivity downstream. We confirm such prediction by estimating a model of multifactor productivity growth in which the effects of upstream competition vary with distance...

This paper develops and applies a simple “conditional growth” framework to make long-term GDP projections for the world economy, taking as a starting point recent empirical evidence about the importance of total factor productivity and human capital in explaining current cross-country...

This paper uses the OECD’s indicators of product market regulation (PMR) to assess the extent to which the regulatory environment in Russia supports competition and to draw attention to the areas where further reform efforts would pay dividends. The indicators show that, despite improvements...

The paper provides an overview of the course of economic reform and the performance of the Russian economy since the early 1990s and an analysis of the structural reform challenges ahead. It assesses the contribution of institutional and structural reforms to economic performance over the...

We derive conditions of individual preferences and technology that give rise to a negative correlation between income inequality and environmental protection. We present a class of models (which captures a static model as well as an overlapping-generations model) in which individuals differ in...

While financial liberalization has in general favourable effects, reforms in countries with poor regulation is often followed by financial crises. We explain this variation as the outcome of lobbying interests capturing the reform process. Even after liberalization, market investors must rely on...

We analyse how, in representative democracies, income distribution influences the stringency of environmental policy and economic growth. Individuals (who differ in abilities) live for two periods, working when young and owning capital when old. Externalities are caused by a polluting factor....

In recent theories of comparative development the role of institutional differences has been crucial. Yet what explains comparative institutional evolution? We investigate this issue by studying the coffee exporting economies of Latin America. While homogeneous in many ways, they experienced...