Microfinance—both credit and savings—has potential to improve the well- being of poor women in developing countries. This paper explores practical ways to achieve that potential. Based on lessons from informal saving mechanisms that women already use, the paper proposes two savings services...

This paper analyses changes in the distribution of equivalised gross household income and income inequality in New Zealand between 1983 and 1998. We analyse the distributional effects of changes in household structure, National Superannuation (old age pension), household socio- demographic...

This paper examines, in the context of future EMU membership of the Central and Eastern European countiries (CEECs), the interaction between fiscal policy and the price level in different exchange rate regimes. The theoretical framework is based on the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level (FTPL)....

The current research emphasis on institutions as key determinants of economic performance, rather than on resources and resource productivity, has uncovered important questions for further research. For example, if institutions are central to economic performance, then what explains observed...

Institutions either promote or constrain economic performance, but which parts of institutions advance or restrict performance, and why do economies sharing similar institutions sometimes perform differently? This paper is a modest attempt at addressing a small part of these questions. It...

We estimate output growth rate spectra for 58 countries. The spectra exhibit diverse shapes. To study the sources of this diversity, we estimate the short-run, business cycle, and long-run frequency components of the sampled series. For most OECD countries the bulk of the spectral mass is in the...

This paper proposes a “before-and-after” approach to empirical examination of the relationship between democracy and growth. Rather than the commonly used cross-country regression method, this paper compares the economic performances of forty countries before and after they became...