In our society today, money's value is measured by what it can buy—its purchasing power—not by its material worth, but it hasn't always been so. · My previous papers Impact of agriculture output on exchange rates and Currency competition-Survival of the fittest dealt with issues surrounding...

Using a two-sector-two-country model with aggregate scale economies and unionisation, we show that optimal welfare state policy entails positive levels of unemployment benefits under free-trade and capital mobility. In this setting, economic integration does not reduce the revenue raising...

Economic theory suggests that liberalization of trade between countries with differing levels of environmental protection could lead pollution- intensive industry to concentrate in the nations where regulations are lax. This effect, often referred to as the “pollution haven” hypothesis, is...

There is a consensus among scholars that overvalued exchange rates result in currency crises. This paper estimates the equilibrium real exchange rate for Turkey and finds that the lira was indeed overvalued before the crises in 1994 and 2001. However, the actual real exchange rate is at present...

The movement of illegal goods and illegal migrants also points to the importance of Mexico. Ignoring Mexico leaves a large hole in the U.S. security perimeter. If it is so easy for goods and people to move across the border, how does the United States plan to improve security without Mexican...

Agriculture accounts for USD 547 billion (approximately) of international trade, which means 9.1% of world merchandise trade and it constitutes 40.9% of world exports in primary products.In the coming decades the agricultural sector faces many challenges stemming from growing global populations,...

This paper introduces three measures of spatial dependence for use in the analysis of regional income distributions and their evolution. The first builds upon the notion of regional conditioning (Quah 1993), and is derived as a trace statistic from a modified Markov transition matrix. The...

This paper studies the effects of local interactions on the distribution of employment in a Keynesian-type model with strategic complementarities. It is shown that rational expectations generate symmetric equilibria for any interaction structure except autarky. Under adaptive expectations, the...

Economic growth continues to be a major objective of state governments in Mexico. What role do firm location, openness, education, and wage rates play in determining the ability of a state to increase the growth of its economy? This study examines the economic competitiveness of the Mexican...

Although directed to the British system of Town and Country Planning this paper has relevance for many OECD countries, including some with systems of land use regulation which evolved entirely independently of the British. The paper starts by characterising the basic features of the British land...