By the end of 1999 HIV/AIDS was present in at least 200 countries and approximately 34.3 million people were living with the disease, 5.3 million of whom had been infected in that year alone (WHO 2000). Approximately 21.8 million persons had died from AIDS by 2000 and countries where life...

This essay will consider the relevance of the social sciences - especially economics - to the foundations of sustainable development. Looming environmental crises have served as a prime motivating force for reevaluating fundamental principles. In particular, the concept of sustainability,...

Productive consumption enables the satisfaction of current needs and, at the same time, increases the productive potential of labour. Theoretical as well as empirical evidence suggests that productive consumption is primarily relevant to low-income countries. From the perspective of growth...

After a decade of structural reforms, unemployment rates have tripled in Argentina. This paper is concerned with the measurement of unemployment risk and its distribution. We show the importance of considering re-incidence in the measurement of risk and develop a methodology. Our estimates for...

Using PSID data for the years 1984 to 1999, we estimate the level and severity of asset poverty. Our results indicate that the share of asset- poor households remained almost the same and the severity of poverty increased during this period, despite the growth in the economy and the financial...

The position taken by William Barnett in this panel discussion is that federal government agencies, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics, view researchers as being among those who comprise the audience for produced data, but not necessarily the most important members of that audience....

This paper applies parametric and nonparametric techniques to the most recent data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) 1992- 2000 and shows the returns to schooling increased over the course of transition, overall and for attainment cohorts neither at the top nor bottom of the...

This paper analyzes some of the implications of North American labor market integration for fiscal policy. The economies of Canada and the US are both characterized by highly integrated internal markets for goods and services as well as for labor and capital, and subnational governments in both...

We study the optimal provision of public goods in the context of a special class of altruistically linked utility functions. We show that the usual Samuelson condition holds as if the utility functions were independent.