There is increasing recognition that non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are an important international and development issue globally, undermining health gains and imposing financial and economic costs on governments and households. NCDs are an important health challenge in the Pacific. First,...

The aim of Health in All Policies (HiAP) is to bring diverse sectors together to find shared solutions; it focuses on identifying 'win-win' or 'cobenefits' such that policy measures contribute not only to improved health outcomes but also to outcomes desired by other sectors, such as education,...

In recent years, the number of studies looking at the effect of politics on economic outcomes has flourished. For developing economies, these studies are useful to better understand why long overdue reforms are not implemented. The studies analyze the overall context within which reforms are...

Why do politicians distort public investments? And given that public investments are poor because presumably that is what is politically rational, what types of reforms are likely to be both efficiency improving and compatible with the interests of politicians? This paper explores these two...

Heterogeneity of public utility services is common in developing countries. In a"high-level"equilibrium, the quality of utility services is high, consumer willingness to pay for services is high, the utility is well funded and staff well paid in order to induce high quality of performance. In...

This paper takes advantage of unique intra-country variation in the Philippines power sector to examine under what conditions politicians have an incentive to"capture"an electric utility and use it for the purposes of rent-seeking. The authors hypothesize that the level of capture is determined...

This paper investigates whether the agglomeration of economic activity in regional clusters affects long-run manufacturing total factor productivity growth in an emerging market context. It explores a large firm-level panel dataset for Chile during a period characterized by high growth rates and...

The authors propose a theory of task trade between countries that have similar relative factor endowments and technological capabilities but may differ in size. Firms produce differentiated goods by performing a continuum of tasks, each of which generates local spillovers. Tasks can be performed...

Little cross-cutting conclusions emerge from comparative studies on the impact of structural adjustment on Sub-Saharan African agricultural performance. This paper aims to illuminate this long-standing debate by adopting a novel quantitative, sectoral and long-term approach controlling for...