This paper assesses the impact of the steadily growing remittance flows to sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Though the region receives only a small portion of the total recorded remittances to developing countries, and the volume of aid flows to SSA swamps remittances, this paper finds that...

No country has achieved sustained economic development without investment in education. Thus, education policy can play a vital role in facilitating development. But which types of schooling-secondary or tertiary-should public policy promote? This paper develops an analytical framework to...

This paper quantifies the magnitude and nature of migration flows from the Caribbean and estimates their costs and benefits. The Caribbean countries have lost 10-40 percent of their labor force due to emigration to OECD member countries. The migration rates are particularly striking for the...

The paper provides a quantitative assessment of social returns to education in Italy. It shows that, after controlling for individual characteristics, local average human capital is positively correlated with individual wages, with estimated social returns between 2 and 3 percent. This result is...

We examine the relationship between trade and financial globalization and the rise in inequality in most countries in recent decades. We find technological progress as having a greater impact than globalization on inequality. The limited overall impact of globalization reflects two offsetting...

This survey of the recent literature asks: how important is trade policy for poverty reduction? We consider the effects of openness on poverty in two components: the effect of openness on average income growth, and the effect on distribution for a given growth rate. Evidence from a variety of...

This paper explores the effect of trade on the relative wage of less-skilled labor through its effect on world prices, which are typically exogenously given under the small open economy assumption. Using the 1995 international input-output data for APEC member countries, we numerically simulate...

This paper presents a simple framework that illustrates the link between skill-based wage differentiation and human capital acquisition given skill-biased technical progress. The analysis points to the economic costs resulting from labor market and income redistribution policies that prevent the...

While global rebalancing will mainly involve structural realignment among major advanced and emerging market economies, it could have significant impact on low-income countries (LICs). Simulations using a global general equilibrium model show that a more balanced global economy would tend to...

We introduce non-tradable goods to the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson (HOS) model to study the distributive effects of terms of trade shocks. We show that the employment of resources in activities producing exclusively for the local market induces a crucial association between domestic spending and...