Preface Over the last decade and a half the global economic order has been undergoing major changes. While this may be thought to reflect the results of a multilateral and participatory process involving debate and negotiations, in reality it has been mostly driven by the economic interests of...

In his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Adam Smith (1776) considered the phenomenon of division of labor so enormously significant for the creation of a nation’s wealth that he devoted the first three chapters of his book to an investigation of this process. This is...

This paper examines the benefits of regionally and globally diversified portfolios from the perspective of investors holding domestic-only portfolios from different Asia-Pacific countries. Three groups of regional portfolio are constructed, with sorting based on relative strength ranking...

A conventional reading of economic history implies that free market reforms rescued the world’s economies from stagnancy during the 1970s and 1980s. I reexamine a well-established econometric literature linking economic freedom to growth, and argue that their positive findings hinge on two...

Many developing countris now actively solicit foreign investment, offering income tax holidays, import duty exemptions, and subsidies to foreign firms. One reason for subsidizing these firms is the positive externalities as foreign technology is transferred from foreign to domestic firms. This...

This chapter reviews the available evidence on the linkages between trade reform, labor markets, and FDI. We begin by drawing on studies of sixteen countries that underwent trade reforms in the 1980s and 1990s. These sixteen countries were chosen because of their inclusion in the United Nations...

This paper uses Indonesian data to analyze the impact of foreign ownership on wages. After controlling for worker and firm characteristics, we find that foreign firms pay a wage premium, which is larger for skilled relative to unskilled workers.