The major theme of this paper is that the commercial banks have weathered the debt crisis, while many debtor countries remain in economic paralysis or worse. There is a growing consensus that much of the LDC debt will not be fully serviced in the future, and that consensus is reflected in at...

Are the well-known facts about urbanization in the United States also true for the developing world? We compare American metropolitan areas with comparable geographic units in Brazil, China and India. Both Gibrat's Law and Zipf's Law seem to hold as well in Brazil as in the U.S., but China and...

It is often argued that the globalization of production places workers in industrialized countries in competition with their counterparts in low wage countries. We examine a firm-level panel of foreign manufacturing affiliates owned by U.S. multinationals between 1983 and 1992 and find evidence...

This paper examines changes since the early 1960s in the export shares of the United States and its major competitors in the markets of the developing countries of the Asian Pacific Rim (APR), defined to include Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia,...

In recent years, a number of governments and consumer groups in rich countries have tried to discourage the use of child labor in poor countries through measures such as product boycotts and the imposition of international labor standards. The purported objective of such measures is to reduce...

What kind of tariff reform is likely to raise welfare in situations where tariff revenue is important? Uncertainty about specification and risk from imprecise parameter estimates of any particular specification reduce the credibility of simulation estimates. A promising alternative is to develop...

Historically, urban growth required enough development to grow and transport significant agricultural surpluses or a government effective enough to build an empire. But there has been an explosion of poor mega-cities over the last thirty years. A simple urban model illustrates that in closed...

This paper investigates the potential impacts of the degree of divergence in open macroeconomic policies in the context of the trilemma hypothesis. Using an index that measures the relative policy divergence among the three trilemma policy choices, namely monetary independence, exchange rate...

Environmental quality in many developing countries is poor and generates substantial health and productivity costs. However, existing measures of willingness to pay for environmental quality improvements indicate low valuations by affected households. This paper argues that this seeming paradox...

Standard models of fiscal federalism suggest many benefits of decentralization in developing economies, and there has been a recent push toward decentralization around the world. However, developing countries presently still have less decentralization, particularly on the revenue side, than both...