In recent years, world food prices have increased and fluctuated widely. This paper explores the impact of international food prices and domestic policies on Millennium Development Goal (MDG) and macro indicators for two archetype low-income countries, a net food exporter and a net food...

In many developing countries, achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 will require significant increases in expenditures on social services and in foreign assistance. It will also require careful planning of the sector allocation and sequencing of public spending. Especially...

This paper summarizes the policy lessons from applications of the Maquette for MDG Simulations (MAMS) model to two low income countries: Ghana and Honduras. Results show that costs of MDGs achievement could reach 10-13 percent of GDP by 2015, although, given the observed low productivity in the...

The authors propose a "bottom up" approach to link public investment programs with a class of macro models recently developed to quantify Strategy Papers for Human Development (SPAHD) in low-income countries. The methodology involves establishing constant-price projections of investment outlays...

The Millennium Development Goals, which expire in 2015, were a global agreement to promote human development and reduce poverty. But they did not create a legalized institutional regime, in which precise obligations would be delegated to specific actors, nor were they, in many respects,...

This paper addresses policies aimed at closing the rural-urban gap for one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the under-five mortality rate (U5MR). The paper relies on the Maquette for MDG Simulations (MAMS), a computable general equilibrium model, applied to the database of an...

This paper briefly reviews new indices of trade restrictiveness and trade facilitation that have been developed at the World Bank. The paper also compares the trade impact of different types of trade restrictions applied at the border with the effects of domestic policies that affect trade...

The proliferation of preferential trade liberalization over the past 20 years has raised the question of whether it slows down multilateral trade liberalization. Recent theoretical and empirical evidence indicates this is the case even for unilateral preferences that industrial countries provide...

Nonreciprocal trade preferences and provisions in the GATT/WTO that allow developing countries greater leeway to retain or use protectionist policies are two of the central planks of so-called special and differential treatment (SDT) for developing countries in the multilateral trading system....

Because of concern that OECD tariff reductions will translate into worsening export performance for the least developed countries, trade preferences have proven a stumbling block to developing country support for multilateral liberalization. The authors examine the actual scope for preference...