Some observers have argued that the IMF’s focus on the institutional weaknesses of the Asian crisis countries that are inherently difficult to remedy and not necessarily relevant for the crisis, and that their inclusion in IMF programs exacerbated the crisis. This paper argues that besides IMF...

This paper analyses the interest rate pass-through for five economies of the Caucasus – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Employing an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) specification to monthly data, we find that the interest rate pass-through is systematically...

In this project, we employ data from the Chinese population censuses of 1982, 1990, and 2000 to examine reform-era changes in the patterns of male and female labor force participation and in the distribution of men’s and women’s occupational attainment. Very marked patterns of change in...

Education’s role in determining worker incomes in China’s rapidly changing urban labor markets is investigated in this paper. Using worker data from a 1999-2000 urban enterprise survey, we examine the effects of education on the current earnings of continuously-employed urban workers,...

Chinese urban workers are no longer shielded from market forces. They are bearing the brunt of the adjustment costs as enterprises shed redundant workers. This paper focuses on the role of education in determining labor market outcomes in China's rapidly changing urban labor environment. The...

This paper presents an empirical criterion for establishing privatization priorities for state owned enterprises. The approach uses firm performance as the basis for deciding the sequence in which firms are privatized. Sequencing is relevant because the order in which a group of state...

The main aim of the paper is to examine the short- and medium-term empirical link between current account balances and a broad set of (economic) variables proposed by theoretical and empirical literature. The paper focuses on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), an economically diverse...

This paper provides the first systematic evidence on compensation for executives of firms listed in China’s emerging stock market (currently the eighth largest of the world with market capitalization of over $550 billion). Specifically, using comprehensive financial and accounting data on...

Using data from the China Urban Labor Survey conducted in five large Chinese cities at year end 2001, we quantify the nature and magnitude of shocks to employment and worker benefits during the period of economic structuring from 1996 to 2001, and evaluate the extent to which adversely affected...

How can we account for Indonesia’s astonishing development performance between 1965 and 1997—rapid growth, massive reduction in the incidence of poverty, low income-inequality and substantial diversification of the economy—in the face of extremely dirigiste microeconomic policies, even by...