The relationship between the current account and the macroeconomic development remains an important issue in an open economy. Recently, global current account imbalances, and more specifically the large deficit in the United States and the surplus in China and other Asian economies, continue to...

This paper uses a gravity model to assess ex-post regional trade agreements. The model includes 130 countries and is estimated with panel data over the period 1962-1996. The introduction of the correct number of dummy variables allows for identification of Vinerian trade creation and trade...

It has been widely argued that, with the decline in trade costs, the importance of distance has declined over time. On the other hand, most gravity models find that the importance of distance has increased over time. This puzzle has not been satisfactorily explained and is examined here. The...

In this paper, the impact of real exchange rate on employment is theoretically investigated. Three channels are identified. 1. Capital/labor intensity channel: the real appreciation, which decreases the cost of imported inputs and increases real wages expressed in tradable goods, exerts a...

The paper explores the evolution of export diversification patterns along the economic development path. Using a large database with 159 countries over 17 years at the HS6 level of disaggregation (4’998 product lines) we look for action at the “intensive” and “extensive” margins...

Retaining as a “Millennium Development Goal” a decrease by two thirds in child mortality whatever its initial level assumes that the target elasticity of child mortality may be the same in all the developing countries. We show that such an assumption is not perfectly consistent with the...

This paper analyzes the impact of capital inflows and the exchange rate regime on the real effective exchange rate. A wide range of developing countries (42 countries) is considered with estimation based on panel cointegration techniques. The results show that both public and private inflows...

We formalize the link between optimal cost-sharing contracts and the production technology in the presence of moral hazard by appealing to several well-known results from duality theory. Building on intuitions from the interlinkage literature, we show that optimal contractual structure is...

Technological progress in the textile and clothing sectors is measured for 26 Chinese provinces using panel data by sector and the stochastic frontier method. The impact of the real exchange rate on this technological progress, as well as its transmission channels, are respectively estimated....

When market structure is complete, factor demands by households will be independent of their characteristics, and households will take their production decisions as if they were profit-maximizing firms. This observation constitutes the basis for one of the most popular empirical tests for...