Abstract East Asian countries have been catching up with the West for most of the post-war period. Indeed, during the last 15 years, developing East and South East Asia have emerged as the most dynamic region of the world economy. This paper attempts to make analytical sense of this...

Although in the post-World War II period as a whole, developing countries have made substantial economic and industrial progress, during the last decade or so, many of them, particularly in Latin America and Africa, have been in an acute economic crisis . As a consequence, these countries have...

The African economies, particularly those in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) stand today at an important crossroads. During the 1980s, for the average African country, GDP per capita fell at a rate of 0.5 percent per annum; in the 1990s it rose slightly at a rate of 0.3 percent per annum. However, in...

Public Expenditures, Growth, and Poverty assesses the efficacy of poverty reduction programs in Latin America, Africa, and Asia by synthesizing studies conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute over the past ten years. Overall, the studies find that investments in...

The question of the effects of race and sex discrimination laws on relative economic outcomes for blacks and women has been of interest at least since the Civil Rights and Equal Pay Acts passed in the 1960s. We present new evidence on the effects of these laws based on variation induced first by...

We examine the possible sources of the larger racial and ethnic wage gaps for men than for women in the U.S. Specifically, using a newly created employer-employee matched data set containing workers in essentially all occupations, industries, and regions, we examine whether these wage...

In this paper, we first describe the 1990 DEED, the most recently constructed matched employer-employee data set for the United States that contains detailed demographic information on workers (most notably, information on education). We then use the data from manufacturing establishments in the...

Legislation prohibiting age discrimination in the United States dates back to the decade of the 1960s, when along with the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act barring discrimination against women and minorities, the U.S. Congress passed the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Many...

Blacks in the United States are poorer than whites and have much lower employment rates. "Place-based" policies seek to improve the labor markets in which blacks - especially low-income urban blacks - tend to reside. We first review the literature on spatial mismatch, which provides much of the...

Audit studies testing for discrimination have been criticized because applicants from different groups may not appear identical to employers. Correspondence studies address this criticism by using fictitious paper applicants whose qualifications can be made identical across groups. However,...