The author offers an overview of issues relating to the development of funded pension schemes in industrial countries. The analysis applies the economic theory of pension regulation to experience with the structure, regulation, and performance of funds in nine countries - Canada, Denmark,...

The author offers a framework for economic policy on mandatory earnings-related pensions. He does not discuss the gains and losses from mandating insurance and savings, nor the use of this policy as a vehicle for income redistribution. Instead, he concentrates on areas that are less well...

Union-nonunion wage differentials have been extensively studied by labor economists, but for lack of data on the developing world the study has been confined largely to the industrial world. This paper is one of the first attempts to empirically examine those differentials in a developing...

Almost by definition, the basis for development is infrastructure - whether services for human infrastructure (health, education, nutrition) or physical infrastructure (transport, energy, water). Although the infrastructure sectors are diverse, what they have in common is that public policy has...

The widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policies. But the basis for this"stylized fact"is questionable, the authors argue. Widely cited evidence of a strong negative correlation between size and consumption per person is...

There are three main approaches to analyzing the effects of aid money and aid-supported reform: before-and-after comparison; control group (simple and modified) studies; and modeling. All three approaches have been used to carry out macroeconomic analysis of policy reform. But before-and-after...

Economic approaches to health and nutrition have focused largely on measures of child nutrition and related variables (such as birth weight) as indicators of household production of nutritional outcomes. But when dealing with adult nutrition, economists have to address an issue that has...

The author, using a neoclassical Solow model, estimates an economy's rate of convergence to its own steady state. Using panel date for a sample of 98 countries, the author applies Chamberlain's (1984) estimation procedures to account for the presence of country-specific effects resulting from...

Sri Lanka has had double-digit unemployment rates for more than a decade.And by 1990, 85 percent of the unemployed had spent more than a year searching for a job. Rama analyzes whether high unemployment rates and long spells of unemployment are the result of profuse legislation of the labor...

Except for two relatively minor statutes, U.S. environmental laws do not permit the balancing of costs and benefits in setting environmental standards. The Clean Air Act, for example, prohibits the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from considering costs in setting ambient air quality...