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...

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...

North (1984) argues that it is not the cost of transport but the cost of transactions that prevents economies from realizing well-being - and that institutions matter because they affect the costs of transactions. The authors analyze the role of the deliberation council - an institution common...

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 restructuring of Mexico's economy has had surprisingly little effect on Mexican unemployment, which is low even in the worst years. The authors ask: Is the official definition of unemployment adequate? Is unemployment properly measured? And who bears its burden? Is the welfare cost of...

Soviet growth for 1960-89 was the worst in the world, after controlling for investment and human capital. And relative performance worsens over time. The authors explain the declining Soviet growth rate from 1950 to 1987 by the declining marginal product of capital. The rate of total factor...

Price and income elasticities estimated from a country's export demand function are used both to predict and to prescribe effective export strategies. But the focus on elasticities has led to the neglect of an important empirical regularity: a strong persistencein the growth rate of a country's...