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 paper tests for the relative importance of international capital market integration in determining interest rates in a broad sample of both industrial and developing countries. The recent turbulence in industrial country financial markets has underscored these concerns. One view holds that...

Cotton exports account for a significant share of commodity exports for some developing countries, especially in West Africa and Central Asia. In these countries, dependency on cotton for export revenues has increased in the past 20 years. These countries therefore have a high exposure to cotton...

The author examines five major industrial countries'portfolio investment in developing countries to learn if institutional investors are significant investors in emerging developing countries. The data reveals considerable divergence in the pattern of outward portfolio flow for the industrial...

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...

Recognizing that a country's commodity prices, foreign exchange rates, and export earnings are related, earlier studies developed an optimal portfolio model based on an integrated approach. But the estimates were inefficient because they summed that the time series data used in the model were...

The author contrasts command-and-control regulation (tight control of water purification, for example) with more flexible forms, including incentive regulation (such as price cap regulation), potential regulation (providing for closer scrutiny if enough customers complain), and reactive rather...

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...

Widespread private capital inflows to middle-income countries have surged over the past three years. At the same time, Brady-type debt reduction operations and domestic policy reform took place, indicators of country creditworthiness improved dramatically, and international interest rates...

In principle, financial regulation seeks to remedy recognized deficiencies in a nation's economic, political, and bureaucratic incentivestructures. But the social urgency of particular financial policy problems differ according to a country's stage of development. Regulatory strategies that make...