The authors analyze the characteristics and behavior of households headed by women in urban Brazil and identify some of the consequences for child welfare on the growth of these households. The following was among their findings. First, households headed by women are a heterogeneous group, which...

The policy failures associated with inappropriate acceptance of unitary models of household behavior are more serious than those associated with inappropriate acceptance of collective models, contend the authors. They support this claim with illustrations. Consider, for example, the effect of...

The literature on the theory of the firm is rich in theoretical and practical insights. The key messages in this overview are the following: (a) the modern theory of the firm provides many insights into political organization, for political jurisdictions can be viewed as pseudo-firms that...

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...

Transfers to the rural land-poor are widely advocated and used in attempts to reduce rural poverty. Such transfers are believed to be productive, in that the final gain to the poor exceeds the initial transfer. The evidence cited most often to support this view is the negative correlation...

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...

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 outlook for economic development for an important group of middle-income countries has again been buoyed by substantial private capital inflows in the 1990s. As in the 1970s, this development has been met with cautious optimism. It is generally accepted that these countries need resource...

This paper contains a numerical listing of working papers prepared by the Poilicy, Research Complex. Each citation contains a brief abstract, and the contact point for the paper.

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...