Using unique matched employer-employee data from China, we discover that migrant workers in the manufacturing industry who are proficient in the local dialect earn lower wages than those who are not. We also find that workers with better dialect skills are more likely to settle for lower wages...

Agriculture is an important area of Chinese economic engagement in Africa. Since the 1960s, China has provided aid, sent experts, and trained African farmers. However, there is still little empirical research on recent Chinese agribusiness investments in Africa. Drawing on case studies of a...

This paper by Jiao Yang presents the results of field research examining local engagement and impact on local communities by a Chinese company and an American company operating in Ghana. Golden Sunshine Mining Company Ltd., a large-scale Chinese gold mining corporation is a relatively young...

It is widely recognized that African Americans have a higher level of mistrust towards the medical and health care sector, which results in insufficient utilization of public health services, low participation in clinical research, and vaccination hesitancy. While the Tuskegee Syphilis Study has...

The real exchange rate is said to be the single most important price in an economy. While we used to think that we knew what explained its movements (e.g., the Balassa-Samuelson effect), the recent much-cited result by Engel (1999) proposes a serious reinterpretation - i.e., nearly 100% of the...

This paper employs a modern global value chain (GVC) decomposition framework to quantify economic interdependence among Asian economies and between Asia and the rest of the world. It pays special attention to the value-added relationships among three sets of economies: those belonging to both...

The real effective exchange rate (REER) is one of the most cited statistical constructs in open-economy macroeconomics. We show that the models used to compute these numbers are not rich enough to allow for the rising importance of global value chains. Moreover, because different sectors within...

This paper seeks to draw lessons for developing countries based on a survey of the recent literature on financial globalization. First, while capital account openness holds promises (by potentially generating a lower cost of capital, better risk sharing, and stronger disciplines on policies),...

In partial equilibrium, a reduction in import barriers may be thought to lead to an increase in imports and a reduction in trade surplus. However, the general equilibrium effect can go in the opposite direction. We study how trade reforms affect current accounts by embedding a modified...