Responding to demand from expanding poultry feed markets, maize area in Bangladesh rose from only a few thousand hectares in the 1980s to more than 200,000 hectares in 2007-08. This publication describes the rise of maize in Bangladesh, emerging problems or risks, technology options for...

Investment Priorities for Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction in Asia Shenggen Fan, Joanna Brzeska, and Ghada Shields

The role of intellectual property rights (IPRs) has been extensively debated in the literature on technology transfers and agricultural production in developing countries. However, few studies offer cross-country evidence on how IPRs affect yield growth, for example, by incentivizing...

Theoretical studies indicate that the welfare of the developing countries might either be improved or damaged by the strengthening of their own intellectual property rights. Net gains through their agricultural sectors will be positive if the payoff from new innovations is sufficiently different...

Planned ‘‘surprise’’ devaluations are often spurred by non-economic circumstances: a rentseeking government; political instability; or the opportunity to put the blame on a predecessor government. In this paper, these aspects are incorporated in the monetary and fiscal policy framework...

This paper uses an intertemporal model of public finances to show that political instability can cause taxes to be tilted to the future, resulting in a fiscal deficit that is suboptimal and only weakly sustainable (in the sense of Quintos). This occurs because political instability gives the...

This paper investigates the value of political institutions for financial markets, using panel data from emerging market countries. We test the hypothesis that changes in political institutions, such as improvements in democratic rights and increased government accountability, have a direct...

This paper offers a theoretical explanation for the determination of exchange rates under specific conditions which can/could be found in some OECD and newly industrialised countries. In an Obstfeld (1994) framework extended to incorporate government expropriation reneging on a fixed exchange...