This paper contains abstracts of Policy Research working paper series, numbers 2803 - 2856.

Does risk perpetuate poverty in a credit-constrained economy? Jalan and Ravallion study portfolio and other behavioral responses to measured risk using household panel data for rural China. One-quarter of wealth is held in unproductive liquid forms. But only a small share of this appears to be a...

If the marginal gains from investment in physical capital depend positively on knowledge, but a household cannot hire skilled labor to compensate for low skills, then even if it has access to credit, the household will achieve lower returns than an educated household. If, as is common, the...

This paper contains abstracts of Policy Research Working Paper series Numbers 2133-2196.

To predict how Algeria's unemployment crisis will evolve, the author evaluates the Algerian unemployment insurance system's ability to finance itself, to affect employment decisions, and promote enterprise restructuring. The main conclusion is that industrial restructuring has serious and...

The most striking fact about the economic geography of the world is the uneven spatial distribution of economic activity, including the coexistence of economic development and underdevelopment. High-income regions are almost entirely concentrated in a few temperate zones, half of the world's GDP...

Developing viable new business is critical to recovery, and long-term growth, especially in transition economies. There has been a long history of public support of enterprise development, starting with centralized state agency initiatives, but moving more recently to decentralized instruments...

The authors review about 80 studies on electricity and gas, water and sanitation, and rail and ports (with a footnote on telecommunications) in developing countries. The main policy lesson is that there is a difference in the relevance of ownership for efficiency between utilities and transport...

The relationships among competition in the financial sector, access of firms to external financing, and associated economic growth are ambiguous in theory. Moreover, measuring competition in the financial sector can be complex. In this paper the authors first estimate for 16 countries a measure...

This paper describes a general equilibrium based social policy model for Cote d'Ivoire whose aim is both to facilitate analysis of a wide range of social policy options, any of which could conceivablybe pursued in Cote d'Ivoire over the next five or ten years, and to provide a basis for further...