A wave of privatization is sweeping the globe, affecting about 100 countries and adding up to an average of more than $60 billion a year in business in the past decade. The challenge is to ensure that privatization yields clear benefits. Empirical studies suggest that ownership change by itself...

Recent rapid changes in the world economy, particularly the transformation of command economies into free market economies in many places around the world, can be expected to lead to an increase in the number of newly created securities markets through the 1990s. This follows a decade of...

The woodlands in some parts of the Sahel are effectively an open-access resource. Under open access, fuelwood cutters have no incentive to allow for benefits that might accrue if the wooded area were managed rather than mined. Those benefits include sustainable streams of fuelwood, fruits, and...

In the neoclassical approach to specifying an export supply equation, relative prices and capacity are assumed to play a crucial role in domestic firms'decisions to supply exports. In the Keynesian approach, the willingness of domestic firms to supply foreign markets is considered to be largely...

This paper provides insights into international commodity modeling by providing a survey of recent developments in this modeling area and by explaining how these developments interacted with and were applied within the Bank. Following a brief introduction into basic commodity modeling purposes,...

This paper emphasizes the fiscal underpinnings of the inflationary process and those particular dynamics when a dual price system is present. In particular, it explores the links between price controls and decontrols and the government budget, mainly through the flow of subsidies to either...

The author evaluates how much relative price shifts affected inflation in Poland between 1989 and 1997. He uses a theoretical model that predicts a positive relationship between variance and skewness in the distribution of relative price changes and the general inflation rate. Regressions...

This paper provides new survey evidence showing that loss aversion and reference dependence are important in shaping people's perception of trade policy. Under the assumption that agents'welfare functions exhibit these behavioral elements, we analyze a model with a welfare-maximizing government...

The three goals of recent agricultural pricing policies in Mexico for maize have been to raise farm income and crop profitability by boosting domestic prices through trade restrictions, to provide some price certainty at planting time, and to reduce year-to-year variations in maize prices. The...

This paper analyzes the immediate, delayed and group responses of 20 commodity prices in four commodity groups (foods and livestock, crops, energy and metals) to macroeconomic"news"(unexpected announcements) in the United States between 1985 and 1989. It finds that macroeconomic news generally...