This paper explores the extent to which discrimination against foreign applicants in the trademark registration process can be used as a"behind-the-border"barrier to imports. Prima-facie evidence shows that in some developing countries the ratio of trademark registration to applications is much...

China's gross domestic product per capita was only US$300 to $370 in 1980-91 in an estimate based on the World Bank Atlas approach used in the World Development Report. These estimates fail to capture the fact that in the 10 years since embarking on a program of economic reform aimed at rapid...

The point of parallel imports of pharmaceuticals is arbitrage between countries with different prices. For several years, an important issue in the European Union (EU) has been the evident conflict between differing price regulations in the member states, on the one hand, and the consequences of...

Through a survey the authors study willingness to pay for improvements in air quality in Sofia, Bulgaria. Using a stochastic payment car approach - asking respondents the likelihood that they would agree to pay a series of prices - they estimate the distribution of willingness to pay various...

The author estimates the effects on growth of commodity price shocks, and uncertainty within an established empirical growth model. Ex-post shocks, and ex-ante uncertainty have been treated in the empirical literature as if they were synonymous. But they are distinct concepts, and it is both...

The explosion of informal entrepreneurial activity during Mongolia's transition to a market economy represents one of the most visible signs of change in this expansive but sparsely populated Asian country. To deepen our understanding of Mongolia's informal sector during the transition, the...

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...

Stories on the positive and negative effects of globalization on workers in developing countries abound. But a comprehensive picture is missing and many of the stories are ideologically charged. This paper reviews the academic literature on the subject, including several studies currently under...

The authors rely on a series of growth accounting exercises to determine whether the growth rate of total factor productivity (TFP) or the unexplained portion of GDP growth (after controlling for the accumulation of capital per worker) in 18 Latin American and Caribbean economies has benefited...

The authors discuss the use of imputed data in regression analysis, in particular the use of highly disaggregated welfare indicators (from so-called"poverty maps"). They show that such indicators can be used both as explanatory variables on the right-hand side and as the phenomenon to explain on...