The author examines how rural road investment projects should be selected and appraised when the objective is poverty reduction. After critically reviewing past and current practices, the author develops an operational approach grounded in a public economics framework in which concerns of equity...

This paper develops a simple framework to analyze various pollution control strategies that have been used or are proposed in the urban passenger transport sector. The context is the declining quality of air in urban areas, which is among the serious problems associated with the rapid...

The authors analyze and compare sectoral growth in three African economies - Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Zimbabwe - since 1965. They extend the classic dual economy - the agriculture and industry sectors - by adding the services sector. For all the three countries, they find at least one...

The remarkable performance of the Irish economy in recent years has attracted much attention. Within a 10-year period the economy went from an 18 percent unemployment rate to nearly full employment, while the ratio of debt to GDP fell from 120 percent to less than 50 percent. Inevitably, this...

Despite tremendous macroeconomic instability in Brazil, the country's distributions of urban income in 1976 and 1996 appear, at first glance, deceptively similar. Mean household income per capita was stagnant, with minute accumulated growth (4.3 percent) over the two decades. The Gini...

Before 1973, the labor market in Europe was tight and immigration from the South (chiefly North Africa and Southern Europe) was encouraged. But with the slowdown in growth in the mid-1970s, the rise in unemployment, and increased economic uncertainty, immigration came to be viewed as a burden by...

Economic development necessarily changes the welfare of socioeconomic groups to various degrees, depending on differences in their social arrangements. The challenge for policymakers is to select the changes that will be most socially desirable. The author demonstrates the usefulness of...

The author uses quantile regression to document the evolution of the earnings structure of salaried and self-employed female workers in urban areas in three Latin American countries-Argentina, Brazil, and Costa Rica-after structural reforms were introduced. The analysis covers pre- and...

Latin America missed opportunities for rapid resource-based growth that similarly endowed countries-Australia, Canada, Scandinavia-were able to take advantage of. Fundamental to this poor performance was deficient technological adoption driven by two factors. First, deficient...

Vietnam grew rapidly in the 1990s, and yet by many measures it has poor economic institutions. Dollar seeks to explain this apparent anomaly. Between the 1980s and 1990s Vietnam carried out significant economic reforms, notably stabilization, the introduction of positive real interest rates,...