Conducting cost-benefit analyses of health and safety regulations requires placing a dollar value on reductions in health risks, including the risk of death. In the United States, mortality risks are often valued using compensating-wage differentials. These differentials measure what a worker...

Exports of textile products originating from Sub-Saharan African countries have grown dramatically in the past decade. Recent trade initiatives, such as the"African Growth Opportunity Act"and"Everything but Arms,"along with low labor costs and improved integration into world markets, are giving...

Economists have criticized regulations that impose uniform environmental standards on plants that may face different marginal abatement costs and damage functions. Such critics ignore the difference in standard implementation across plants, giving rise to nonuniform standards. The authors...

The authors discuss when and how to adjust expenditures derived from household surveys to reflect the consumption of basic services. They discuss simple adjustment methods for markets that are subsidized, rationed, or subject to increasing marginal tariff pricing. Using Ecuador as an example,...

With a policy of free entry, individuals, firms, or community groups who wish to supply power, water, and sanitation services can do so with minimal legal restrictions. Free entry is the opposite of"exclusivity"or"legal monopoly". Free entry is allowed in most industries, but governments usually...

How does economic geography influence industrial production and thereby affect industrial location decisions and the spatial distribution of development? For manufacturing industry, what are the externalities that matter, and to what extent? Are these externalities spatially localized? The...

Productivity, and the Rybczynski effects of factor endowments, have been highlighted as the two main reasons behind the growth of newly industrializing economies in East Asia. However, empirical studies at the aggregate level, do not find support for these claims. Focusing on Singapore's...

This paper shows how the industrial structure and performance changed after Chile's dramatic trade liberalization. A comparison of the 1967 and 1979 censuses shows little improvement in productivity overall, but these figures don't separate the effects of trade liberalization from the effects of...

Economic geography has become a mantra for many economists, geographers, and regional scientists. Previous studies have tested the importance of economic geography for production activities and found a significant association between them. Most of these studies, however, have not taken into...

How do different trading arrangements influence the industrialization process of developing countries? Can preferential trading arrangements (PTAs) be superior to multilateral liberalization, or at least an alternative when multilateral liberalization proceeds slowly? If so, what form should the...