Over the years, the East-West Center (EWC) has developed considerable expertise in refinery modeling, especially in the area of forecasting product balances for countries, given planned capacity changes, changes in product demand, changes in crude slates, and changes in product specifications....

During the last decade, the Venezuelan government has pursued a reform of the legal regime of hydrocarbons tailored to its interests as an oil producing country. However, the ongoing consequences of the global economic recession which negatively impacted the Venezuelan economy, call into...

Econometric Modeling has a wide range if applications, including economy-wide representations. This study takes on the task of finding a suitable structure to model the Venezuelan economy. It is revealed that econometric structural and computable general equilibrium models are inapplicable,...

Prepared for the COMESA policy seminar on“Variation in staple food prices: Causes, consequence, and policy options”,Maputo, Mozambique, 25-26 January 2010under the Comesa-MSU-IFPRI African Agricultural Marketing Project (AAMP)

Paper to be presented at the Comesa policy seminar“Food price variability: Causes, consequences, and policy options"on 25-26 January 2010 in Maputo, Mozambiqueunder the Comesa-MSU-IFPRI African Agricultural Markets Project (AAMP)

The Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) was a key issue in the July 2008 failure to reach agreement in the WTO negotiations under the Doha Development Agenda. It includes both price (P-SSM) and quantity-triggered measures (Q-SSM). This paper uses a stochastic simulation model of the world wheat...

Existe una preocupación creciente por el aumento de la inseguridad alimentaria a escala global. Sin embargo, sus implicaciones económicas son poco conocidas. El presente artículo utiliza un modelo estructural de gravedad para cuantificar el efecto de las crisis alimentarias sobre los flujos...

As networks improve and new services emerge, questions arise that affect service deployments and network choices. The Internet is arguably a successful example of a network shared by many services. However, combining heterogeneous services on the same network need not always be the right answer,...

This dissertation contains three essays that can be read independently. The first chapter examines how a debt crisis can occur and persist as a result of unanticipated, transitory, real interest rate and commodity price shocks. Using an optimal stopping framework, the debtor country's optimal...