This paper examines the causes of the large buildup of enterprise arrears in Russia during 1992, and evaluates policy options to deal with them. Noting the experience of. Eastern European countries, the paper emphasizes that the settlement of arrears through wholesale extension of credit would...

While the provision of subsidized loans through the VBSP forms a cornerstone of Vietnam’s antipoverty policy, little is known on the impact of these preferential loans. In this paper, we use fixed effect regression to estimate the average effect of the program on income and expenditures of...

A cardinal measure of risk which represents the safety-first criteria is defined. The functional form of that measure is determined for a subgroup of risk-averse agents that do not have money illusion. An empirical illustration of possible applications of that measure shows a method of...

The paper examines, via simulation analysis the stabilizing effects of buffer stocks under different forms of supply functions, where each specification of the supply function represents a different expectational form about future prices. The analysis is carried out under different assumptions...

Moral hazard, a mostly inevitable byproduct of all insurance programmes, creates special difficulties in crop insurance programmes. In this study of drought compensation programmes in Israel's Northern Negev, moral hazard was reflected mostly by the transition from the least extensive crop...

The paper develops and illustrates the application of criteria for ranking risky investment alternatives that are based on their certainly equivalent (cE) outcomes and determines expressions for approximating the cE outcomes by means of the central moments of their distribution. The paper...

In the face of rising public deficits and shrinking public resources, geographical targeting may be a viable way to allocate resources for poverty alleviation in developing countries. Efficiency can be increased and leakage to the non poor reduced substantially by targeting increasingly smaller...