It might seem obvious discovering an asset such as oil or copper would be wonderful news for the country making the find. Yet the opposite is often true. The windfall can bring poverty, civil strife, corruption, inequality, slower growth and undemocratic practices. The phenomenon is known as the...

• The rapid ageing of populations in the rich economies can be expected to stimulate strong growth in private funded pensions, providing a massive potential of foreign finance for developing countries. • Pension managers can reap big diversification benefits by investing on the emerging...

• Early climate-related actions should be those with a high local economic and/or environmental payoff per unit of impact on greenhouse gases. • Energy, transport and natural resource management policies can often be better designed to realise greenhouse gas reductions at little or no...

The last decade has exemplified a retrenchment of bank lending in developing countries. International banks strive to boost capital ratios, thereby raising equity, reducing their less profitable assets and rebalancing portfolios towards less risky claims. In that context of underfinanced...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical overview of the relationships among trade, aid and FDI, both in terms of policy interactions and interactions among resource flows. Aid flows from one country to another can have positive or negative effects on trade flows between those countries....

The paper examines the effect of differing policies in the post-independence period on the agricultural and overall economic performance of Zambia and Zimbabwe. It focuses on the interaction between macroeconomic and agricultural policy reforms. It shows that macro and micro reforms need to be...

A partir d’un modèle dynamique d’équilibre général appliqué au Costa Rica, les auteurs analysent les liens entre l’environnement, le commerce international et la croissance économique. Leur étude envisage les conséquences des politiques commerciales et environnementales sur...

Should Mexican agriculture be liberalized? If so, how fast should this be done, and what policies should accompany the transition? We use Mexican agriculture as a case study to analyze the transition problems that arise in most major economic reforms. We focus on the implications for policy...

This paper analyses the effect of fiscal decentralisation on health outcomes in China using a panel data set with nationwide county-level data. We find that counties in more fiscally decentralised provinces have lower infant mortality rates than counties where the provincial government remains...

In this paper, we analyse the potential contribution of the Internet and its commercial application to the development process in poor countries. In historical perspective, the Internet has diffused at a far faster rate than earlier generations of communications technology: from 1990 to early...