Across the developing world, public goods exert significant impacts on the local rural economy in general and agricultural productivity and welfare outcomes in particular. Economic and social-cultural heterogeneity have, however, long been documented as detrimental to collective capacity to...

This paper uses a growth diagnostics approach à la Hausmann, Rodrik, and Velasco (HRV) to identify the most'binding'constraints to private sector growth in Mongolia - a small, low-income, mineral-rich, transition economy. The approach of applying the HRV methodology is useful in those cases...

In the past half a century, Egypt has experienced remarkable progress in the provision of infrastructure in all areas, including transportation, telecommunication, power generation, and water and sanitation. Judging from an international perspective, Egypt has achieved an infrastructure status...

This paper employs a 55 sector small open economy computable general equilibrium model of the Kenyan economy to assess the impact of the liberalization of regulatory barriers against foreign and domestic business service providers in Kenya. The model incorporates productivity effects in both...

The original goal of the Motor Industry Development Program was to help the automotive industry in South Africa adjust to trade liberalization and become internationally competitive. In simple terms, it consists of an import/export complementation arrangement, whereby the local value-added of...

This paper assesses the impact of a change in the price of cashew received by exporters in general -- and by FUNPI, a fund to promote the industrialization of agricultural products, in particular -- on farmgate prices and poverty in Guinea-Bissau. The analysis builds a theoretical model of...

This paper estimates the effects of peer benchmarking by institutional investors on asset prices. To identify trades purely due to peer benchmarking as separate from those based on fundamentals or private information, the paper exploits a natural experiment involving a change in a government...

This paper analyzes the determinants of export flow survival in Georgia. The paper uses a unique Georgian firm-level data set, in which firms'characteristics and output dynamics are matched with their customs'export transactions, for the period 2006-12. A discrete survival model is used to...

Whereas conventional wisdom argues that markets shut down during crises, with sellers struggling to find buyers, we find that markets continue to operate during financial turmoil, even in narrow and volatile emerging economies. Simple event studies indicate that both trading volume and trading...

Using firm-level data on manufacturing sectors in Africa, this paper addresses how domestic supply constraints and other firm characteristics explain the geographical orientation of firms'exports and the overall market diversification of African manufacturing exports. The degree of market...