The first section of this paper reviews the most recent evidence on inequality in 18 LatinAmerican countries and shows that in all but four the changes in inequality over the1990s were small and insignificant. The distribution depends on the ownership and rateof return on assets, particularly...

Growth in the first post-reform decade in Latin America has been disappointing, largelybecause of a severe slowdown after 1995 in the countries in South America. Per capitaincome grew at only .9% per year between 1995 and 1999 compared to 2.7% for 1950-80and 1.5% for the nineties as a whole....

Trade liberalization in the early 1990s in Bangladesh has enabled the private sector torespond with market-stabilizing inflows of rice and wheat following major productionshortfalls. At the same time, easing of restrictions on foreign investment, combined withsubstantial depreciation of the...

This paper documents the construction of social accounting matrices (SAMs)for Vietnam for 1996 and 1997. The data sources used to construct the SAMsinclude national accounts statistics, government budget data, the official 1996input-output table, the 19 97/98 Vietnam Living Standards Survey...

Two sets of issues loom large on the economic horizon of Malawi: poverty alleviation and the country’s vulnerability to shocks emanating from the outside world. In this paper, simulations with a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model of Malawi are used to analyze aspects of these issues....

This working paper documents the construction of a 1993-94 Social Accounting Matrix(SAM) for Bangladesh. 1 The SAM distinguishes 10 agricultural sectors—including twodifferent kinds of rice technology—and 19 manufacturing sectors, out of 43 sectors intotal. It also differentiates between...

The last few years have seen a proliferation of attempts by various institutions to create a framework that would enable analysts to have a broad overview of all transactions in the Malawian economy. A first attempt was made by Lodh and Chulu (1994) to construct a macro accounting framework...

The paper reports on the construction and testing of a Standard International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) computable general equilibrium model for South Africa. A 1998 social accounting matrix (SAM) for South Africa is compiled using national accounts information and recently released...

Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models are a class of economywide models that are widely used for policy analysis in developing countries. This paper provides a detailed documentation of an applied CGE model of Malawi – the first ever for Malawi – developed in the context of the project...

The major objectives of this paper are to shed some light on the mechanism thatgenerates interregional economic imbalances among communities in rural China. Centralto this issue is the development of township and village enterprises (TVEs) because thepresence of secondary industry is closely...