The paper studies monetary policy and the monetary transmission mechanism in Thailand in light of the Asian crisis in 1997. Existing studies that adopt structural vector auto-regression (VAR) approaches do not give a clear and agreed-upon view how monetary shocks are transmitted to the Thai...

The author addresses three questions about military spending in developing countries: What are the levels of (and trends in) military spending as a percentage of gross national product? What impact does peacetime military spending have on growth, government spending on social welfare and...

This paper studies the relationship between the growth of China and India in world merchandise trade and Latin American and Caribbean commercial flows from two perspectives. First, the authors focus on the opportunity that China and India's markets have offered Latin American and Caribbean...

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the growing use of derivatives by Danish pension institutions as a risk management tool to hedge embedded options on their balance sheets. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s it was a widespread practice for Danish pension institutions to guarantee a...

Using global data for the period 1960-99, the authors estimate neighborhood arms races. They find that the level of military expenditure is strongly influenced by the expenditure of neighbors. The authors estimate an"arms race multiplier,"finding that an initial exogenous increase in military...

This paper examines the export performance of 99 countries over 1995-2004 to understand the relative roles of export growth through"discovery"of new products and growth during post-discovery phases of the export product cycle -- acceleration and maturation -- in existing markets and expansion...

This paper analyzes data from a randomized experiment on mean returns to capital in Sri Lankan micro-enterprises. The findings show greater returns among men than among women; indeed, returns were not different from zero for women. The authors explore different explanations for the lower returns...

Assuming a given educational policy, the recent brain drain literature reveals that skilled migration can boost the average level of schooling in developing countries. This paper introduces educational subsidies determined by governments concerned by the number of skilled workers remaining in...

This paper acknowledges the fact that some countries have to borrow in foreign currencies due to the various constraints they face. Starting from this point, the author reviews approaches for trying to determine the currency structure for sovereign debt, and discusses some issues inherent in...

Large and sustained differences in economic performance across regions of developing countries have long provided motivation for fiscal incentives designed to encourage firm entry in lagging areas. But empirical evidence in support of these policies has been weak at best. The authors undertake a...