The exchange rate has moved from about 1300 kyat per dollar in 2006-07 to 800 kyat to the dollar in January 2012 while the consumer price index has jumped by over two-thirds. World rice prices in dollars have been generally strong, with Vietnamese five percent broken export prices at $520/ton in...

This paper is the first iteration in an ongoing effort by the Ash Center and Proximity Designs to describe a growth strategy for Myanmar that takes account of political and economic realities--assuming that sanctions will soon be removed. Myanmar is a country facing a difficult political and...

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) recently released an excellent report on Myanmar's energy sector. In it they presented estimates of future demand growth by the Ministry of Electric Power for electricity. They show demand doubling from 12,459 million kWh in 2012-13 to 25,683 million kWh in...

There is an immense challenge facing the leadership in Myanmar. They have to negotiate a nation and to reform the basic assumptions and processes that have ruled for the past decades. They need to make the new system more representative, more inclusive, less favorable to a narrow group of...

This paper was prepared for the fourth annual Vietnam Executive Leadership Program (VELP), held at the Harvard Kennedy School from August 26 to 30, 2013. This paper aimed to provide participants, including Vietnamese government officials, scholars, and corporate executives, with a concise...

When in 2010, the President of the Union of Myanmanr, the Speaker of the Lower House and several ministers decided to push for a rapid political opening, they engineered what could be called a critical juncture. This critical juncture now provides the country with an opportunity to move forward,...

Recent studies in international trade report that new exporters often start selling small amounts and cease exporting in the first year. These findings reflect a substantial amount of uncertainty facing new exporters. In this paper we study whether export activities in the neighborhood reveal...

The empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper, more fundamental factors, rooted in long-term history. A growing body of new empirical work focuses on the measurment and estimation of the effects of...

This paper presents concepts from economic analysis that shed light on the formation and breakup of sovereign states. First, we discuss the key trade-off between economies of scale in the provision of public good and political costs from heterogeneity of preferences. Second, we present four...

We provide an extensive set of alternative models for the estimation of the real cost of equity in a sample of utitlites firms in Brazil with monthly data from March 2006 to June 2011.The main results are that the traditional CAPM is regected and, together with the Fama-French factors, give a...