As countries have deregulated prices and lowered entry barriers in the natural gas industry, many new participants have emerged, promoting competition in the newly created markets. The increased competition has benefited everyone through more efficient pricing and greater choice among natural...

In the neoclassical approach to specifying an export supply equation, relative prices and capacity are assumed to play a crucial role in domestic firms'decisions to supply exports. In the Keynesian approach, the willingness of domestic firms to supply foreign markets is considered to be largely...

The authors address the issue of how wages are determined in socialist economies. They distinguish between different types of economic regimes, in terms of how much decentralization is permitted and how extensive are market-based features orrules. Wages are commonly assumed to be exogenously...

The authors examine the welfare effects of increasing household energy prices in Poland. Their main finding is that the policy of subsidizing household energy prices, common in the transition economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, is regressive. Such programs do help the poor...

The author examines the role of the stock market as a signal to managers in undertaking capital expenditures. He concludes that while both managerial and market perceptions are integral, managerial perception is of greater importance. The evidence suggeststhat, as a statistic, the Q ratio is not...

Cross-sectional tests of asset returns have a long tradition in finance. The often-used capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and the arbitrage pricing theory both imply cross-sectional relationships between individual asset returns and other factors, and tests of those models have done much to...

Casual observation leads to the conclusion that stabilization funds tend to be short-lived. While it may be that some funds have failed due to poor management or unwarranted political interventions, the stochastic components of commodity prices can generate insurmountable difficulties for even...

Debate on Indonesia's palm oil policy was stimulated by a sharp increase in cooking oil prices in 1994-95 and a resulting increase in the export tax rate on crude palm oil. Palm oil has been one of the fastest growing subsectors in Indonesia. Using a quantitative model, the author analyzes the...

China's gross domestic product per capita was only US$300 to $370 in 1980-91 in an estimate based on the World Bank Atlas approach used in the World Development Report. These estimates fail to capture the fact that in the 10 years since embarking on a program of economic reform aimed at rapid...

The authors assess inflation in Czechoslovakia between 1985 and 1991 and identify the main causes of inflation through a literature survey and empirical studies. The official prices in centrally planned economies were never perceived by central planners to be fully market clearing. Only by...