This paper addresses two issues: (i) the extent of the restrictiveness/effectiveness of the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) with respect to the developing country suppliers of textile products during the 1980s, and (ii) the extent to which these restrictions yield trade gains for the less...

Non-tariff barriers (NTBs) present a growing threat to a liberal world-trading system and slow the reallocation of production of mature industries from developed to developing countries. Among NTBs, voluntary export restraints (VERs) are proliferating and constitute a major element of the"new...

The authors analyze the possibility of tradeoffs between efficiency and equity as well as the possibility of distributional conflicts in the context of renegotiation of infrastructure contracts in developing countries. To do so, they present a model in which contracts are awarded by auctioning...

Closed-end national index funds (NIFs of country funds) invest primarily in the stocks of the originating countries, such as Brazil, India, and the Republic of Korea. They are typically traded in the organized exchanges of industrial countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom....

The authors explore the effects on the terms of trade of regional economic integration. They show why it is an appropriate measure of the welfare effects of such integration, comparing it with the many ex post studies that base their conclusions on changes in the import shares of member and...

During the past two decades many economies have opened their retail sector to foreign direct investment, yet little is known about possible implications of such liberalization on the economies of developing host countries. Using firm-level data from Romania, this study examines how the presence...

The Argentine crisis witnessed, among other things, a deposit run, the suspension of deposit convertibility, and a"boom"in the stock market. The authors argue that this boom reflects the cost that depositors were willing to incur to get their money out of the banking system, in light of the...

To address questions about how stronger patent rights will affect India's pharmaceutical industry, the author simulates the effects of introducing such protection - as required by the World trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) - on market structure...

In a large cross-country sample of manufacturing establishments drawn from 188 cities, average exports per establishment are smaller for African firms than for businesses in other regions. The authors show that this is mainly because, on average, African firms face more adverse economic...

Drawing on evidence about industrial organization and market structure, the authors develop a computable general equilibrium model in selected industrial sectors with increasing returns to scale. They use this model to estimate the welfare gains Korea would realize from abolishing the import...