The remarkable performance of the Irish economy in recent years has attracted much attention. Within a 10-year period the economy went from an 18 percent unemployment rate to nearly full employment, while the ratio of debt to GDP fell from 120 percent to less than 50 percent. Inevitably, this...

The authors analyze wage determination and gender discrimination in Romania using the 1994 Romanian Household survey. They estimate wages for men and women in urban and rural areas using a Heckman selection model. They analyze gender discrimination in offered wages, to address the methodological...

Many developing countries faced macroeconomic shocks in the 1980s and 1990s. The impact of the shocks on welfare depended on the nature of the shock, on initial household and community conditions, and on policy responses. To avoid severe and lasting losses to poor and vulnerable groups,...

This paper contains abstracts of Policy Research Working Paper series Numbers 3135-3170.

This paper assesses the effects of knowledge on economic growth. By using an array of indicators, each of which represents an aspect of knowledge, as independent variables in cross-section regressions that span 92 countries for the period 1960 to 2000, they show that knowledge is a significant...

China's performance in economic growth, and poverty reduction has been remarkable. There is an ongoing debate about whether this growth is mainly driven by productivity, or factor accumulation. But few past studies have incorporated information on China's human capital stock, and thus contained...

The author examines whether output contraction associated with cyclical output fluctuations and economic crises have an asymmetric effect on poverty. He identifies four potential sources of asymmetry: expectations and cofident factors, credit rationing at the firm level (induced by either...

The authors aim at contributing to understand the dispersion of returns from policy reforms using cross-country regressions. The authors compare the"before reform"with"after reform"GDP growth outcome of countries that undertook import-liberalization and fiscal policy reforms. They survey a large...

New research on urban air pollution casts doubt on the conventional view of the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality. This view holds that pollution automatically increases until societies reach middle-income status because poor countries have neither the institutional...

The authors present new data on the regulation of the entry of start-up firms in 85 countries. The data cover the number if procedures, official time, and official costs that a start-up firm must bear before it can operate legally. The official costs of entry are extremely high in most...