Although climate policies have been so far mostly focused on mitigation, adaptation to climate change is a growing concern in developed and developing countries. This paper discusses how adaptation fits into the global climate strategy, at the global and national levels. To do so, a partial...

Countries seeking membership in the European Union (EU) cannot look to the EU for a blueprint for reforming their system for taxing capital income. Indeed, it is hard to generalize about tax systems in the EU. Most member states apply fairly low tax rates to interest payments and discriminate...

Economic policy reform that creates opportunities for new productive activities often shifts wealth from one set of agents toward another, creating reason for political pressure against the reform. The author explores how government financial guarantees secure the political support of the...

What has the profession learned from cross-country regressions about the links between long-run growth and indicators of fiscal, monetary, trade, financial, and exchange-rate policies? The authors find that: indicators of financial development are strongly associated with long-run growth; other...

Reforming the social security system has received increasing attention in recent years. This paper studies a switch from an unfunded defined-benefit system (pay-as-you-go) to a fully-funded defined-contribution system in a stable demographic environment. While the former finances current...

This paper examines macrofinancial data from 117 developing and industrial countries for the year 1985. The objective is to broadly characterize the financial systems of these countries using generally available data and to produce a set of comparative indicators for use in other work in this...

The author analyzes sectoral patterns of investment and saving in China-over time and compared with other countries-to shed light on the factors driving high investment and on how saving is channeled into investment. The findings inform several policy debates. Key findings include: (1)...

The enforcement record of the 1990s shows that private international cartels are not defunct--nor do they always fall quickly under the weight of their own incentive problems. Of a sample of 40 such cartels prosecuted by the United States and the European Union in the 1990s, 24 lasted at least...

Protectionism and industrial regulation are two topics in which the interplay of politics and economics is so strong that one wonders why the intellectual merger between the two approaches in the New Political Economy has taken so long. After describing the emergence of the state in Western...

Education attainment levels increased dramatically for Mexico's labor force in the 1980s and early 1990s. In parallel, the country experienced a pronounced increase in earnings inequality from 1984-94, reflected in a higher dispersion of wages and an absolute decline in the real incomes of less...