Growing concern over health risks associated with food products is at the forefront of trade policy debate. At the heart of this debate is the"precautionary principle,"which holds that precautions should be taken against health, safety, and environmental risks even whenscience has not...

Uncertainty in project planning and appraisal is still topical in the World Bank and other lending and development agencies although it is certainly not a new issue. It is appropriate to reconsider the issue now because more than a decade of active research on risk analysis has transpired...

This paper assesses the effect of institutional quality on research and development (R&D) expenditures in developing countries. The paper finds that the risk of expropriation and the rule of law are correlated with R&D expenditures. Since both institutional variables increase as institutional...

This paper contains abstracts of Policy Research Working Paper series Numbers 2133-2196.

The authors assess the implications of multilateral trade reforms for poverty in China. They do so by combining results from a global modeling exercise with a national CGE model that features disaggregated households in both the rural and urban sectors. They examine two trade reform scenarios:...

Economic approaches to health and nutrition have focused largely on measures of child nutrition and related variables (such as birth weight) as indicators of household production of nutritional outcomes. But when dealing with adult nutrition, economists have to address an issue that has...

To predict how Algeria's unemployment crisis will evolve, the author evaluates the Algerian unemployment insurance system's ability to finance itself, to affect employment decisions, and promote enterprise restructuring. The main conclusion is that industrial restructuring has serious and...

The most striking fact about the economic geography of the world is the uneven spatial distribution of economic activity, including the coexistence of economic development and underdevelopment. High-income regions are almost entirely concentrated in a few temperate zones, half of the world's GDP...

As an alternative to traditional subsidy schemes in utility sectors, direct subsidy programs have several advantages: they are transparent, they are explicit, and they minimize distortions of the behavior of both the utility, and the customers. At the same time, defining practical eligibility...

In 1970, Indonesia was a poor agricultural state, with a per capita GNP (Gross National Product) of only US$80 -- the lowest among Asian economies and substantially lower than such African countries as Kenya and Ghana. Agriculture -- with about 50 percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and 66...