Drawing on original surveys of agricultural traders, the authors examine how traders operate in two Sub-Saharan African countries, Benin and Malawi. They find the following: The largest transaction costs for traders are search and transport. Search methods rely principally on personal visits by...

The author evaluates how much relative price shifts affected inflation in Poland between 1989 and 1997. He uses a theoretical model that predicts a positive relationship between variance and skewness in the distribution of relative price changes and the general inflation rate. Regressions...

The authors analyze the U.S. demandfor Bangladeshi imports for products restricted under the Multifiber Arrangement. Because Bangladesh is only a small supplier of these products and Latin American and Asian countries can supply close substitutes, the authors expected a high elasticity of demand...

The past 15 months have seen the beginning of structural change in Russia but a failure of the economy to stabilize. The balance sheet, conclude the authors suggests that a return to centralized control remain almost impossible, but the dencentralization that has occurred contain many...

The authors test two alternative models of learning to export: productivity learning, whereby firms learn to reduce production cost, and, market learning, whereby firms learn to design products that appeal to foreign consumers. Using panel, and cross-section data on Moroccan manufacturers, the...

This paper reviews the most important changes, both in the economy and in the legal and institutional framework, to deal with unfair trade practices that Costa Rica has experienced during its trade liberalization process. It also evaluates whether the sectors that as a result of such a process...

This paper develops a theory of the precautionary demand for commodity stocks. It suggests that commodity stocks are held for precautionary purposes by producers, consumers, and intermediate processors, while speculators hold stocks on the expectation of capital gains from a subsequent price...

Administered prices should deviate from marginal cost if they are to be used as instruments to generate revenue. The analysis is based on the Bank's two-step approach to public sector pricing: first calculating marginal cost, and then adjusting it to account for other factors. The aim is to show...

The effect on the poor of changes in the price of staple foods is a central issue in debates on development policy. In the short run the rural rich are likely to gain, and the rural poor to lose, from an increase in the relative price of food staples in a food producing economy. However, in the...

Structural adjustment programs in sub-Saharan African countries in the 1980s removed trade restrictions, price controls, and export taxes and abolished state-owned commodity marketing bodies. The authors studied the effects of these policy changes on the coca sector, using a global econometric...