The authors review the economic principles that should guide the efficient choice of targeted policies for environmental protection. They recommend policy instruments along three dimensions: (1) whether they use economic incentives; (2) whether they target environmental damage directly; and (3)...

Economists have criticized regulations that impose uniform environmental standards on plants that may face different marginal abatement costs and damage functions. Such critics ignore the difference in standard implementation across plants, giving rise to nonuniform standards. The authors...

Deregulation of the U.S. natural gas industry has been under way since the late 1970s. The industry was deregulated to create competitive markets in natural gas and its pipeline transportation, in the expectation that competition would guide transactions toward a more efficient outcome. The...

The authors discuss when and how to adjust expenditures derived from household surveys to reflect the consumption of basic services. They discuss simple adjustment methods for markets that are subsidized, rationed, or subject to increasing marginal tariff pricing. Using Ecuador as an example,...

The literature on regional integration agreements (RIAs) is vast and deals with political, economic, and political economy issues. The literature on the economics of RIAs deals mostly with static effects, and concludes that these effects are, in general, ambiguous. So far there has been no...

How do different trading arrangements influence the industrialization process of developing countries? Can preferential trading arrangements (PTAs) be superior to multilateral liberalization, or at least an alternative when multilateral liberalization proceeds slowly? If so, what form should the...

Egyptian economic history has been influenced by the import-substitution industrialization approach to development, dating back to Gamal Abdel Nasser's Pan-Arabic and socialist movement in the 1950s. Two major waves of liberalization have marked the government's efforts to rationalize and...

Rapid development, a widening regional gap, and growing concentration of activities have characterized the Chinese economy since the reforms in the late 1970s. This paper examines the spatial disparities of the economic concentration in different stages of development from a geographic approach...

The presence and persistence of substantial wage differentials between industries has been documented. Differences between industries could result from (1) the normal functioning of competitive labor markets (compensating differential levels of human capital), (2) institutional factors, such as...

As countries have deregulated prices and lowered entry barriers in the natural gas industry, many new participants have emerged, promoting competition in the newly created markets. The increased competition has benefited everyone through more efficient pricing and greater choice among natural...