The authors examine technical efficiency variation across four industrial sectors in India, using a stochastic production frontier technique. The results are comparable to technical efficiency distribution patterns obtained in other countries. The authors examine heterogeneity in firm-level...

Using plant-level data on more than 1000 Chinese industrial plants, the authors estimate a production function treating capital, labor, water, and raw material as inputs to industrial production. They then estimate the marginal productivity of water based on the estimated production function....

Are multinationals flocking to pollution havens in developing countries? Using data from four developing countries (Cote d'Ivoire, Mexico, Morocco, and Venezuela), the authors examine the pattern of foreign investment. They find almost no evidence that foreign investors are concentrated in dirty...

In the early 1980s, the Polish chemical industry got caught up in a battle waged by the European Community's chemical industry to preserve the EC market for itself. The Polish share of that market was very small, and the performance of the Polish companies did not depend on it, so they emerged...

What are the prospects for economic development in lagging sub-national regions? What are the roles of public infrastructure investments and fiscal incentives in influencing the location and performance of industrial activity? To examine these questions, the authors estimate a spatial profit...

This study explores the impact of competition from international trade on wage discrimination by sex in two highly open economies. If discrimination is costly, as posited in neoclassical theory based on Becker (1959), then increased industry competitiveness from international trade reduces the...

Using extensive time series information on unit values for homogenous goods, this paper first examines the distribution of import prices paid by developing countries whose trade is highly concentrated with a major exporting country (France), and compares these prices with those paid to France by...

This paper analyzes the scale and productivity consequences of varied input use in Indian manufacturing using detailed plant-level data. Counts of distinct material inputs are higher in urban settings than in rural locations, unconditionally and conditional on plant size, and they are also...

This paper shows how the industrial structure and performance changed after Chile's dramatic trade liberalization. A comparison of the 1967 and 1979 censuses shows little improvement in productivity overall, but these figures don't separate the effects of trade liberalization from the effects of...

In the last decade Morocco undertook substantial, if gradual, trade liberalization by reducing tariffs, reforming trade regulations and signing free and preferential trade agreements with several regions and countries, including the United States, Turkey, the European Union and Arab countries....