Most economists think of common property as physical-a body of water, a forest-and as bounded within geographic space. In this paper, building on work in social theory, the author argues that common property can also be social-defined within symbolic space. People can be bound by well-defined...

Much of the literature that studies the relationship between trade and poverty in developing countries focuses on the effects of national trade reforms, such as own tariff reductions. In contrast, the World Trade Organization negotiations at the Doha Round were more concerned with the poverty...

Paradoxically, when economists analyze a policy's impact on welfare they typically assume that people are the best judges of their own welfare, yet resist directly asking them if they are better off. Early ideas of"utility"were explicitly subjective, but modern economists generally ignore...

This paper contains abstracts of Policy Research Working Paper series, numbers 2857 - 2882

The author investigates the poverty impacts of informal export barriers like transport costs, cumbersome customs practices, costly regulations, and bribes. He models these informal barriers as export taxes that distort the efficient allocation of resources. In low-income agricultural economies,...

The authors analyze wage determination and gender discrimination in Romania using the 1994 Romanian Household survey. They estimate wages for men and women in urban and rural areas using a Heckman selection model. They analyze gender discrimination in offered wages, to address the methodological...

Argentina was a pioneer of infrastructure reform in the early 1990s. The social dimension of infrastructure services was typically overlooked in the reform process. However, social sensitivities often resurfaced in the years that followed, leading to a series of ad hoc social policy measures...

The main objective of this study is to explore the realationship between a country's overall economic policy environment and the performance of investment projects in the social sectors. The authors focus on the impact of economy-wide policies including a range of fiscal, monetary, exchange...

Globalization has been a persistent phenomenon of the post-war period. The gross volume of cross-border capital flows has grown at an average of 25 percent a year, and trade in goods and services has also increased, albeit not as dramatically, but at least twice as fast as world GDP over the...

Even though access to credit is central to child labor theoretically, little work has been done to assess its importance empirically. Dehejia and Gatti examine the link between access to credit and child labor at a cross-country level. The authors measure child labor as a country aggregate, and...