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...

While substantial research finds that financial development boosts overall economic growth, the authors study whether financial development is pro-poor: Does financial development disproportionately raise the income of the poor? Using a broad cross-country sample, the authors find that the...

China's gross domestic product per capita was only US$300 to $370 in 1980-91 in an estimate based on the World Bank Atlas approach used in the World Development Report. These estimates fail to capture the fact that in the 10 years since embarking on a program of economic reform aimed at rapid...

In Australia, a means-tested old-age public pension is paid from general tax revenues. A full pension (equivalent to roughly a quarter of the average wage) is currently paid to more than half the aged population, and a reduced pension is paid to another quarter of the aged population. About 20...

At the heart of the debate about public versus private ownership lie three questions: 1) Does competition matter more than ownership? 2) Are state enterprises more subject to welfare-reducing interventions by government than private firms are? 3) Do state enterprises suffer more from governance...