This report expands on a dynamic model of market integration to investigate how information is transmitted across commodities. The author investigates one property of an efficient market : the full use of available information. Studies of spatial price integration simultaneously looks at the...

In the debate about the relationship between trade policy and growth, various measures for trade intervention have been used. The author presents a new measure based on a country's relative price structure and the structure of relative world prices. This measure, he argues, conforms more closely...

The"simultaneous ascending auction"was first introduced in 1994 to sell licenses to use bands of radio spectrum in the United States. Much of the attention devoted to the auction came from its role in reducing federal regulation of the radio spectrum and allowing market values, rather than...

A key question for stabilization programs concerns how governments get into fiscal difficulty in the first place. Accordingly, this paper is about fiscal policy issues that arise during such macroeconomic stabilization in developing economies. Specifically, this report sets out the basics, as...

This paper shows that market-based financial instruments are better suited to manage external price risk for a country that is a price taker in world commodity markets. This is especially the case for mineral and energy price risks where financial instruments (such as commodity swaps) exist for...

India's government procures agricultural products such as rice, wheat, and sugar at below-market prices and sells them in both urban and rural ration shops. The rest of such crops is sold in the open market. This creates a two-tier price system for consumers and producers. Many (including...

From its inception, the Penn World Tables (PWT), building on the International Comparisons Program (ICP) of the United Nations, has sought to compare the standard of living of individuals in different countries. That is, the term"real GDP per capita"as reported in the PWT is intended to...

The authors find that raw materials inventories in the manufacturing sector in the 1970s and 1980s were two to three times higher in developing countries than in the United States, despite the fact that in most developing countries real interest rates were at least twice as high. Those...

Exports respond unpredictably to a change in real exchange rates, suggests evidence from the 1980s. Recent theoretical work explains this as a consequence of the sunk costs associated with breaking into foreign markets. Sunk costs include the cost of packaging, upgrading product quality,...