Estimates of child poverty are based on the percentage of children living in poor households, which ignores the issue of intrahousehold allocation. It is commonly argued that the fact that data are collected at the household level means it is not possible to report figures relating to the number...

Is public R&D spending complementary and thus “additional” to private R&D spending, or does it substitute for and tend to “crowd out” private R&D? Conflicting answers are given to this question. We survey the body of available econometric evidence accumulated over the past 35 years. A...

There has been an increasing awareness within the developed world that the cultural industries may play an important role in economic development. The fact that most of the commercial cultural industries have relatively low distribution costs, and that the gains from the mass production of a...

Structural Adjustment – Key Policy Issues highlights two challenging issues for policy advisers and policy makers alike — the evaluative framework used for assessing reform proposals and the development of implementation strategies to give effect to policy changes. The Commission argues that...

This paper finds that the rapid update of information and communication technologies contributed to Australia’s strong productivity performance in the 1990s and the contribution to labour productivity growth was at least as strong as it was in the US. Australia generated a productivity...

Problematic issues are raised by the expressed intention of the European Commission to promote greater awareness on the part of scientists in the “European Research Area” about intellectual property rights and their uses in the context of “Internet intensive research collaborations.”...

When relationship-specific investments are necessary for production, under-investment occurs if contracts cannot be enforced. The efficiency loss from under-investment will differ across industries depending on the importance of relationship-specific investments in the production process. As a...

The paper reviews the salient features of officially dollarized economies (with particular reference to Panama) and discusses costs and benefits of official dollarization. Also, the paper reviews existing and some potential seigniorage sharing arrangements and discusses conditions that are...

As more nations in the Western Hemisphere consider adopting the U.S. dollar as their own major currency, this IMF economist separates fact from fiction concerning dollarization. How will the dollarized nations react to U.S. monetary policy over which they will have no say?

The identification is made of those conditions by which it is possible to generate synergy or mutually enforcing relations between economic development and environment conservation with the perspective of a systems entropy flow limits. Monetary and fiscal policies are the framework of structural...