This paper briefly reviews the main theories of state versus private ownership and empirical evidence on the impact of privatization in developing countries (including transition economies). The paper draws some lessons for policy and offers some suggestions on how to assess privatization, at...

Measuring the incidence of public spending in education requires an intergenerational framework distinguishing between what current and future generations - that is, parents and children - give and receive. In standard distributional incidence analysis, households are assumed to receive a...

In the absence of reliable and exhaustive income data, Proxy Means Tests (PMTs) are frequently employed as a cost-eective way to identify income-poor beneciaries of targeted anti-poverty programs. However, their usefulness depends on whether proxies accurately identify the income poor. Based on...

This paper assesses the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on CO2 emissions. With this aim a dynamic panel data model is estimated for a cross-section of 213 countries over the period 1960 to 2009. The model, based on a STIRPAT approach, also integrates the EKC approach and specifically considers the...

A growing body of literature has recently focused on the economic origins and consequences of modern maritime piracy and on the perception that the international community has failed to control it. This paper aims to investigate maritime transport costs as one of the channels through which...

We examine the drivers of inequality change in Honduras between 1991-2007, trying to understand why inequality increased in Honduras until 2005, while it was falling in most other Latin American countries. Using annual household surveys, we document first rising inequality between 1991-2005,...

This study aims to identify robust push and pull factors of human trafficking. I test for the robustness of 78 push and 67 pull factors suggested in the literature. By employing an extreme bound analysis, running more than two million regressions with all possible combinations of variables for...

While the majority of micro studies finds that rural education increases agricultural productivity, various recent cross‐country regressions analyzing the determinants of agricultural productivity were only able to detect an insignificant or even surprisingly negative effect of schooling. In...

This paper explores the economic relationship between foreign direct investment to developing countries and the export prices of the latter, measured by terms of trade. It is rst shown that economic theory suggests such a relationship for various reasons but is inconclusive about the direction...