Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- About the Contributors -- Abbreviations -- Chapter 1 Getting the Most out of Central America's Free Trade Agreements -- What Is the Expected Impact on Trade Volumes from Central America's Efforts to Liberalize and Promote Trade? -- What Is the...

This paper investigates the effect of ownership and competition on Indian bank productivity since the 1991 reforms. We find that Indian private banks dominate the public and foreign banks both in terms of productivity levels and productivity growth, with the new Indian private banks leading the...

This article studies the evolution of the private saving rate in India during 1960-95. Its distinctive feature is that it proposes three new measures of private saving, which are incremental improvements to the (naive) national accounts measure. The improvements consist of accounting for capital...

Soaring commodity prices in 2007 and 2008 raised concerns that volatility was also rising, which would have implications for welfare and therefore for the design of public policy interventions. The literature focuses on trends in commodity prices rather than their volatility characteristics....

Peace came accompanied not only by the end to the human drama associated with the conflicts, but also by a significant economic dividend, a much needed development in a region where per capita gross domestic product (GDP) had stagnated between 1970 and 1990 and where two countries (El Salvador...

The objective of this paper is to empirically test across alternative, apparently observationally equivalent theories of currency crises. Theories of crises are often difficult to distinguish from each other based on the behavior of commonly used predictors. Using a comprehensive data set on...