The increasingly important role of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the global economy is linked to questions of how the foreign direct investment (FDI) they control impacts on overall economic activity in the recipient countries. Of specific interest is the policy context in which such FDI...

This paper presents the results of a survey administered across seventeen countries that seeks to examine quality practices, priorities and performance. The participating countries were Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands,...

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Overall labour productivity in the Irish manufacturing sector increased by 158 per cent between 1991 and 1999. This growth in labour productivity coincided with strong growth in employment during the same period, in stark contrast to the experience of other European countries. This paper...

In his seminal publications between the 1930s and 1960s, Frederick Lane offered three hypotheses regarding the impact of the Voyages of Discovery that have guided debate ever since. First, pepper and other spice prices did not rise in European markets in the century before the 1490s, and thus...

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In an environment of low returns to agricultural activities and slow structural change, both employment and enterprise diversification have been presented as possible strategies for raising the incomes of farm households. This paper focuses on the barriers to taking up off-farm employment and...

We show that the composition of government spending influences the long-run behaviour of the real exchange rate. We develop a two-sector small open economy model in which an increase in government consumption is associated with real appreciation, while an increase in government investment may...

This paper employs a new methodology for measuring the contribution of growth and interest rate differentials to the half-life of deviations from Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). Our method is based on directly comparing the impulse response function of a VAR model, where the real exchange rate is...