A framework is proposed to subsume public goods and common-pool resources, respectively, as specific cases of positive and negative externalities. A pure public good is a positive externality whose appropriable benefits are too small or too uncertain relative to the high private cost for anyone...

We investigate the extent to which the investment slowdown in many Asian countries since the Asian Financial Crisis is attributable to changes in governance institutions. In the process we test the more general hypothesis that different aspects of governance will become relevant constraints to...

A non-tatonnement process is described using the simplest demand-and-supply model, involving the following : uniformly distributed agents; random matching of buyers and sellers; and a universal permission to engage in mutually acceptable trade at non-equilibrium prices. A sufficient condition is...

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A comparative-static model describes the decline of manufacturing in the face of rising overseas employment through a mechanism other than the Dutch Disease. Instead it is competition for skilled labour and the relative ease in producing skills that affect the size of the manufacturing sector,...

Recently currency instability and its economic and social consequences prompt the question whether and to what extent a common currency could have served to prevent or meliorate the Asian crisis. This paper examines the advantages and costs of such a proposal, using the experience and...

The government is rightly concerned with employment generation to make growth inclusive. The use of the open unemployment rate to measure its success, however, is misplaced. In a developing country with a large informal sector and in the absence of unemployment insurance, open unemployment is...

Recent work has documented industrial output growth around the poor periphery from 1870 to the present, finding unconditional convergence on the leaders long before the modern BRICS and even before the Asian Tigers. The Philippines was very much part of that catching up. In the decade or so up...

Where capital markets are undeveloped and political differences among capital owners predominate, capital becomes "parcellised" and is, for all intents and purposes, "specific" to the parcel. The familiar specific-factors model then becomes applicable. Parcellisation results in lower output and...