Leading economic institutions such as the World Bank have argued that liberalization holds the key to growth, poverty alleviation and redistribution. Even recent efforts to model increasing returns within the framework of new growth theories have not resulted in prescriptions for stronge roles...

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed by President William Jefferson Clinton in 1992. Although NAFTA is a trade and tariff initiative it has profound consequences for labor and the U.S. economy. Since its implementation NAFTA has resulted in the permanent elimination of more...

IIR 2002 focuses on one of the most fundamental building blocks of a reform agenda, namely, governance frameworks for commercialization. It was in December 2000 that we first mooted the subject of governance for this issue of the IIR. Subsequent developments, such as the Enron saga, the Orissa...

Brings out the context for (economic) governnance reform in India and develops the theme of the report on better governance for commercialisation of infrastructure. Argues that most situations of governnace inadeuacy or failure can be traced to utlimate causes in bad policy, rules, law and poor...

The paper reviews the evolution of research and innovation in the EU and assesses how current policies and programmes have influenced the development of Europe's research landscape. Based on existing literature, evaluation reports and practice, the paper critically examines the effectiveness of...

The 2009 Cash for Clunkers program aimed to stimulate consumer spending in the new automobile industry, which was experiencing disproportionate reductions in demand and employment during the Great Recession. Exploiting program eligibility criteria in a regression discontinuity design, we show...

The paper analyses the problem of optimal taxation in oligopoly when environmental degradation induced by the industry production process feeds back into market demand. The main assumption is that economic agents and the policy-maker care about the environment only because its degradation...

The purpose of this contribution is to give a broad-based account of the possible interactions between the ECB's monetary policy, on the one hand, and structural policies in the euro area, on the other. While it does not provide a model-based framework, the aim is to present in a qualitative...

Long the nation's largest public utility, the Post Office Department lacked a regular means of ascertaining the costs of providing different mail services until 1926. The paucity of cost data, however, did not deter Congress from setting postage rates down to a fraction of a cent or from...