How can Penang upgrade and diversify its economy? This paper addresses this question using a number of methodologies that have been developed for assessing competitiveness and identifying the direction of future industrial evolution. The results show that although Penang was successful in...

The paper analyses how the global economic crisis will affect the economies of the low income Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and discusses the fiscal measures which can be taken to help mitigate the adverse impact of the crisis. It focuses on Tajikistan, the poorest member of the CIS...

This paper examines the phenomenon of the over-supply of teachers but shortage of qualified teachers in Indonesia. Using a theoretical framework of government-dominated market with government-set wage rate and demand for teachers, the analysis explores how teacher supply, particularly the...

Regional disparities present an ever present development challenge in most countries, especially those with large geographic areas under their jurisdiction. A neglect of these inequities may create the potential for disunity and, in extreme cases, for disintegration. In view of this, most...

Prevailing measures of relative poverty put an implausibly high weight on relative deprivation, such that measured poverty does not fall when all incomes grow at the same rate. This stems from the (implicit) assumption in past measures that very poor people incur a negligible cost of social...

This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism,...

In many countries, place specific investments in infrastructure are viewed as integral components of territorial development policies. But are these policies fighting market forces of concentration? Or are they adding net value to the national economy by tapping underexploited resources? This...

Advanced and emerging market economies have rapidly integrated into international capital markets and this growing globalization of financial markets has led to some important changes in the patterns of saving and investment across the world. The main goal of this paper is to test whether the...

This paper studies how liberalization affects productivity growth using micro-level plant data. While previous studies have already shown the existence of a positive relationship between competition and economic performance, the novelty of this paper is that it analyzes not only the average...

According to the conventional wisdom, when an economy enters a recession and nominal prices adjust slowly, the monetary authority should devalue the domestic currency to make the recession less severe. The reason is that a devaluation of the currency lowers the relative price of non-tradable...