The collective approach to household behavior relaxes the restrictive features of the unitary model by specifying household welfare as a weighted combination of the individuals'utilities. But the weights are assumed fixed or exogenous to the analysis. The authors extend the collective approach...

Universities in Latin America are increasingly considered instruments of social and economic development and face rising expectations in regard to supplying relevant skills, undertaking applied research, and engaging in commercial activity. The paper discusses trends and challenges within Latin...

The black market foreign exchange premium is an important implicit tax on exports, creating a conflict between the fiscal goal of financing government spending with a limited menu of tax instruments and the allocative goal of stimulating exports. In this paper, the premium is solved for in a...

In the late 1980s, Chile planned to privatize Santiago's sanitary works enterprise (EMOS) but instead reformed it under public ownership. It did so through a regulatory framework that mimicked the design of a concession with a private utility, setting tariffs that ensured at least a seven...

The case study on the U.S. Treasury Direct examines the evolution of the electronic distribution systems for marketable and nonmarketable government securities, the main objectives, and the basic legal infrastructure and the preconditions enabling the system. The U.S. experience highlights that...

In the course of trade-policy reforms, countries must confront at least two important questions with respect to tariffs. First, what is the optimal structure of tariffs? In particular, is it optimal to tax all imports at a uniform rate? Second, should intermediate inputs be subject to import...

This report examines trends in the Zambian labor market over the period since independence. It focuses particularly on two phenomena - skill shortages and wage rigidities - which have made it more difficult for the economy to recover from the fall in price of its main export commodity : copper,...

What part of the inequality observed in a particular country is due to unequal opportunities, rather than to differences in individual efforts or luck? This paper estimates a lower bound for the opportunity share of inequality in labor earnings, household income per capita and household...

By the end of the 1990s, most industrial and many developing countries had liberalized their telecommunications markets to improve service accessibility and affordability for both businesses and households. In contrast, Algeria still managed its telecommunications sector as public property. The...

The authors provide an empirical analysis of the determinants of three child-health outcomes related to the Millennium Development Goals: the infant mortality rate, the child mortality rate, and the prevalence of malnutrition. Using data from Demographic and Health Surveys, they go beyond...