The effect of the performance of the judicial system has been thrown into the limelight as the business sector has in various surveys pointed to its performance as being one of the main obstacles and disincentives to doing business in the Philippines. The channels through which judicial...

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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...

This note points out that the pattern of trade predicted by the comparative advantage may or may not hold, depending on the initial distribution of endowments. A necessary and sufficient condition for the “perverse?case to occur in a pure-exchange economy is that the education in the value of...