Since the mid-1990s, China’s state leadership has adopted a policy of nurturing the competitiveness of large state-owned industrial enterprises. The implications of this policy have been a matter of debate in the literature. This paper seeks to provide some useful input into the debate....

This study investigates empirically what the major factors are which have driven Wenzhou’s informal credit market and how much that market is responsive to monetary policies and the formal banking conditions nationwide. The main findings are: (i) the informal credit lending rates are...

The Chinese experience of economic transformation has presented a serious challenge to the Washington Consensus. Since the mid-1990s, institutions upholding the Washington Consensus have mostly excluded the Chinese experience–because of its conspicuous anomaly-in their attempts to...

Recent development literature has placed priority on poverty reduction, and on possible growth enhancement from a more equal distribution of assets and income. At the same time, empirical work consistently shows that economic growth is no more than distribution neutral. In that context, this...

This paper takes stock of the current status of health sectors in MENA. From the narrow perspective of national aggregate indicators, as with most middle income countries, the region has seen significant achievements. Yet, health sectors face systemic challenges, and suffer from significant and...

This paper examines how ëconfluenceí and ëautonomyí, two key concepts introduced by Frisch around 1930, have disappeared in econometrics textbooks and why only some fragments of the two have survived mainstream econometrics. It relates the disappearance to the defect in the textbook position...

The close relationship between commodity future and cash prices is critical for the effectiveness of risk management and the functioning of price discovery. However, in recent years, commodity futures prices, across the board, have appeared increasingly detached from prices on physical markets....

Despite repeated policy initiatives from donors and governments, the human and economic cost of continued lack of access to safe water and sanitation in sub-Saharan Africa remains high. This paper shows that a radical reorientation of policy is needed to achieve a significant increase in...

This paper investigates the rise and fall of the IV method in macro-econometric models and its subsequent revival in micro-econometric models. The key findings are: (i) the IV method implicitly breaks the contemporaneously circular causality postulated in a simultaneousequation model (SEM) by...