It is important to know how aggregate economic growth or contraction was distributed according to initial levels of living. In particular, to what extent can it be said that growth was"pro-poor?"There are problems with past methods of addressing this question, notably that the measures used are...

This analysis conducts dynamic simulations to determine how major variables interact across sectors. Changes in growth performance, more than anything else, were responsible for the sharp drops in aggregate savings in 1980-82 in Korea and in 1984-85 in the Philippines. In Korea, per capita...

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region's trade performance over the past two decades has been disappointing. Efforts to boost trade through a plethora of regional trade agreements (RTAs) are underway. This study examines the potential contribution of regional trade agreements, as well as...

Despite its importance to economic growth and the evolution of market structure, the investment behavior of firms, industries, and countries remains poorly understood. This paper has several objectives. First, it reviews some basic models of irreversible investment to illustrate the option-like...

Past research has found that subjective questions about an individuals'economic status do not correspond closely to measures of economic welfare based on household income or consumption. Survey respondents undoubtedly hold diverse ideas about what it means to be"poor"or"rich."Further, this...

This paper estimates a monetary Euler system of a utility-maximizing representative consumer from two inflationary Latin American countries: Chile in the late seventies and Mexico in the early eighties. The results show that money is necessary to get reasonable parameters of the utility...

Using 2005 firm level data for 26 countries in Eastern and Central Europe, this paper estimates performance gaps between male and female-owned businesses, while controlling for location by industry and country. The findings show that female entrepreneurs have a significantly smaller scale of...

In this summary report and a series of country case studies, infoDev is exploring the transformative role that Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can have in post-conflict nations during the process of reconstruction. The case studies look at countries at different stages of...

The Little Data Book on Financial Inclusion 2015 is a pocket edition of the Global Financial Inclusion Database published in 2015 in “The Global Findex Database 2014: Measuring Financial Inclusion around the World” by Asli Demirguc-Kunt, Leora Klapper, Dorothe Singer, and Peter Van...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, interest in systemic risk has surged among academics and policy makers. The mitigation of systemic risk is now widely accepted as the fundamental underlying concept for the design of the post-crisis regulatory agenda. Effective mitigation requires...