The authors study the impact of the 1988-94 trade liberalization in Brazil on wage distribution. They explore three main channels through which trade liberalization could have affected wage distribution: (1) increasing returns to skilled workers because of Hecksher-Ohlin adjustments to trade...

After weighing the costs and benefits of pollution control, profit-maximizing firms sometimes choose not to invest in pollution abatement because the penalty they expect regulators to impose for noncompliance falls short of the cost of abatement. To improve incentives for pollution control,...

Ilahi analyzes the determinants of intra-household time use in Peru in 1994 and 1997. She tests whether sickness, unemployment, the provision of water and energy services, and other factors affect the time use of men and women differently. The results show that women work up to a fifth more than...

The author uses the regional structure of the economy, proxied by the shares of services and industry in regional gross domestic product (GDP), as an indicator of the demand for educated workers. By examining whether the level of schooling as a function of shares of services and industry differs...

Cote d'Ivoire spends more of its budget (42 percent) on education than any other country in the world. The purpose of this paper is to present an economic assessment of vocational and technical education (VTE) within the country. This assessment takes a three-pronged approach. First, it studies...

The Latin America and Caribbean region contributes about 10 percent of the 90 million people added to world population every year. This is slightly greater than its 8 percent share of world population. This paper studies population projections, covering almost two centuries from 1985 to 2150....

The author examines the performance of the new private pension systems in Peru and Colombia during their first years of existence. Peru and Colombia were the second and third Latin American countries to implement a systemic reform of their pension systems. The reforms experienced difficulties in...

Vietnam experienced a dramatic decline in child labor during the 1990s. The authors explore this decline in detail and document the heterogeneity across households in both levels of child labor and in the incidence of this decline in child labor. Theauthors find a strong correlation between...

Output collapses, and crises are a fact of life. Severe economic downturns occur periodically, and have grave consequences on the poor. The authors propose a new measurement for economic downside risk, and severity: Growth at risk. Similar to the concept of Value at Risk in finance, Growth at...

The authors characterize poverty in Sri Lanka, using data from two recent household surveys (for 1985-86 and1990-91). Poverty rates in 1990-91 were highest in the rural sector and lowest in the estate sector, with the urban sector in between. Between 1985-86 and 1990-91, national poverty...