In the last decade, the private sector has increased its role in the highways sector both through the construction and management of new assets. Private sector involvement, often justified by the need to ease public expenditure, allows a reduction in public participation for new investments. The...

This paper investigates the role of the term spread to predict domestic output and inflation in less developed financial market with the focus on Malaysia bond market. By controlling for past values of the dependent variable, this paper finds that the term spread of various bond maturities...

India has a rich heritage of traditional systems of medicine viz. Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, Tibetan which are mostly based on botanical formulations. Although biologically, the region is extremely rich in medicinal plants, due to years of unwise use, the availability of raw materials in desired...

Although decentralization is often modeled as an outcome of bargaining over rents and poli-cies, intuitively it seems possible that public statements, symbols and status often have a great impact on this process. The paper studies the relative importance of the “real” political actions...

This paper assesses the pre and post Free Trade Agreement (FTA) pattern in bilateral trade between Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Besides the usual direction of trade analysis we also use general and partial equilibrium approaches in order to evaluate the true potential of this FTA. Our results reveal...

This paper considers a setting in which the acquisition of human capital entails a change of location in social space that causes individuals to revise their comparison groups. Skill levels are viewed as occupational groups, and moving up the skill ladder by acquiring additional human capital,...

The current implementation of the Fan Chart displays equal tail probability bands and do not take into account that the variable of interest may be subject to data revision. In this note I propose the use of Highest Probability Density, HPD, bands and include flexibility to display the risks...

Why did the Japanese economy stagnate before World War II, how did it achieve rapid economic growth after the war, and why did it stagnate again after the 1970s? To answer these questions, I developed a two-country trade model with technology transfer, where rms in the two countries compete in a...

ABSTRACT Ethiopia’s exchange rate policies have been a bone of contention for concerned economic analysts and commentators alike. This study takes a new look at the record to explore the impact of exchange rate liberalization reforms on export growth in Ethiopia. I employ generalized method of...

Since the early 90's, the Federal Planning Bureau assesses the sustainability of pensions in Belgium. Since a couple of years, it uses a dynamic microsimulation model, MIDAS_BE, to assess the development of the adequacy of pensions. This working paper illustrates the possibilities generated by...