Trade in health products has been flourishing in recent years as the demand for better health has been growing throughout the world. At the same time, trade in health products is hampered by substantive trade barriers. In this paper, we present evidence that countries around the world still...

Using a decomposition approach on data collected by the Asian Productivity Organization (APO) as well as World Input-Output data, we show that in most Asian economies the services sector makes the largest contribution to labor productivity. Furthermore, we find evidence of a major reallocation...

Does foreign aid spent on trade facilitation increase trade flows of developing countries? There is an on-going and high profile discussion of aid-for-trade associated with the Doha negotiations of the World Trade Organization. There continue also questions about how best to achieve the...

This paper studies how East Asia's trade composition and orientation have changed over the past decade and analyzes the implications for the region and beyond. Over the last 2 decades we have witnessed the emergence of regional and global supply chains, in which production is divided into...

The information and communication technology (ICT) revolution of the past 3 decades has transformed the world into an integrated marketplace. Today, producers and consumers alike are able to compare the prices of local businesses and worldwide sellers. For an increasing number of tradable goods,...

The main objective of this paper is to give an overview of the most commonly used housing policies and to illustrate their economic impact. To facilitate the analysis, we first introduce a simple two-period housing demand model for owner-occupied houses and rental houses. We then add a standard...

The research objective of this paper is to test whether health conditions and health behavior are related to home ownership. This question has not yet been examined quantitatively in the existing literature. Our estimation results show that homeowners consistently report better health and less...

The 14 Pacific developing member countries (DMCs) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) have opted for very different exchange rate regimes with varying degrees of flexibility. Whereas several microstates have adopted an external currency as their legal tender, others have decided to use a basket...

Exploiting the Indonesian Family Life Survey, this paper studies the transition of socioeconomic related disparity of excess weight, including overweight and obesity, from 1993 to 2014. First, we show that the proportions of overweight and obese people in Indonesia increased rapidly during the...