This paper estimates the impact of the high food prices of 2010 on income poverty and the achievement of MDG 1 in Asia and the Pacific. It also estimates the impacts of high price during 2011 under various scenarios for the prices of food and oil. We find that although the high food prices of...

We review the literature on the relationship between agricultural trade policy reform and poverty, and the results of recent detailed simulation studies applied to economies in the ESCAP region. We then use the GTAP model to evaluate the possible impacts of the most recently proposed modality...

The authors compare the European Community's "trade fundamentals" prevailing in the 1960s with those applying in Arab countries today. The fundamentals differ significantly-Arab countries trade much less with each other than EC members did, and the importance of such trade in GDP varies greatly....

This paper discusses the causes and consequences of the current trend in which a principal driver of growth is inward remittances by workers deployed overseas. The main benefit of the phenomenon is an easing of the fiscal burden arising from the effectively large transfer from workers to the...

Myanmar has peculiar conditions of deposit dollarization that were shaped by administrative controls. On the one hand, restrictive controls encouraged the accumulation of foreign currency deposits (FCD). On the other hand, foreign currency loans (FCL) were not practiced officially; therefore,...

This paper investigates the impact of ownership type on the entire growth rate distributional mass of Chinese firms, using a conditional estimation approach of the Asymmetric Exponential Power (AEP) density that goes beyond simple location-shift analysis. We first find a Chinese growth puzzle,...

One of the greatest challenges China faces is how to reshape its heavily investment-driven mode of economic growth. By investigating how the rebalancing of Japan's economic growth mode was realized in the 1970s, we indicate that it is essential in the rebalancing to correct the distortions in...

Japan has suffered from long-lasting but mild deflation since the latter half of the 1990s. Estimates of a standard Phillips curve indicate that a decline in inflation expectations, the negative output gap, and other factors such as a decline in import prices and a higher exchange rate, all...

A standard growth accounting exercise indicates that, after Japan's "lost decade," its overall total-factor-productivity (TFP) growth has increased notably since 2000. This productivity revival has been limited, however, to information technology (IT) production--has not been a broad-based...

This paper investigates the features and recent changes of China's industrial structure using input-output tables for different periods from 1997 to 2005. We find that the domestic production inducement coefficients of China's material and machinery industries have declined while the import...