The innovation of this paper is the proof of a relationship between human capital and growth, using a sample of 83 countries and six time periods between 1960 and 1990. Nonetheless, calculations from both interactive and variable-coefficient models...

While the world has been mesmerised by China’s emergence as a major player in international trade, now being one of the world’s top ten traders, and also as an absorber of international capital (second only to the United States), China’s state-owned...

In principle, the sovereign credit rating industry could help mitigate the congestion externalities common to world capital markets that arise from the failure of market participants to internalise the social cost of external borrowings. This would...

This Technical Paper is a study of the working of urban credit cooperatives in China. It begins by putting the German, French, US and Japanese experiences into perspective, before constructing a macroeconomic analysis of the operation, institutional...

The reform of public pension systems has become a key policy issue in many countries. Because conventional approaches to reform largely unfunded retirement income schemes prove politically and economically difficult, attention has focused on the...

Egypt, the oldest and most populous country in the Arab world, and one of its most influential in the Southern Mediterranean region, is now moving into the global economy. During the 1990s the country has pursued successful macroeconomic...

This paper provides statistically significant international evidence on the interaction between funded pensions and aggregate savings, after controlling for country-specific effects and for other saving determinants that have typically been...

The lagging economic performance of the Southern Mediterranean (SOM) region over the past decade is often attributed to the region’s relative lack of openness to international trade. The closer analysis of the region’s trade patterns undertaken in...

The developing countries of the Southern Mediterranean (SOM) have missed the extraordinary surge of private international investment in recent years. Although the SOM region was an important destination for foreign direct investments, its share of...

This paper examines the growth performance of Indian States during 1970-94. We, first, propose a grouping of States according to differences in the availability of physical, social, and economic infrastructure, using principal components analysis....

Large current account deficits are often assumed to play an important role in the propagation of financial crises in emerging markets in receipt of heavy private capital inflows. This paper reaches some major conclusions. First, the Lawson Doctrine —...

The signature of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), which entered into force on 1st January, 1995, marked a turning point in efforts to strengthen and extend intellectual property protection....

This paper presents an overview of the evolution of exchange-rate regimes in Africa and then attempts to assess empirically the impact of exchange-rate policy on manufactured export performance on a panel of major Sub-Saharan Africa countries over...

The recent currency crises in Latin America and Asia have hit countries with strong macroeconomic fundamentals but weak domestic financial systems. Private capital flows, attracted by disorderly financial liberalisation and exchange rate pegs,...

Egypt needs to diversify exports further in order to emerge from its isolation and to draw the maximum advantage from the growth potential offered by trade globalisation. To what extent does the bilateral free trade agreement with the European Union...

How and to what extent can a high degree of global financial integration help the fast-ageing OECD benefit from the delayed ageing process in the non-OECD area? The question is being raised with increasing urgency as it is slowly understood that even...

We present estimates, at the State level, of Indian manufacturing Total Factor Productivity (TFP) and Technical Efficiency (TE) from the estimation of production functions for 17 manufacturing industries from 1976 to 1992. Our analysis relates TFP...

Corruption in customs administrations is a major problem in many African countries. Data from the period 1990-96 are used to examine several hypotheses concerning the determinants of customs fraud in Senegal and Mali. Statistical tests using...

Apart from size of population and GDP, China and Viet Nam have a good deal in common. Both are economies in transition from socialist central planning to the market. Both were largely agrarian societies on the eve of their reforms and, in both,...

In recent years, as China’s reform of state–owned enterprises (SOEs) has gathered momentum, the number of workers made redundant has been rising. Until now, the dismissals have affected only a fraction of the “surplus labour”, which has been...