Trade and investment in services are difficult to measure, and the regulatory barriers that inhibit the free flow of services are hard to quantify. As a result, very little attention has been paid to dismantling barriers to services trade and investment. Rather, free trade negotiations tend to...

This paper assesses the impact of government fiscal policies on income inequality in Asia. It discusses the role and effectiveness of redistributive fiscal policies and quantifies the effects of taxation and government expenditure on income distributions. Panel estimation for 150 countries with...

The paper aims to assess what influences volatility of capital flows to emerging countries and whether or not there is a spillover or contagion effect in the volatility. The empirical results suggest strong and significant contagion effects from global and regional volatilities on the volatility...

How much would output increase if underdeveloped economies were to increase their levels of schooling? We contribute to the development accounting literature by describing a non-parametric upper bound on the increase in output that can be generated by more levels of schooling. The advantage of...

Human capital refers to the ability and efficiency of people to transform raw materials and capital into goods and services, the consensus being that these skills can be learned through the educational system. The concept of human capital, necessarily, is related to the productivity of workers....

The collapse of trade during the great recession of 2008-2009 has raised the question of whether the rise of global value chains (GVCs) has increased or accelerated the international transmission of business cycle shocks. In this paper, we empirically investigate two channels through which a...

Adverse foreign output shocks have a sizable impact on the welfare of small open economies. Therefore, one of the key roles of monetary policy in those economies is to minimize the welfare losses arising from such shocks. To assess the welfare impact of external shocks under different monetary...

Private investment in Malaysia has never fully recovered from the impact of the Asian financial crisis (AFC). Both domestic and foreign investment have remained lackluster post-AFC; while foreigners continue to shun Malaysia, it seems even domestic investors are fleeing as well, with Malaysia...

This paper analyzes the equity of opportunity in basic education and infrastructure services in seven developing countries, namely, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Viet Nam. The analysis applies a method developed by the World Bank called the Human...

This paper proposes and analyzes one possible reason why some countries get stuck in the middle-income trap: the role played by the changing structure of the economy (from low-productivity activities into high-productivity activities), the types of products exported (not all products have the...