"This paper surveys the growing literature on monetary cooperation in East Asia that goes beyond the Chiang Mai Initiative. It compares and contrasts the various proposals for cooperation such as the Williamson basket peg, the Asian monetary system, and the yen block as to their crisis...

"The paper identifies a set of core concepts that reflect key "political economy" factors shaping the policy reform process that can assist in guiding the policy-based lending (PBL) design process. It discusses the recurring themes that constrain the effectiveness of PBL, reviews from a...

"This study examines the role of infrastructure development and technical change in explaining increases in agricultural production and changes in land use in the Mekong Delta Region of Viet Nam during the mid-1990s. The study relies on econometric analysis of household-level longitudinal farm...

"This research study examines how the Thai central government can finance decentralization and make local governments accountable for their own finances. The Thai government's medium-term fiscal stance is not conducive to planned fiscal decentralization, and local governments will not...

"We use a recently constructed cross-country data set on absolute poverty to examine whether there is regional and sectoral variation in the relationship between poverty and economic growth. We find that the povertygrowth linkage is strongest in East Asia and that this linkage is essentially...

"This paper provides evidence of a problem with the influential testing and assessment of Solow's (1956) growth model proposed by Mankiw et al. (1992) and a series of subsequent papers evaluating the latter. First, the assumption of a common rate of technical progress maintained by Mankiw et al....

"The Doha Agenda continues the Uruguay Round's expansion of trade negotiations into behind-the-border policies, regulations, and institutions. This distracts attention from the part of the Agenda most directly linked to poverty reduction and economic development: removal of distortions to...

"Using an early warning system (EWS) model, this paper provides more empirical evidence on the causes of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, with a view to discriminating between the two hypotheses of "weak fundamentals" and "investors' panic." The results show that there are strong warning signals...

"Access to new information and communication technologies (ICT) remains extremely unequally distributed across and within societies. While there have been a good deal of popular discussions about this "digital divide", not much is known about the quantitative significance of its various...

"Among developing member countries (DMCs), Indonesia and the Philippines rank fairly high in the distribution of real GDP per capita in PPP dollars while Bangladesh ranks much lower. In terms of aggregate schooling, the Philippines has secondary and tertiary enrollment rates that are...