This paper seeks to outline a number of issues relating to banking lending and corporate finance that deserve further research attention. The main purpose is to identify research issues and raise questions, rather than to propose solutions and answers. Specifically, the issues identified fall...

India has undertaken extensive reforms in its manufacturing sector in the last two decades. However, an acceleration of growth in manufacturing, and a concomitant increase in employment, has eluded India. What might be holding the sector back? Using Annual Survey of Industries data at the...

It has been argued that the adverse impact of skilled versus unskilled labor migration can be mitigated or even offset by the fact that skilled migrants remit more than unskilled ones. This paper contributes to the much debated and so far unresolved related issue of whether remittances actually...

J. Salcedo Cain, Rana Hasan, Rhoda Magsombol, and Ajay Tandon examine the evolution of inequality in India between 1983 and 2004. Inequality levels were relatively stable between 1983 and 1993, but increased between 1993 and 2004, a period of relatively fast economic growth. While the increases...

C. Peter Timmer writes about the causes of high food prices, focusing on staple grains - rice in particular - and edible oils. He shows that although food prices have come down from the spikes of early 2008, they are likely to remain higher than they were in early 2007 for years to come. The...

This paper examines the links between ownership, innovation, and exports in electronics firms in three late-industrializing developing countries (People's Republic of China, Thailand, and Philippines), drawing on recent developments in applied international trade and innovation and learning....

The paper empirically investigates the relationship between productivity and employment in Republic of Korea using structural vector autoregression (VAR) models. Productivity-enhancing technology shocks significantly increase hours worked, which lends support to the real business cycle theory....

This paper empirically examines the relative importance of different sources of inflation in developing Asia. In particular, it tests the widely held view that the region's current inflation surge is primarily the result of external price shocks such as oil and food shocks. In addition, this...

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) are emerging as developing Asia's main policy tool for handling the region's excess foreign exchange reserves. SWFs represent a strategic shift of excess reserves from low-risk, low-return investments to high-risk, high-return investments, and are subject to a wide...