This paper explains why a debtor country may be eager to spend foreign exchange reserves on the retirement of its cross-border obligations at market prices. A simple two-period framework shows that such spending can be profitable to both the debtor countries and their foreign creditors, and...

Two key developments affected Thai agriculture in the last decade: the precipitous decline (until 1988) in world prices for the major agricultural items exported by Thailand, and the decline in the amount of cultivable land available for each agricultural worker. During this same period the Thai...

The problems associated with structural stagnation, the debt crisis, and policy mismanagement have proved resistant to the procedures of balance-of-payments stabilization and structural adjustment of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. This paper considers the challenges...

Four scenarios for the global trading system in the 1990s are outlined and their implications for developing countries considered: (i) further development of a GATT-based trading regime; (ii) development of a world of trading blocs -- where the critical issue is not whether they will emerge (they...

This study has three basic objectives. First, it estimates the subsidy rates for the officially supported external financing received by the Thai public sector. Second, it attempts to provide some analysis of the impact of this concessional funding on the domestic allocation of resources. Third,...

This Technical Paper examines: (i) how the governments of the six dynamic Asian economies — Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand — have responded to the challenge posed by the Montreal Protocol to reduce their consumption of ozone-depleting substances like...

Models of trading economies have become very large in dimensions and complex in structure. This paper seeks conditions under which it is possible to aggregate the production and consumption of groups of commodities in "industries": commodity groups sharing some common characteristics and...

How open are the capital accounts in Korea and Taiwan? Has there been a trend towards more financial openness during the 1980s? This paper aims at answering both questions by estimating a model of interest determination first outlined by Edwards and Khan, in an extension suggested by Haque and...

In the terminology of the International Monetary Fund, "conditionality" refers to the policies the Fund expects a member to follow in order to be able to avail itself of credit from the Fund (Gold, 1979). Over the years, major changes in the landscape surrounding the Fund and in the situation of...

In the 1960s, the principle of subsidies for agricultural inputs was unquestioned. The advent of Structural Adjustment Plans led however to a re-examination of this principle, as preference moved towards liberalisation of the agricultural sector. Given the very low consumption of fertilizers in...