In most developing countries, irrigation, road, and power networks are not in good condition. In Latin America, for example, the effectiveness of such public infrastructure is only about 74 percent of that of industrialized countries in terms of forgone output. This paper develops a...

The paper analyzes the intertemporal relationship between oil duties, taxes, government spending, and GDP in Mexico during the 1981-98 period. The results from estimating a VAR model, impulse response functions, and variance decompositions on the quarterly series of taxes, government spending,...

Using a nationally representative dataset, and information on why farmers did not purchase fertilizer, the authors estimate a double-hurdle fertilizer adoption model for Ethiopia. Access is an overriding constraint in four zones. The results underline the importance of increasing the...

The authors posit and test an intertemporal political economy model in which the government sets tax and R and D levels while investors respond with production. Equilibrium policy and growth rates depend on the initial cost structure. It is found that in many African countries, low tax/high...

The paper investigates the effects of sub-Saharan African colonial heritage on economic growth in a sample of nonindustrial countries. Parameter estimates suggest that the partial effects of extractive institutions engendered by a twentieth century colonial heritage account for approximately 30%...

The paper analyses how an error in inflation expectations helped maintain high interest rates in the wake of the mayor stabilization plan launched in Brazil over the past 18 years. Newly implemented low-inflation measures lacked credibility and forced agents to expect a higher inflation rate...

Iran is committed to substantial trade and market reform in its third Five Year Development Plan. It started, however, with nontariff barriers on all products, a dual exchange rate regime with the market rate more than four times the official rate, and domestic energy product subsidies of about...

An econometric model is used to assess the short-term (impact), interim, and cumulative effects of food in the economy of Tunisia for the period 1960-92. Food aid displaced neither domestic production nor commercial imports of food grains. Rather, food aid provided incentives to promote growth...