Rising unemployment and falling living standards are two of the main problems facing policymakers in economies in transition. The case of Albania is distinctive, because high unemployment has been associated with a very large private sector and by far the greatest scale of temporary emigration...

The paper uses a dynamic equilibrium model to explain the concurrence of economic growth and business cycles. Introducing durable goods into a model with ex-ante identical consumer-producers and economies of specialized learning-by-doing, the author shows that when job-shifting costs, economies...

The paper follows Benhabib and Spiegel (Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 34, 1994:143-73) in examining the effect of human capital accumulation on economic growth. The paper is innovative in two ways. First, it takes the R&D-based models more seriously. This delivers more structural...

The authors analyze an endogenous growth model with economy-wide increasing returns, in which a public input is essential for private production. Within such a framework, it is shown that a continuum of equilibria and global indeterminacy can arise for reasonable parameter values, simply due to...

The author studies East Asian economic performance relative to the experience of a sample of rich, industrialized countries. On combining the coefficients from an augmented Solow model of growth for a sample of industrialized countries with the actual levels of factor accumulation in East Asia,...

The paper uses a calibrated general-equilibrium model to quantify the welfare impact of trade liberalization-and compute the optimal tariff structure-for Costa Rica when trade-policy-induced foreign direct investment and international capital taxation with credits are present. It shows that...

The paper looks at the situation of legal immigrants who employ illegal immigrants for various services. This enables the legal immigrants to allocate more time to other work, thereby increasing their earnings. Illegal immigrants employed by legal immigrants may specialize in certain professions...

Why do so many African governments consistently impose high tax rates and make little investment in productive public goods, when alternative policies could yield greater tax revenues and higher national income? The authors posit and test an intertemporal political economy model in which the...

The paper presents a model where the median voter in the donor country determines the support of foreign aid. It is first established that an individual in the donor country is affected by the direct benefits (due to altruism) and costs (due to taxes) of giving aid, and by the indirect benefits...

The paper addresses the question of whether trade restrictiveness impacts economic performance, via a trade restrictiveness index that is decomposable into a trade distortion and a domestic distortion component. The paper builds on the Anderson and Neary price index measure of trade distortion,...