Wage inequality between skilled and unskilled labor in the US and its trading partners, Mexico and Chile, has increased since 1980, while Taiwan's wage inequality has decreased since the mid-1980s. The authors provide a new explanation for the latter, involving a rise in capital flows from...

The paper investigates the effects of Sub-Saharan African colonial heritage on economic growth in a sample of nonindustrial countries. An empirical Solow growth model is specified in a way that allows an examination of whether or not growth in Sub-Saharan Africa reflects a legacy of extractive...

Has the efficiency of firms in India improved since its liberalization in 1991? The authors attempt to answer this question by analyzing the determinants of firm-level efficiency in six manufacturing sectors in India while focusing on the effects of liberalization and domestic competition. They...

This paper explores sufficient conditions for the welfare-improving environmental policy reform in the Harris-Todaro economy. A rise in the pollution tax rate in the urban manufacturing has spillover effects on the two labor market distortions: the less-than-optimal manufacturing employment and...

This study develops a new analytical framework to account for sources of rapid economic growth in China. The traditional Solow approach is expanded to include another source of economic growth-structural change. The empirical results show that structural change has contributed to growth...

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,...

The authors use firm-level data from Indian manufacturing industries to explore the determinants of exports, focusing on the role played by technology. The empirical analysis, which distinguishes between a firm's decision to export and the volume of its exports conditional on its having decided...

The paper examines the problem of excess mortality of females in India. The determinants of gender-specific child survival are investigated through the traditional household production model pioneered by Becker, which is extended to include publicly provided goods as fixed inputs in production...

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...

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% of that of industrialized countries. Low effectiveness imposes a cost on these countries in terms of...