The paper surveys the theoretical and empirical research on how trade and trade liberalization affect poverty and income distribution. The impact of globalization on poverty reduction has been uneven but the findings in the literature are sensitive to modelling choices. Trade liberalization...

The paper discusses the income inequality changes which have taken place in a few representative developing regions during the last 30 years. While inequality rose in the majority of the countries of these regions in the 1980s and 1990s, the last decade was characterized by a bifurcation of...

This paper analyses the co-movements between the United States stock market and several commodity futures between 1997 and 2011, by computing dynamic conditional correlations at: (i) 1-hour; (ii) 5-minute; (iii) 10-second; and (iv) 1-second frequencies. We document a synchronized structural break,...

We study the potential for introducing indexation on loans provided by multilateral lenders to low income countries (LICs), and thus whether a reform of their lending policy is feasible and economically justified. To this end, we provide new evidence for a group of 40 international development...

For a large number of developing countries, agriculture remains the single most important sector. Climate change has the potential to damage irreversibly the natural resource base on which agriculture depends, with grave consequences for food security. However, agriculture is the sector that has...

The debate on whether price movements in commodity markets are determined by changes in physical supply and demand fundamentals or by the speculative effects of financial investors seems to find some element of agreement on one particular point: the need for increased transparency and improved...

The discussion on exchange rate policy is dominated by the so-called “impossible trinity”. According to this principle an autonomous monetary policy, a control over the exchange rate and free capital movements cannot be achieved simultaneously. In this paper, a strategy of managed floating...

Many economists and policy makers advocate a fundamental shift towards “green growth” as the new, qualitatively-different growth paradigm, based on enhanced material/resource/energy efficiency and drastic changes in the energy mix. “Green growth” may work well in creating new growth...

Economic growth strategies of developing countries have focused in the last decades on expanding their exports. In that scheme, wage compression seems necessary in order to compensate the observed slow productivity pace achieving, therefore, “competitiveness”. The core of this discussion is,...

We present a Structuralist-Keynesian theoretical approach on the determinants of the real exchange rate (RER) for open emerging economies. Instead of macroeconomic fundamentals, the long-term trend of the real exchange rate level is better determined not only by structural forces and long-term...