The paper investigates the relationship between offshoring, wages, and the ease with which individuals' tasks can be offshored. Our analysis relates to recent theoretical contributions arguing that there is only a loose relationship between the suitability of a task for offshoring and the...

This paper analyses currency options for six Pacific states - Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu – that issue their own currencies. Empirical estimates indicate that these states already stabilize their currencies against the US dollar because of their large and...

The nature of international trade has changed significantly. For centuries, trade concentrated on the exchange of finished goods. It now increasingly involves bits of value that are added at different locations to combine into one final product. Therefore, trade in functions or tasks are of...

Major DAC donors are widely criticized for weak targeting of aid, selfish aid motives and insufficient coordination. The emergence of an increasing number of new donors may further complicate the coordination of international aid efforts. On the other hand, new donors (many of which were aid...

The aim of the paper is to discuss and to provide evidence for the existence of pecuniary knowledge externalities, considered here as the main cause of positive disequilibrium experience by downstream producers. This last effect, confirmed by the empirical analysis here performed, contrasts the...

This paper investigates empirically the occurrence of pecuniary knowledge externalities at the sectoral level across European economies. The main results suggest that, although some sectors can be considered as playing a particularly important role as a source of pecuniary knowledge...

The paper presents a new sectoral taxonomy that focuses on the existence of non negligible external effects, deriving from user-producer knowledge interactions, the latter in turn coupled with intermediate goods transactions, in a system of vertically integrated manufacturing and services...

Performance-based aid has been proposed as an alternative to the failed traditional approach whereby donors make aid conditional on the reform promises of recipient countries. However, hardly any empirical evidence exists on whether ex post rewards are effective in inducing reforms. We attempt...

We investigate whether elected members of the United Nations Security Council receive favorable treatment from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), analyzing panel data on the level of conditionality attached to (a maximum of) 314 IMF arrangements with 101 countries over the period of 1992 to...

Germany could have reached Kyoto protocol obligations earlier if German solar investments would be relocated to Sicily. Additional benefits of emission savings and energy production should rise up to 72%. Nevertheless German solar power plants 2008 counted for 20 % of the financial benefits...