Mali, a landlocked West African nation at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, has introduced a program to produce biodiesel using jatropha curcas, a non-edible shrub widely available throughout the country by farmers for generations as a living fence for their gardens. The aim of the program...

The authors constructed a standard computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to explore the economic impact of increased spending on infrastructure in six African countries: Benin, Cameroon, Mali, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda. The basic elements of the model are drawn from EXTER, adjusted to...

This study aims to analyze the impact of Covid-19 on the female’s labor force participation (LFP) probability in Brazil in 2020. We found through the probit model that females are about 7 percentage points less likely to participate in the labor force than males. Covid-19 and layoffs decrease...

This study aims to analyze the economic impacts of infrastructure investment in Africa, focusing on the Guinea-Bissau economy. Through a dynamic CGE model, we find that the natural resource revenues (or aid)-funded infrastructure investments generate externalities that increase factor returns....

The vast majority of international migrants from developing countries are of working age. And yet, their integration in the formal local labor market of their host countries continues to be a challenge. This paper reviews the scope of mentoring programs as a more systematic policy instrument to...

Regulators of concessions in newly privatized infrastructure sectors typically start the price control process with limited sectoral and corporate data. To move toward more realistic regulatory targets, they must ensure that this information base grows and that their ability to process it...

In 1989, the Argentine government initiated rapid privatization of infrastructure services-mainly gas, telecoms, electricity generation and transmission, and water and electricity distribution in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. The author reviews the performance of the agencies set up to...

Brazil's electricity sector is made up of more than sixty-five, mostly vertically integrated, federally- and state-owned monopolies. The most pressing problems in the sector are excessive operational costs and large investment needs. Both of these problems can be addressed through more...

Port reforms in Argentina have sought to deregulate, decentralize, and privatize. And they have sought to introduce competition not only among ports but also for the ports --by inviting operators to bid for port concessions-- and within the ports-- by dividing large ports into terminals and...

Argentina began to concession its intercity highways and the access roads to Buenos Aires in the early 1990s. It first offered the intercity highways for competitive bids, setting the terms, the tolls, and the service levels and basing bid selection primarily on the rental offered for the...