This report is a summary of "World Development Report 1995: workers in an integrating world" which deals with labor and employment, issues that are important to South Asia. Indeed, expanding employment and increasing the remuneration of workers, which are crucial for poverty elimination, is the...

Institutional lending in crisis is evaluated from a theoretical point of view. First, the share of senior loans in new loans is irrelevant under a given probability distribution of the country's resources. Second, seniority may partially alleviate the inefficiency of debt contracts when the...

We examine the effects of labor market rigidities on the outcome of trade liberalization using a general-equilibrium model of Bangladesh. When there are no labor market distortions, the poorest households experience a real-wage increase following trade liberalization. When there are either...

Empirical analysis shows that democracy has facilitated economic liberalization in 25 postcommunist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The existence of a vibrant civil society at the start of the transition has the most explanatory power in this team's regression

Governments' contingent liabilities increase fiscal vulnerability, but are omitted in traditional measures of the current deficit. In the Czech Republic this omission may mean that fiscal adjustment has been overstated by 3 to 4 percent of annual GDP, with future budgets having to pay for past...

This paper analyzes the dynamics of general equilibrium models with externalities in human capital accumulation which extends that of Uzawa-Lucas. Multiple balanced growth paths, with different growth rates, and a continuum of equilibria (with a unique balanced growth path) may exist. In...

The mechanism by which aggregate supply creates the income that generates its matching demand (called Say's Law), may not work in a general equilibrium with decentralized markets and savings in bonds or money. Full employment is an equilibrium, but convergence to that state is slow. A...