With food prices on the rise, understanding the transmission of price shocks, both internationally and domestically, is central for trade policy analysis. This paper examines spatial market integration and its determinants for ten key food products in Bolivia, across the four most important...

This paper reassesses what works in banking regulation based on the new World Bank survey (Survey IV) of bank regulation and supervision around world. The paper briefly presents new and official survey information on bank regulations in more than 125 countries, makes comparisons with earlier...

This paper has two purposes. It first considers the impact on world food prices of the changes in restrictions on trade in staple foods during the 2008 world food price crisis. Those changes -- reductions in import protection or increases in export restraints -- were meant to partially insulate...

For individual countries, variable trade barriers can be used to reduce the volatility of domestic relative to world prices. If this is done by countries accounting for a large share of the market, its effect is offset by increases in world price volatility. This study shows the nature of the...

This research analyzes the success of the infrastructure projects financed by the World Bank, focusing on the causal link between the quality of project implementation and its outcome. The results show that the success of infrastructure projects depends fundamentally on the quality of...

This paper studies the volatility of commodity prices on the basis of a large dataset of monthly prices observed in international trade data from the United States over the period 2002 to 2011. The conventional wisdom in academia and policy circles is that primary commodity prices are more...

Cashew policy reforms in Mozambique have been controversial. They are often invoked by critics as an illustration of how agricultural policy reforms supported by international financial institutions may fail to have their intended effects. This paper revisits the reforms and their outcomes...

This paper brings new evidence on the impact of services liberalization on the performance of manufacturing firms. Using a unique database of Ukrainian firms in 2001-2007, the authors utilize an external push for liberalization in the services sector as a source of exogenous variation to...

In poor countries, most governments implement policies aiming to stabilize the prices of staple foods, which often include storage and trade measures insulating their domestic market from the world market. It is of crucial importance to understand the precise motivations and efficiency of those...