This paper examines the impact of export orientation, import competition, foreign ownership and the rate of capital accumulation on the relative demand for skilled and unskilled labor in pre-crisis Indonesia.

As debt work-outs facilitate recovery from Asia'a recession, GDP there can be expected to rise and manufactured exports to expand. Asian imports and investment will remain low, however, as crisis-enhanced foreign debt is serviced and domestic savings continue to be sent abroad. Superficially,...

China’s economic growth has, hitherto, depended on its relative abundance of production labour and its increasingly secure investment environment. Within the next decade, however, China's labour force will begin to contract. This will set its economy apart from other developing Asian countries...

One consequence of the trade and technology driven increases in skill premia in the older industrial regions since the 1980s has been a perceived “skill shortage” in those regions, along with freer migration of skilled and professional workers from developing regions. While skilled migration...

Pressure from negotiators on agricultural tariff reform in the Doha Round is favouring commitments to reduce “average” tariffs over a range of commodities. This stems from the perceived need for “flexibility” in protection levels, particularly for some highly protected product groups...

China’s maintenance of a de facto peg against the US dollar during and following the Asian financial crisis caused a realignment of exchange rates in the Asian region. This paper explores the “equilibrium” level of China’s real effective rate in the lead-up to, during and following that...

The recent influx of financial capital to China implies expectations of continued real appreciation and, indeed, rapid expansion had previously led to real appreciations elsewhere in East Asia. In a world of open economies and differentiated traded goods, however, development-related...

International pressure to revalue China’s currency stems in part from the expectation that rapid economic growth should be associated with a real exchange rate appreciation. This hinges on the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis under which economic growth, stemming from improvements in traded sector...

The analysis of global population forecasts of the past 30 years by the US National Academy of Sciences confirms that errors have been considerable and that population forecasts have generally been upward-biased. Recent stochastic population projections also yield wide error bounds. We discuss...