This paper attempts to present a viable approach for the design of an instrument of government finance (and monetary management) in an Islamic economy where conventional transactions based on an ex-ante promise of a risk-free rate of return are forbidden. Resources to finance government...

Connectivity in developing countries has traditionally been viewed in terms of investment in transport and communications. This papers makes an effort to go beyond this traditional view and conceptualizes connectivity as networks between people and places. We split the overall national reforms...

While Pakistan has taken several steps to promote competition in its markets, further reforms are required in improving domestic commerce, agricultural markets and industries. With increasing risks and cost of doing business due to deteriorating law and order situation as well as massive energy...

In the early 1990s capital flows to the Asian economies were dominated by FDI. By contrast, Latin America was attracting little FDI and a large share of its inflows were either short-term or portfolio and viewed as “hot money.” These differences gave rise to the view that Latin America was...

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We develop a theoretical framework to compare forecast uncertainty estimated from time series models to those available from survey density forecasts. The sum of the average variance of individual densities and the disagreement, which is the same as the variance of the aggregate density, is...

Using self-assessed health status together with several indicators of individual morbidity and socio-demographic characteristics, we study the quality of health and income related health disparity in five racial/ethnic groups as well as across 17 geographic areas of New York State. The American...

We estimate a Bayesian learning model with heterogeneity aimed at explaining the evolution of expert disagreement in forecasting real GDP growth and inflation over 24 monthly horizons for G7 countries during 1990-2007. Professional forecasters are found to begin and have relatively more success...

Using forecasts from Consensus Economics Inc., we provide evidence on the efficiency of real GDP growth forecasts by testing whether forecast revisions are uncorrelated. As the forecast data used are multi-dimensional—18 countries, 24 monthly forecasts for the current and the following year...

Dwivedi and Srivastava (1984, DS) studied the exact finite sample properties of Nagar’s (1962) double k-class estimator as continuous functions of its two characterizing scalars k1 and k2, and provided guidelines for their choice in empirical work. In this note we show that the empirical...