India and Pakistan, the two largest economies in South Asia, share a common border, culture and history. Despite the benefits of proximity, the two neighbors have barely traded with each other. In 2011, trade with Pakistan accounted for less than half a percent of India's total trade, whereas...

The primary objective of this study is to analyze the impact on Bangladesh of increased market access in India, both within a static production structure and also identifying dynamic gains. The study shows that Bangladesh and India would both gain by opening up their markets to each other....

The authors examine the effects of WTO agreements and domestic trade policy reforms on production, welfare, and poverty in Bangladesh. They use a sequential dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, which takes into account accumulation effects, allowing for long-run analysis. The...

Proposals aimed at improving the welfare of the poor often include indicator targeting, in which non-income characteristics (such as race, gender, or land ownership) that are correlated with income are used to target limited funds to groups likely to include a cincentration of the poor. Previous...

Standard economic analyses suggests that when the budget for redistribution is fixed, transfers should be targeted to (that is, means-tested for) those most in need. But both economists and political scientists have long recognized the possibility that targeting could undermine political support...

Ninety percent of the differences across countries in total fertility rates are accounted for solely by differences in women's reported desired fertility. Using desired fertility constructed from both retrospective and prospective questions, together with instrumental variables estimation, it is...

Recently, much attention has been paid in the literature on economic growth to the phenomenon of"conditional convergence,"the tendencies of economies with lower-level incomes to grow faster, conditional on their rate of factor accumulation. The author documents that, regardless of conditional...

As part the Local Level Institutions study of local life in villages in rural Indonesia information was gathered on sampled household's participation in social activities. We classified the reported activities into four distinct types of social activity: sociability, networks, social...

As a less restrictive trade regime is associated with greater responsiveness to economic incentives, econometric evidence that does not allow for the impact of import controls cannot be used reliably to assess the effect of a devaluation on the trade balance. Indeed, devaluation combined with...

Except during the Great Depression, the historical path for per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the United Stateshas been reasonably stable exponential trend growth, with modest cyclical deviation. Graphically, growth in the United States displays as a modestly sloping, only slightly...