Transactional sex is believed to be an important risk-coping mechanism for women in Sub-Saharan Africa and a leading contributor to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This paper uses data from a panel of women in rural Tanzania whose primary occupation is agriculture. The analysis finds that following a...

An extensive multi-disciplinary literature examines the effects of learning one's HIV status on subsequent risky sexual behaviors. However, many of these studies rely on non-experimental designs; use self-reported outcome measures, or both. This study investigates the effects of a randomly...

Empirical evidence - including the current global crisis - suggests that shocks from advanced countries often have a disproportionate effect on developing economies. Can this account for the fact that aggregate fluctuations are larger and more persistent in the latter than in the former...

This paper concludes that Colombia's impressive fiscal adjustment during 1985 - 1987 was due to structural changes in fiscal policy, not simply to such fortuitous events as the coffee boom. Although impressive, the fiscal adjustment fell short of actually improving the government's net financial...

To study the adjustment to the debt crisis, this paper compares the experience of seven"crisis"debtor countries with those of five"noncrisis"debtor countries. In response to a sharp reduction in external capital flows, the crisis countries rescheduled their debt during 1982-87. The noncrisis...

This paper explores the broad themes of the literature on economic growth. It makesthe following two broad conclusions. First, it notes that the efficiency of investment is as important as the level of investment in determining growth performance. Secondly, it states that keeping to a minimum...

This paper analyzes the structural relationship between policies that distort resource allocation and long-term growth. It briefly reviews the Solow model in which steady-state growth depends only on exogenous technological change, but finds it unsatisfactory as a model of long-term growth. The...

Recent literature suggests that long-run averages of growth and inflation are only weakly correlated and that such correlation is not robust to the exclusion of observations of extreme inflation. Including time series panel data has improved matters, but an aggregate parametric approach remains...

Fiscal adjustment is an illusion when it lowers the budget deficit or public debt but leaves the government's net worth unchanged, says the author. Conventional measures of the budget deficit largely measure the change in explicit public sector liabilities (debt). A more appropriate measure of...

The management of fiscal deficits and their financing in Colombia has been generally sound. This paper shows how episodes of loose fiscal policy have been minor compared to other Latin American countries. The near-crisis of the early 1980s was addressed in a timely way through a sharp fiscal...