The object of this paper is to shed additional light on the much debated issue as to whether futures prices accurately forecast future spot prices or not. In other words, the question is whether or not futures prices incorporate a risk premium. If they do

Based on an economy-wide perspective, this paper begins with a discussion of the bias against exports and agriculture that characterized the economic literature and the development strategies in many developing countries after World War II. This is followed by an analysis of how the...

The concept of sector-specific and economy-wide policies on incentives for agriculture is defined. A methodology is described for measuring the impact of those policies and results are given for a sample of commodities for 18 developing countires for 1975-84. On average, sector-specifiv policies...

With the 1967 reform, Canada?s immigration policy changed from a country-preference system to a points system. The latter provides points according to applicants? education level but abstracts from the quality of their education. This paper considers the points system (h), the country-preference...

It has been argued that the adverse impact of skilled versus unskilled labor migration can be mitigated or even offset by the fact that skilled migrants remit more than unskilled ones. This paper contributes to the much debated and so far unresolved related issue, namely whether remittances...

This paper examines two issues: 1) the welfare impact of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), and 2) the effect of structural and policy changes on the welfare impact of PTAs. It is shown that, on the import side, the home country loses from a PTA between small countries (and the PTA as a whole...

International migration is an important determinant of institutions, not considered so far in the empirical growth literature. Using cross-section and panel analysis for a large sample of developing countries, we find that openness to emigration (as measured by the general emigration rate) has a...