. Deeply rooted social institutions – societal norms, codes of conduct, laws and tradition – cause gender discrimination. . Religion per se does not systematically define such discrimination. All dominant religions show flexibility in interpreting the role of women in society. . The...

• Trade barriers seriously distort patterns of international trade, allocation of resources, and economic growth. The total economic costs of the barriers are estimated to exceed $475 billion per annum • Partial reform, such as envisaged in the Uruguay Round, would yield benefits of $195...

This paper analyses the effect of fiscal decentralisation on health outcomes in China using a panel data set with nationwide county-level data. We find that counties in more fiscally decentralised provinces have lower infant mortality rates than counties where the provincial government remains...

Efforts to establish, test and analyse hypotheses regarding cross-country variations in women’s economic status are hampered by the lack of a readily accessible and easily used information resource on the various dimensions of gender inequality. Addressing this gap, this paper introduces the <a href="http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/19/28/36223936.xls"...</a>

Strong growth in China and India has led to improvements in raw-material exporting countries' terms of trade and attracted complementary finance. The long-term challenge for these countries, where institutions are often fragile, is to avoid the so-called “resource curse”. This paper aims to...

Linkages between international trade and the domestic environment are receiving intensified scrutiny by researchers and policy makers alike. This is especially the case in developing countries, where trade can be a significant agent of change and growth. While trade policies are increasingly...

In recent years, the role of institutions for development has received considerable attention from development researchers, policy makers and practitioners. This paper reviews the evidence on the impact of institutions on growth and other development outcomes. Most of the reviewed studies find a...

The Rural/Urban-North/South Model (RUNS) is a global applied general equilibrium model, with a focus on agriculture. RUNS was initially developed in the early 1980's and has been used throughout the 1980's to provide analyses of world agricultural trends and agricultural policies. Amongst other...

Poor people lack access to health care with a negative impact on their dignity, human capital formation and their risk-management options. Recently an emerging movement of community-based health insurance schemes has attracted the attention of policy makers and researchers as it seems that these...

This paper provides a fresh look at informal employment, a phenomenon of renewed interest to policy makers and researchers alike. It finds that informal employment is likely to stay, is sometimes a voluntary choice, can offer better working conditions than formal employment and is very...