Suppose a DAC donor earmarks $1 billion of taxpayers’ money for official development assistance (ODA). The donor may use two instruments as an outright grant or in combination with a market loan to produce a concessional loan of $2 billion with a percentage grant element of 50 per cent. Many...

Poor countries are and will remain for some time vulnerable to external shocks, whether to export prices or from natural disasters. The lowest-income countries have a higher incidence of shocks than other developing countries and tend to suffer larger damages when shocks occur. For the poorest...

• 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...

One of the particular features of poor countries’ economies is their volatility, due mostly to their dependence on commodities. The paper shows that this volatility is a prime factor behind the debt crises of the poorest countries. It advocates the adoption by donors of a new lending...

This paper presents a new data set on human capital. It is based upon data released at the OECD for a subgroup of 38 member and non-member countries, and an effort performed at the Development Centre to expand this data set to other developing countries. The key to our methodology is to minimise...

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...

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...

The paper attempts to explain why single factor explanations of the poverty of nations are usually found to be unsatisfactory. Middle- and low-income countries excluding sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, have an income per head which stands at about one third of the rich countries’ income per...

Raising manufacturing productivity is of central importance to the developing world and an essential element of policy making. <I>Overcoming Barriers to Competitiveness</I> is about establishing the most reliable analysis of manufacturing productivity possible and helping policy makers set their...</i>

The paper develops the view that the perspective on the HIPC initiative is distorted by the fact that -contrary to the Brady deal itself- it lacks all perspective on the “market value” of the debt which is written down. The appropriate “market value” is one that takes account of the risk...