Many developing countries possess comparative advantage both in natural resources and in labor-intensive industries, and experience both industrial pollution and natural resource degradation. We present a model that incorporates these stylized facts together with key spatial features and...

This is one of the first analytical reports on the major lessons learned from Sri Lanka’s experience of the tsunami and the response in the rebuilding phase: Promised external assistance appeared at first to be more than adequate to cover reconstruction costs in full. But problems soon emerged...

After successful emergency relief operations, Sri Lanka initiated post-tsunami reconstruction with optimism and a relatively rapid recovery was expected. However, initial expectations have turned out to be overly optimistic. Coordination problems between agencies, constraints on aid absorption...

This paper examines several aspects of the rehabilitation and reconstruction program that followed the 2004 tsunami in Asia. Almost 230,000 people died in the disaster. We focus on two main issues: aid delivery and reconstruction policy following the disaster. Although issues such as immediate...

Does globalization increase inequality in developing countries, and if so, how? In a theoretical model of a regionally heterogeneous economy, we show how different regional rates of technical progress due to trade and FDI interact with constraints to unskilled labor mobility. As favored regions...

In Indonesia, an export boom and rapid, sustained gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the decade after 2000 was accompanied by real earnings that were flat on average, and even declined for many workers. Conventional models of growth and trade predict that labor productivity rises as an...

We reconsider some analytical arguments on the double dividend, focusing on the small open developing economy case. Compared with the large, mature industrial economies usually considered, such economies differ in several respects, including the structure of tax revenues, commodity pricing and...