As an instrument of trade and investment policy, special economic zones have played a catalytic role in processes of industrialization, diversification, and trade integration in many countries, particularly in East Asia. However, in the African context, anecdotal evidence suggests the experience...

This study briefly summarizes the development experiences of special economic zones in China and Africa, the lessons that Africa can learn from China, and the preliminary results of the Chinese investments in special economic zones in Africa. The study makes recommendations on how to unleash the...

The authors used the policy game approach to gain insight into a problem that has puzzled analysts of high inflation economies. Why are programs based on tight fiscal and monetary policies slow at reducing inflation in high inflation countries? Distinguishing between regimes of rule and...

The authors investigate the theoretical effects of lobbying and pressure group activities on both economic efficiency and on equity. Looking at lobbying as a political activity that takes place alongside production, they find that lobbies may generate economic inefficiency as part of the process...

The author gives examples of research recently published in professional journals that directly helped, or could help, in formulating policy advice (and perhaps even policymaking). An article by Younger (1992) was helpful in analyzing a problem in Ghana, where aid flows to government crowded out...

Many development strategies assume (or desperately hope) that a country already has the capacity to plan and implement institutional reform or that such institutional reform can be pushed through with the external pressures of aid and conditionalities. In a decentralized reform strategy,...

The authors apply vector autoregression to firm-level panel data from 36 countries to study the dynamic relationship between firms'financial conditions and investment. They argue that by using orthogonalized impulse-response functions they are able to separate the"fundamental factors"(such as...

The issue of trade in services is the subject of increasing interest. Evidence of this is its inclusion in the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations. As a contribution to the analysis of the issue, this paper analyzes the influence of a country's resource endowments on its net trade in financial...

In 1996 Ghana privatized its incumbent telecommunications firm by selling 30 percent of Ghana Telecom to Telekom Malaysia, licensing a second network operator, and allowing multiple mobile firms to enter the market. The reforms yielded mixed results. Landline telephone penetration increased...

The authors use a computable general equilibrium model of the Russian economy to assess the impact of accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), which encompasses improved market access, tariff reduction, and reduction of barriers against multinational service providers. They assume that...