Until recently, there has been no systematic empirical assessment of the economic impact of the brain drain. Despite many case studies and anecdotal evidence, the main reason for this seems to be the lack of harmonized international data on migration by country of origin and education level. An...

The authors focus on the consequences of skilled migration for developing countries. They first present new evidence on the magnitude of migration of skilled workers at the international level and then discuss its direct and indirect effects on human capital formation in developing countries in...

Labor market integration is typically assumed to improve welfare in the absence of distortions, because it allows labor to move to where returns are highest. The author examines this result in a simple general equilibrium model in the presence of a common property resource: social capital....

Knowledge accumulation means either new knowledge (an increase in its quality), greater access to existing knowledge (an increase in its quantity), or both. The authors examine the relative contribution of these two components of knowledge to total factor productivity (TFP) for North-North and...

Before 1973, the labor market in Europe was tight and immigration from the South (chiefly North Africa and Southern Europe) was encouraged. But with the slowdown in growth in the mid-1970s, the rise in unemployment, and increased economic uncertainty, immigration came to be viewed as a burden by...

Despite the predictions of standard trade theory, countries in the North are not indifferent about free migration and free trade. Migration has become a major concern in some OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries. But is migration really a threat? If free trade...

There have been extensive theoretical studies of firms'responses to environmental regulations ad enforcement but few empirical analyses of firms'expenditures on pollution abatement in response to different regulations and enforcement strategies. The authors empirically analyze the pollution...

Public provision of education has often been perceived as universal and egalitarian, but in reality it is not. Political pressure typically results in incidence bias in favor of the rich. The author argues that the bias in political influence resulting from extreme income inequalities is...

Growth is pro-poor if the poverty measure of interest falls. According to this definition there are three potential sources of pro-poor growth: (1) a high rate of growth of average incomes; (2) a high sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes; and (3) a poverty-reducing pattern of...

In recent years -as a result of economic contraction, declining employment and real wages, and changes in labor market behavior- Ukraine's tax base of the social security system has declined, threatening its sustainability. About 40 percent of the labor force works in the informal sector, paying...