This study uses the Ricardian approach to examine the economic impact of climate change on agriculture in Zimbabwe. Net farm revenue is regressed against various climate, soil, hydrological and socio-economic variables to help determine the factors that influence variability in net farm...

In the highly centralized system of the Philippines, local funding provides the only source of flexibility to meet specific and urgent needs. The government in Manila, which pays all teacher salaries, finds it easier politically in times of fiscal belt-tightening to cut recurrent costs. Although...

A new dataset of 1,948 retail stores in India compiled by the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys shows that 27 percent of the stores report labor regulations as a problem for their business. Using these data we analyze the effect of labor regulation on employment at the store level. We find that...

Rural poverty remains a crucial part of the poverty picture in Argentina. This paper used a rural dataset collected by the World Bank in 2003. Findings show that extreme income poverty in rural areas reached 39 percent of the people or 200,000-250,000 indigent families. These families tend to:...

The authors take a new look at the regulatory determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) by asking whether labor market flexibility affects FDI flows across 25 Western and Eastern European countries. Their analysis is based on firm level data on new investments during the 1999-2001 period....

The objective of this paper is to review the historical experience of the Bank's lending and sector activities in the population field, and to evaluate the Bank's strengths and weaknesses in this field. Based on analysis of Bank documents, interviews and field visits, the review concludes that...

The Venezuelan government and PDVSA (Venezuela's state oil companies) are both exposed to oil price instability. Given the existing tax structure, PDVSA has a higher exposure than the government, especially when prices drop below $18-20 a barrel. The authors show that the volatility of prices...

The author examines the development of foreign trade institutions and policies in Central European countries invited to negotiate their accession to the European Union. With the dismantling of state trading, conditions of market access have been dramatically liberalized. However, except for...

Many government programs want to provide more credit to the farm sector to increase agricultural productivity. If the marginal effect on productivity is small, those resources might be put to better use elsewhere. The authors conducted an econometric analysis of the effect of credit on output...

The authors attempt to analyze the linkages between macroeconomic policies and economic growth variables, their movement over time, and their impact on poverty in the case of Poland. Poland, a middle-income country, is of particular interest because its data sources allow for a relatively...