Does foreign aid contribute to economic growth? If so, is the impact of aid conditional on good policies? This is a controversial issue. While the World Bank (1998) contends that the aid is effective only if recipient governments have good policies, others refute this view and argue that aid...

Unpredictable environmental fluctuations are a major problem in fisheries. To mitigate these uncertainties, reserves are advocated to help ensure population persistence, reduce population and harvest variance and to provide a ‘hedge’ against management failures. Using recent insights from...

If capital for corporate finance was available from a common global pool and at zero transaction cost, then does after-tax arbitrage require harmonisation of income tax rates across jurisdictions? This paper shows that the answer is in the negative. When a corporation has the choice in deciding...

There has been little evidence in the past to support the use of commodity-currency cross-hedges (Demaskey and Pearce, 1998; Benet, 1990; Eaker and Grant, 1987). However, this paper shows that if currencies can be defined as commodity currencies, as per Chen and Rogoff (2003) and Cashin, Ce´spedes and...

It is well known in the theoretical literature on deregulation, that any informative signal will be used to give the firm appropriate incentives. This paper presents a model of deregulation that draws on the multi-task model of Holmstrom and Milgrom (1991). Sufficient conditions are derived for...

The performance of the Pacific Island countries (PICs) over the past two decades has been characterized by economic growth rates that are low on average yet extremely volatile. This has been so despite favorable levels of natural and human resources, high levels of public investment and aid, and...

We contribute to the understanding of marine reserves and the management of renewable resources with uncertainty. We show that the key benefit of reserves is that they increase resilience, or the speed it takes a population to return to a former state following a negative shock. Resilience can...

Uzawa (1968) first introduced a simple and appealing method for reducing problems with variable rates of time preference to single-state systems by transforming the time scale from t to ., a utility discount factor. This transformation has been used extensively, particularly in models of...

The resolution of problems with lease renewals in Fiji, particularly in the sugarcane districts, has ramifications for private investment and growth in the entire economy. The impending withdrawal of subsidies to sugar as world trade is liberalised has increased the urgency of finding solutions...

This study examines the effects of market reform on the agriculture sector of Tajikistan. It investigates the level and determinants of technical efficiency for a sample of cotton growing regions in Tajikistan. Using unbalanced panel data of 11 years covering the transition period 1992-2002, 34...