This paper evaluates some factors that affect longevity in Africa, with the aim of offering an insight on how government economic policy and consumption spending affect the lives of people in developing countries. Government economic policy was found to be contributing in a negative manner to...

This paper examines the use of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) as a technique for modeling political and crisis situations and supporting the decision-making process. FCMs use notions borrowed from artificial intelligence and neural networks to combine concepts and causal relationships, in the form...

What are the perceptions of households in the Middle East and North Africa Region regarding changes in the climate of the areas where they live? To what extent are households affected by extreme weather events such as droughts or floods? And who tends to suffer the most from such events when...

This paper uses firm-level data from 119 developing countries to show that services sector productivity is positively associated with manufacturing productivity. Moreover, the link between productivity in services and manufacturing is particularly strong for manufacturing firms that are more...

We extend the basic model of trade protection with special interest groups developed in Grossman and Helpman (1994) to include monopolistic competition with variable markups. We find the following results: (i) for sectors organized into lobbies the endogenous import tariff is always positive and...

Industrial development is often accompanied by massive migration from agricultural to industrial areas. This paper compares two steady states, the first and the second, which emerge before and after the termination of such migration, respectively. The paper shows that 1) the employment rate must...

The study examines the role of human capital in the economic growth of Pakistan by using primary, secondary and higher education enrolments as proxies for human capital in three different specifications. The idea behind these models is to find out the most relevant level of education in terms of...

This theoretical analysis develops a model for analyzing public policy in interdependent economies. The model allows for feed-backs between the commodity, money, and labor markets in all of the economic systems. Regionally oriented monetary policies are fully analyzed, as are regional oriented...

Taxes and transfers are widespread institutions among middle income and high income countries. In this chapter I survey main aggregate features of such institutions and features of the labor market. To study the relation between taxes and transfers and labor market outcomes I survey some...

This paper deals with the role of speculation on food prices' fluctuations in Senegal. The analysis is based on a nonlinear rational expectations commodity storage model which seems to be the appropriate approach to explain the behavior of the speculators who intervene on the food markets. The...