Previous research has documented a strong correlation between countries’ income levels and the quality of their export goods. Given the evidence of fast unconditional convergence in export quality, this raises the question how to reconcile these stylized facts with a stable world income...

This paper reviews Vietnam’s recent experience with reforming the state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector. It therefore sets the stage by overviewing key developments since Đổi Mới and highlighting some stylized facts about the SOE sector before quantitatively assessing the legal and...

This paper investigates the outstanding economic growth experience of Bangladesh. It shows that the country's improvements in structural correlates of growth from 1990 to 2004 are in the global top 5 percent for any 15-year period since 1970. They were driven by infrastructure enhancements, more...

This paper first shows that important economic arguments in favor of the Prebisch- Singer hypothesis of falling terms of trade of developing countries have implicitly relied on the role of multinational corporations and foreign direct investment. As of yet, the relationship between the latter...

This paper investigates the effects of multinational corporations on labor standards. We argue that the previous literature has failed to distinguish the different motives that encourage firms to become multinational. Therefore, we build a stylized model of segmented labor markets with...

This paper explores the economic relationship between foreign direct investment to developing countries and the export prices of the latter, measured by terms of trade. It is rst shown that economic theory suggests such a relationship for various reasons but is inconclusive about the direction...

In this paper, we address in more detail the question raised in Wacker (2011b): why does foreign direct investment (FDI) generally have a positive impact on developing countries’ terms of trade except in the case of South Asia? After arguing that such a negative relationship is generally...

Martin Ravallion ("Why Don't We See Poverty Convergence?" American Economic Review, 102(1): 504-23; 2012) presents evidence against the existence of poverty convergence in aggregate data despite the conditional convergence of per capita income levels and the close linkage between growth and...

This paper discusses the different concepts of measuring multinational corporations' activities to provide empirical researchers helpful guidelines about which measures to use in their work. I discuss which economic relations exist between the measures and show that a tight relationship can be...