03. Journals

2,963 items available

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http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2210

These are journal articles published in World Bank journals as well as externally by World Bank authors.

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Evolving Wage Cyclicality in Latin America

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2018-10) Gambeti, Luca ; Messina, Julian

This paper examines the evolution of the cyclicality of real wages and employment in four Latin American economies, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, during the period 1980–2010.Wages were highly procyclical during the 1980s and early 1990s, a period characterized by high inflation. As inflation declined wages became less procyclical, a feature that is consistent with emerging downward wage rigidities in a low inflation environment. Compositional effects associated with changes in labor participation along the business cycle appear to matter less for estimates of wage cyclicality than in developed economies.
A Helping Hand or the Long Arm of the Law?: Experimental Evidence on What Governments Can Do to Formalize Firms

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2016-01) de Adrade, Gustavo Henrique ; Bruhn, Miriam ; McKenzie, David

We conducted a field experiment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil to test which government actions work to encourage informal firms to register. We find zero or negative impacts of information and free cost treatments and a significant but small increase in formalization from inspections. The local average treatment effect estimates of the inspection impact are larger, providing a 21 to 27 percentage point increase in the likelihood of formalizing. The results show that most informal firms will not formalize unless forced to do so, suggesting that formality offers little private benefit to these firms.
Global Supply Chains and Trade Policy Responses to the 2008 Crisis

(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2015-01) Gawande, Kishore ; Hoekman, Bernard ; Cui, Yue

The collapse in trade and the contraction of output that occurred during 2008–9 was comparable to, and in many countries more severe than, the Great Depression of the 1930s. However, it did not give rise to the rampant protectionism that followed the Great Crash. The idea that the rise in the fragmentation of production across global value chains – vertical specialization – may be a deterrent against protectionism is underappreciated in the literature. Institutions also played a role in limiting the extent of protectionist responses. World Trade Organization discipline raises the cost of using trade policies for member countries and has proved to be a stable foundation for the open multilateral trading system that has been built over the past 50 years. Using trade and protection data for seven large emerging market countries that have a history of active use of trade policy, the influence of these and other factors on trade policy responses to the 2008 crisis are empirically examined. An instrumental variables strategy is used to identify their impact. Participation in global value chains is found to be a powerful economic factor determining trade policy responses.
Economic Growth and Equality of Opportunity

(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2014-05-27) Peragine, Vito ; Palmisano, Flaviana ; Brunori, Paolo

In this paper, we argue that a better understanding of the relationship between inequality and economic growth can be obtained by shifting the analysis from the space of final achievements to the space of opportunities. To this end, we introduce a formal framework based on the concept of the Opportunity Growth Incidence Curve. This framework can be used to evaluate the income dynamics of specific groups of the population and to infer the role of growth in the evolution of inequality of opportunity over time. We show the relevance of the introduced framework by providing two empirical analyses, one for Italy and the other for Brazil. These analyses show the distributional impact of the recent growth experienced by Brazil and the recent crisis suffered by Italy from both the income inequality and opportunity inequality perspectives.
Wage Rigidity and Disinflation in Emerging Countries

(American Economic Association, 2014-01) Messina, Julián ; Sanz-de-Galdeano, Anna

This paper examines the consequences of rapid disinflation for downward wage rigidities in two emerging countries, Brazil and Uruguay. Although wage rigidities are altered by disinflation, in neither of the two countries does price stability eliminate frictions in wage-setting mechanisms. In a context of individual wage negotiations and weak unions, disinflation in Uruguay puts an end to its history of indexation, but strong resistance to nominal wage cuts emerges. In strongly unionized Brazil, wage indexation is highly persistent, but the introduction of inflation targeting by the Central Bank in 1999 moves the focal point of wage negotiations to expected inflation.
Antidumping, Retaliation Threats, and Export Prices

(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2013-01) Avsar, Veysel

Utilizing four-dimensional (firm-product-destination-year) Brazilian firm-level export data, we show that antidumping (AD) duties result in a significant and dramatic increase in the unit values of the products that firms export to duty-imposing countries. Furthermore, we examine the effect of potential (retaliatory) AD duties on the unit price of the firms' shipments. Our findings suggest that AD activities in Brazil lead Brazilian exporting firms to increase their unit export prices for the named industries' products to decrease the dumping margin and avoid the threat of retaliation by the target countries.
Coffee Market Liberalisation and the Implications for Producers in Brazil, Guatemala and India

(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2012-11) Russell, Bill ; Mohan, Sushil ; Banerjee, Anindya

The standard approach to modelling the relationship between world and producer prices of coffee does not incorporate the effects of changing government policies and market structures. These changes have led to large structural breaks in the relationship between the prices implying the standard estimates are biased. We model coffee prices in Brazil, Guatemala and India allowing for the structural breaks and show that the liberalisation of coffee markets has benefited producers substantially both in terms of a higher share of the world price of coffee and higher real prices. This suggests that calls to re-regulate coffee markets may be misplaced.
Can Global De-Carbonization Inhibit Developing Country Industrialization?

(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2012-06-01) Mattoo, Aaditya ; Subramanian, Arvind ; van der Mensbrugghe, Dominique ; He, Jianwu

Most economic analyses of climate change have focused on the aggregate impact on countries of mitigation actions. We depart first in disaggregating the impact by sector, focusing particularly on manufacturing output and exports. Second, we decompose the impact of a modest agreement on emissions reductions—17 percent relative to 2005 levels by 2020 for industrial countries and 17 percent relative to business-as-usual for developing countries—into three components: the change in the price of carbon due to each country's emission cuts per se; the further change in this price due to emissions tradability; and the changes due to any international transfers (private and public). Manufacturing output and exports in low carbon intensity countries such as Brazil are less affected. In contrast, in high carbon intensity countries, such as China and India, even a modest agreement depresses manufacturing output by 3–3.5 percent and manufacturing exports by 5.5–7 percent. The increase in the carbon price induced by emissions tradability hurts manufacturing output most while the real exchange rate effects of transfers hurt exports most.
The Contours and Possibilities of Open Development

( 2011-09) Pradhan, Sanjay ; Odugbemi, Sina

Is the idea of open development another vague, endlessly elastic term capturing what is merely a passing mood, a fad? The goal of this issue of Development Outreach is to strike a resounding No. We will define open development in a clear and robust manner; and we will show that, rather than being a passing fancy, the idea of open development actually captures an emerging paradigm shift in how development is being done. We are also going to show that this new paradigm will endure. Before we define what open development is, however, we need to understand what the vanishing development paradigm has been.
New Structural Economics : A Framework for Rethinking Development

(World Bank, 2011-08-01) Lin, Justin Yifu

As strategies for achieving sustainable growth in developing countries are re-examined in light of the financial crisis, it is critical to take into account structural change and its corollary, industrial upgrading. Economic literature has devoted a great deal of attention to the analysis of technological innovation, but not enough to these equally important issues. The new structural economics outlined in this paper suggests a framework to complement previous approaches in the search for sustainable growth strategies. It takes the following into consideration. First, an economy's structure of factor endowments evolves from one level of development to another. Therefore, the optimal industrial structure of a given economy will be different at different levels of development. Each industrial structure requires corresponding infrastructure (both “hard” and “soft”) to facilitate its operations and transactions. Second, each level of economic development is a point along the continuum from a low-income agrarian economy to a high-income industrialized economy, not a dichotomy of two economic development levels (“poor” versus “rich” or “developing” versus “industrialized”). Industrial upgrading and infrastructure improvement targets in developing countries should not necessarily draw from those that exist in high-income countries. Third, at each given level of development, the market is the basic mechanism for effective resource allocation. However, economic development as a dynamic process requires industrial upgrading and corresponding improvements in “hard” and “soft” infrastructure at each level. Such upgrading entails large externalities to firms' transaction costs and returns to capital investment. Thus, in addition to an effective market mechanism, the government should play an active role in facilitating industrial upgrading and infrastructure improvements."