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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Now showing 1 - 10 of 47

Challenges of Fiscal Policy in Emerging and Developing Economies

(Taylor and Francis, 2018) Huidrom, Raju ; Kose, M. Ayhan ; Ohnsorge, Franziska L.

This article presents a systematic analysis of the availability and use of fiscal space in emerging and developing economies. We report two major results. First, emerging and developing economies built fiscal space in the run-up to the Great Recession of 2008–2009, which was then used for stimulus. Since then, fiscal space has shrunk and remains narrow as these economies have taken advantage of historically low interest rates. Second, fiscal policy in emerging and developing economies has become countercyclical (or less procyclical), i.e., “graduated,” since the 1980s, as most clearly demonstrated during the Great Recession. The move towards graduation is most pronounced for those economies with greater fiscal space, which suggests that fiscal space matters for a government’s ability to implement countercyclical fiscal policy.
Growth Strategies and Dynamics: Insights from Country Experiences

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008) El-Erian, Mohamed A. ; Spence, Michael

The paper examines the challenges that developing countries face in accelerating and sustaining growth. The cases of China and India are examined to illustrate a more general phenomenon which might be called model uncertainty. As a developing economy grows, its market and regulatory institutions change and their capabilities increase. As a result, growth strategies and policies and the role of government shift. Further, as the models of economies in these transitional states are incomplete and because models used to predict policy impacts in advanced economies may not provided accurate predictions in the developing economy case, growth strategies and policies need to be responsive and to evolve as the economy matures. This has lead governments in countries that have sustained high growth to be somewhat pragmatic, to treat the policy directions that emerge from the advanced economy model with circumspection, to be somewhat experimental in seeking to accelerate export diversification, to be sensitive to risks, and as a result to proceed gradually in areas such as the timing and sequencing of opening up on the current and capital accounts. The last is an area in which existing theory provides relatively little specific guidance, but in which there are relatively high risks that decline over time as the market matures.
What Have We Learned from a Decade of Manufacturing Enterprise Surveys in Africa?

(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2006-08-02) Bigsten, Arne ; Söderbom, Måns

In the early 1990s the World Bank launched the Regional Program on Enterprise Development (RPED) in several African countries, a key component of which was to collect data on manufacturing firms. The data sets built by these and subsequent enterprise surveys in Africa generated considerable research. This article surveys the research on the African business environment, focusing on risk, access to credit, labor, and infrastructure, and on how firms organize themselves and do business. It reviews the research on enterprise performance, including enterprise growth, investment, and exports. The article concludes with a discussion of policy lessons.
Is There a Case for Industrial Policy? A Critical Survey

(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2006-07-22) Pack, Howard ; Saggi, Kamal

What are the underlying rationales for industrial policy? Does empirical evidence support the use of industrial policy for correcting market failures that plague the process of industrialization? This article addresses these questions through a critical survey of the analytical literature on industrial policy. It also reviews some recent industry successes and argues that public interventions have played only a limited role. Moreover, the recent ascendance and dominance of international production networks in the sectors in which developing countries once had considerable success implies a further limitation on the potential role of industrial policies as traditionally understood. Overall, there appears to be little empirical support for an activist government policy even though market failures exist that can, in principle, justify the use of industrial policy.
The 'Glass of Milk' Subsidy Program and Malnutrition in Peru

(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2006-07-10) Stifel, David ; Alderman, Harold

This study of the Vaso de Leche ('glass of milk') feeding program in Peru looks for evidence that this in-kind transfer program aimed at young children furthers nutritional objectives. The study links public expenditure data with household survey data to substantiate the targeting and to model the determinants of nutritional outcomes. It confirms that the social transfer program targets poor households and households with low nutritional status. Nevertheless, the study fails to find econometric evidence that the nutritional objectives are being achieved.
Trade Preferences to Small Developing Countries and the Welfare Costs of Lost Multilateral Liberalization

(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2006-05-17) Limão, Nuno ; Olarreaga, Marcelo

The proliferation of preferential trade liberalization over the last 20 years has raised the question of whether it slows multilateral trade liberalization. Recent theoretical and empirical evidence indicates that this is the case even for unilateral preferences that developed countries provide to small and poor countries, but there is no estimate of the resulting welfare costs. This stumbling block effect can be avoided by replacing the unilateral preferences with a fixed import subsidy, which generates a Pareto improvement. More importantly, this paper presents the first estimates of the welfare cost of preferential liberalization as a stumbling block to multilateral liberalization. Recent estimates of the stumbling block effect of preferences with data for 170 countries and more than 5,000 products are used to calculate the welfare effects of the European Union, Japan, and the United States switching from unilateral preferences for least developed countries to an import subsidy scheme. In a model with no dynamic gains to trade, the switch produces an annual net welfare gain for the 170 countries that adds about 10 percent to the estimated trade liberalization gains in the Doha Round. It also generates gains for each group: the European Union, Japan, and the United States ($2,934 million), least developed countries ($520 million), and the rest of the world ($900 million).
Price Effects of Preferential Market Access : Caribbean Basin Initiative and the Apparel Sector

(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2006-05-01) Özden, Çaglar ; Sharma, Gunjan

Preferential trade arrangements should be evaluated by their effect on prices rather than by their effect on the total value of trade. This point is emphasized in the theoretical literature but rarely implemented empirically. This article analyzes the U.S. Caribbean Basin Initiative's (CBI's) impact on the prices received by eligible apparel exporters. The CBI's apparel preferences are the most important and heavily used unilateral preferences because of high trade barriers imposed on exports from the rest of the world. A fixed effect generalized least squares (GLS) estimation is used to isolate the effects of other factors (such as quality, exchange rates, and transaction costs) and to identify the effects of tariff preferences. CBI exporters capture only about two-thirds of their preference margin despite the high degree of competition among importers. This translates into a 9 percent increase in the relative prices they receive, with some variance across countries and years. Countries specializing in higher value items capture more of the preference margin, and the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has a negative effect. Removing multifibre arrangement quotas significantly lowers the benefits of CBI preferences.
Robust Multidimensional Spatial Poverty Comparisons in Ghana, Madagascar, and Uganda

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2006-04-06) Duclos, Jean-Yves ; Sahn, David ; Younger, Stephen D.

Spatial poverty comparisons are investigated in three African countries using multidimensional indicators of well-being. The work is analogous to the univariate stochastic dominance literature in that it seeks poverty orderings that are robust to the choice of multidimensional poverty lines and indices. In addition, the study seeks to ensure that the comparisons are robust to aggregation procedures for multiple welfare variables. In contrast to earlier work, the methodology applies equally well to what can be defined as union, intersection, and intermediate approaches to dealing with multidimensional indicators of well-being. Furthermore, unlike much of the stochastic dominance literature, this work computes the sampling distributions of the poverty estimators to perform statistical tests of the difference in poverty measures. The methods are applied to two measures of well-being, the log of household expenditures per capita and children's height-forage z scores, using data from the 1988 Ghana Living Standards Study survey, the 1993 National Household Survey in Madagascar, and the 1999 National Household Survey in Uganda. Bivariate poverty comparisons are at odds with univariate comparisons in several interesting ways. Most important, it cannot always be concluded that poverty is lower in urban areas in one region compared with that in rural areas in another, even though univariate comparisons based on household expenditures per capita almost always lead to that conclusion.
Market Access and Welfare under Free Trade Agreements : Textiles under NAFTA

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-12-29) Cadot, Olivier ; Carrere, Celine ; de Melo, Jaime ; Portugal-Perez, Alberto

The effective market access granted to textiles and apparel under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is estimated, taking into account the presence of rules of origin. First, estimates are provided of the effect of tariff preferences combined with rules of origin on the border prices of Mexican final goods exported to the United States (U.S.) and of U.S. intermediate goods exported to Mexico, based on eight-digit harmonized system tariff-line data. A third of the estimated rise in the border price of Mexican apparel products is found to compensate for the cost of complying with NAFTA's rules of origin, and NAFTA is found to have raised the price of U.S. intermediate goods exported to Mexico by around 12 percent, with downstream rules of origin accounting for a third of that increase. Second, simulations are used to estimate welfare gains for Mexican exporters from preferential market access under NAFTA. The presence of rules of origin is found to approximately halve these gains.
Foreign Direct Investment in Mexico since the Approval of NAFTA

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-12-06) Cuevas, Alfredo ; Messmacher, Miguel ; Werner, Alejandro

Cross-country panel data are used to assess the effect of free-trade agreements on flows of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Free-trade agreements are found to have a significant positive effect on FDI flows, and free-trade agreements are found to matter more for the smaller members of the agreement. For example, the North American Free-Trade Agreement's (NAFTA) effect on FDI flows into Mexico is much larger than its effect on flows into the United States. These cross country results are used to assess NAFTA's effect on FDI flows into Mexico. After controlling for a set of other factors such as an increase in worldwide FDI flows the trade agreement is found to generate FDI flows nearly 60 percent higher than they would have been without the agreement.