The stalemate reached on launching negotiations on most of the Singapore Issues at Cancún provides an opportunity to revisit the knowledge base upon which proposals for international collective action may be drawn. This Paper examines the available evidence on public procurement practices in...

This Paper empirically investigates the impact of distortions in the banking sector on the structure and dynamics of product markets as well as on firm level outcomes. Our analysis suggests that an increase in the efficiency of the banking industry can have first-order effects not only on the...

The purpose of this paper is to try to shed some new light on the current industrial policy crisis. This paper proposes that the industrial policy debate is shaped by knowledge about the functioning of the underlying industrial structure, which in turn is the Gegenstand of scholars in the field...

This paper discusses the problems the Dutch economy has experienced during the last seven years, pinpoints problems for future developments of the Dutch economy, and surveys the political-economic debate in the Netherlands. The focus is on the unemployment problem, still unsolved and therefore...

The industrialization of labour is the main engine of growth during the early stages of economic development. In less developed countries, equipment investment has played a less important role than non-equipment investment; and it has only proved growth enhancing when it either encountered a...

In the late 1980s many developing countries experienced something of a paradigm shift, in that governments began to pursue more market oriented domestic policies. There was increasingly a perception that liberalizing access to service markets was a potentially low cost and effective method of...

This paper reviews the empirical evidence on the relationship between economic output and various dimensions of air and water quality. Pollution may rise with growth, because an increased scale of economic activity means more emissions, ceteris paribus. Economic growth may be associated with a...

This paper estimates a structural model of economic geography using cross-country data on per capita income, bilateral trade, and the relative price of manufacturing goods. More than 70% of the variation in per capita income can be explained by the geography of access to markets and to sources...

Gender-based discrimination is a pervasive and costly phenomenon. To a greater or lesser extent, all economies present a gender wage gap, associated with lower female labour force participation rates and higher fertility. This paper presents a growth model where saving, fertility and labour...

We propose a market-for-offenses model of property crime, which explicitly accounts for protection expenditures among heterogeneous individuals. The crime equilibrium is modeled as a free-access equilibrium in which the match between criminals and victims equates the average returns to crime. We...