Women in the workplace in developing countries

The increased participation of women in economic activities of developing countries has been neglected, although they often work longer hours than men. In Africa, Asia, and the Pacific women average 12-13 hours more a week than men. They are often heads of households as male partners become ill, migrate, or die. The work is mostly in the household with other subsistence activities that statistics do not count. The UN Statistical Office estimated that the percentage of economically active women increased between 1970 and 1990 in the whole world except for sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the gap between female and male employment in the developing world stays wide because of fewer educational opportunities and social restrictions affecting women. 1/2 of the 70% of 830 million economically active women living in developing countries are in Asia. 3 of 4 women aged over 25 in Asia and Africa are illiterate. In Latin America and the Caribbean less than 25% of women are illiterate. Female illiteracy reaches over 75% in northern Africa and western Asia, almost 75% in sub-Saharan Africa, under 50% in eastern and southeastern Asia, and 75% in southern Asia. There is a wide gap between urban and rural illiteracy of women aged 15-24. In Africa over 40% of urban women were illiterate vs. nearly 80% of rural women in 1980. Enrollment in secondary schools in 1985 indicated that while in developed countries about equal number of girls were enrolled per 100 boys, in northern Africa only 70 girls, in sub-Saharan Africa only 60 girls, in eastern Asia 90 girls, and in southern Asia only about 40 girls were enrolled. In Africa under 20% of women vs. 80% of men in northern Africa, were active in the official economy, while in sub-Saharan Africa 40% of women vs. 90% of men, in Latin America nearly 40% of women vs. 80% of men, and in southern Asia in a little over 20% of women vs. over 80% of men.     

Concessionary lending to developing countries

International transfers to promote the development of countries in the Third World began at the end of the Second World War. At first they were in the form of grants, mostly to colonies or ex-colonies. Then official development assistance from most industrial countries to most developing countries was institutionalized as it became apparent that the international capital market was inadequate in size and too costly for very poor countries. This led to official international lending on increasingly ‘soft’ terms. The ‘softening’ was brought about in a long complex discussion among the lending governments mostly within the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Theoretical and practical considerations brought the argument substantially to an end in the late 1970s with the widespread acceptance of the principle that, after all, grants were preferable for the poorest of developing countries.     

Environmental problems and developing countries

The status of environmental conditions for forests, soils, water, air, and atmospheric changes is presented for developing countries. Loss and degradation of forests continue. The rate of cutting of moist tropical forests is 17-20 million hectares/year. The consequences would be eventual total destruction within several generations, lost soil and watershed protection, local climate change, and habitat destruction. The human toll can also be great as seen by the flooding deaths of 5000 Philippine villagers. Soil erosion is a greater danger than desertification. In sub-Saharan Africa, total harvest and yields of important food crops have declined compared to increases elsewhere in the world. In countries such as Costa Rica, Malawi, Mali, and Mexico the soil losses approximate .5-1.5% of gross domestic product annually. Progress has been made in water purification, but there are still nearly 1 million people in the developing world without access to clean water for drinking and bathing. 1.7 billion have inadequate sanitation. Access to sanitation in urban areas is on the rise. Waterborne diseases are a result of poor sanitation: 900 million cases of diarrheal disease/year, 500 million with trachoma, 200 million with schistosomiasis, or bilharzia, and 900 million from hookworm. Other diseases resulting from improper sanitation are cholera, typhoid, and paratyphoid. Water scarcity is another problem. Air quality is threatened by dust and smoke pollution which contribute to respiratory illnesses, by indoor burning of wood and charcoal particularly in rural Africa and south Asia, and high levels of lead from automobile emissions. Hundreds of thousands of people are affected through increased illness and even loss of mental functioning as in the case of lead poisoning. Atmospheric changes such as ozone depletion or global warming may not show their impact until decades later. The consequences are high levels of ultraviolet radiation which cause cancers, cataracts, and possibly immune system damage, and temperature increases which will increase the levels of the seas.     

External and budget deficits in some developing countries

This paper documents and explains the positive comovement between the external and budget deficits of developing countries for which post-1960 time-series data are available. First, the estimates indicate that the empirical covariance between these deficits is always positive and is statistically significant for many cases. Second, the empirical covariance is close to that predicted from a tractable small open-economy, overlapping-generation model with heterogeneous goods capturing the joint behavior of the external and budget deficits. Also, the predicted covariance is induced by shocks which are closely related to internal conditions such as domestic resources and fiscal policies, and to a much lesser extent to external conditions such as the world interest rate, real exchange rate, and terms of trade.     

亚洲发展中国家经济增长前景有所改善

据亚洲开发银行(简称:亚行)最新发布的一份报告称,由于今年第一季度的出口需求高于预期,2017年亚洲发展中国家的经济增长前景有所改善. 在《2017年亚洲发展展望》的补充报告中,亚行将2017年亚太地区的增长预期从此前的5.7％上调至5.9％,并将2018年的增长预期从5.7％上调至5.8％.2018年增长率的上调幅度较小,反映出亚行对出口推动力的可持续性持谨慎态度.     

Policy instruments for pollution control in developing countries.

Economic development in developing countries must be accomplished in a manner that does not harm the environment with pollution. Pollution harms human health and productivity. Thus appropriate strategies must be developed that promote growth, reduce poverty, and protect the environment. A review of the current literature is performed with attention paid to cost-effective interventions i.e., comparisons of regulatory and fiscal instruments that can reduce pollution. Both direct instruments (like effluent charges, tradable permits, deposit refund systems, emission regulations and regulatory agency funding for purification, cleanup, waste disposal, and enforcement) and indirect instruments (like input/output taxes and subsidies, substitution subsidies, abatement inputs, regulation of equipment and processes, and development of clean technologies) are examined. Examples are used to show how indirect instruments can be successful when monitoring and enforcement is too costly. A careful examination of distributive concerns illustrate how the effect on the poor may need particular consideration and how groups with vested interests can help evaluate the probable success of such interventions.     

Anatomy of banking crises in developing and emerging market countries

This paper uses a Binary Classification Tree (BCT) model to analyze banking crises in 50 emerging market and developing countries during 1990-2005. The BCT model identifies three conditions (and the specific threshold of the key indictors) at which the vulnerability to banking crisis increases—(i) very high inflation, (ii) highly dollarized bank deposits combined with nominal depreciation or low bank liquidity, and (iii) low bank profitability—which highlight that foreign currency risk, poor financial soundness, and macroeconomic instability are important drivers of banking crises. The results also emphasize the importance of conditional thresholds in triggering crises, in that banking crises are underlined by a combination of vulnerabilities—or a sequence of (non-linear) conditions—rather than the deterioration of a unique factor.     

亚洲发展中国家面临温和增长的新时代

亚洲开发银行(简称:亚行)正在大幅下调亚洲发展中国家2012年和2013年的增长预期;同时宣称,在多年快速发展之后,面对持续低迷的全球需求,该地区将迎来较长时间的温和增长.亚洲发展中国家必须适应一个温和的增长环境,各国需要做出更多努力以减少对出口的依赖,重新平衡增长源头,提高生产力和效率,亚行首席经济学家李昌镛(Changyong Rhee)说道:这些措施对于继续帮助该地区人民摆脱贫困至关重要.     

影响亚洲发展中国家的增长前景

根据亚洲开发银行（简称：亚行）发布的《亚洲发展展望补充》（ADOS）数据显示,欧洲日益恶化的金融及银行业危机和美国经济的疲软复苏正在对亚洲发展中国家的增长前景产生重压。     

世界银行预测全球增长放缓,发展中国家受影响

世界银行（以下简称＂世行＂）发布的最新《2012年全球经济展望》说,鉴于欧元区债务问题和几个大的新兴经济体增长趋弱导致全球增长前景黯淡,发展中国家应准备好应对下行风险进一步增加。世行调低了对2012年的增长率预测,     

The impact of government deficits on money growth in developing countries

This paper investigates the relationship between government budget deficits and money growth in the developing countries for which reliabile data exist. It is sometimes suggested that it is more likely that money growth follows debt growth in developing countries, due to the embryonic state of capital markets and because the central bank generally comes under direct control of the minister of finance. Our results provide only mixed support for this contention, however. In the majority of countries in our sample there is no evidence that government deficits affect money growth. For high-inflation years there seems to be more support for a relationship between deficits and money growth.     

资本流量破纪录猛增对发展中国家构成挑战

世界银行年度报告2006年<全球发展金融>指出,2005年流向发展中国家的私人资本净流量达到破纪录的4910亿美元,驱动因素是私有化、企业并购、外债再融资,以及投资者对亚洲和拉美地区本币证券市场的强烈兴趣.资本流量急遽增加,包括银行贷款和债券发行达到破纪录水平,与此同时去年发展中国家经济增长率达到6.4%,是发达国家2.8%增长率的一倍多.     

Explaining when developing countries liberalize their financial equity markets

This paper is the first to explain when countries opened their financial equity markets and is the first to explain financial liberalization using a large sample of developing countries. We test several novel hypotheses. We find that equity markets are opened earlier in countries that trade more with developed countries and that have more developed financial markets. Equity markets are opened earlier in democracies, especially if the country's leader is a civilian. Our other findings are consistent with the literature, which has found greater financial market openness in countries receiving more FDI, in richer countries, and in democracies.     

Flexible specialization, new technologies and future industrialization in developing countries

Developing countries increasingly recognize that in the future far more attention will need to be paid to firms located outside the modern or formal sector. In this context, the complex of recent microelectronics and organizational innovations seems highly attractive for these are often said to be capable of facilitating a pattern of industrialization based on flexible, small-scale production, rather than on the more typical large-scale technology of mass production. This article, accordingly, seeks to evaluate the various mechanisms through which the new technologies—and the more general possibilities implied by the various definitions of ‘flexible specialization’—may in fact contribute to such an alternative model of industrialization.     

金融全球化与发展中国家利益保护

在金融全球化进程中,发达国家的优势地位和对全球金融利益的过度追求,引起与发展中国家的利益冲突。作为金融全球化中处于弱势地位的发展中国家,应坚持适当的利益原则,最大限度地维护自己的全球经济金融利益,阻止发达国家的利益渗透。     

Demand for money in developing countries: Some theoretical and empirical results

This paper examines the role of credit restraint variables in the demand for money function for developing countries where interest rates are inoperative. A simultaneous equation model is proposed to allow for the interaction between these variables and the supply of money. Statistical results indicate that credit restraint variables in the demand for money function have stronger explanatory power than either the inflation rate or the real rate of return on money. The paper also deals with partial demand adjustment and adaptive expectations mechanisms with particular reference to the existence of credit rationing and substitution between money and real assets.