Technical regulations and specialization in international trade

It is widely acknowledged that while technical regulations can improve welfare and facilitate markets, they can also impede trade. The trade impeding effects of technical regulations are especially worrisome for developing countries: they frequently lack the human and capital resources necessary to satisfy technical measures, and thus are more likely to be excluded from markets by technical measures. This paper uses highly disaggregated US data on agricultural, mining and manufacturing imports to examine the impact of technical regulations on trade patterns. Using instrumental variables estimation to correct for the potential endogeneity of technical regulations, the analysis suggests that technical regulations substantially impinge on poor countries' exports: their weaker capacities to satisfy technical regulations lead them to specialize away from industries with heavier regulatory burdens.     

Food safety issues and fresh food product exports from LDCs

Fresh food products have a high income elasticity of demand and few traditional trade barriers in high income markets. As such, they represent an important opportunity for less developed country (LDC) exporters. Fresh food product exports account for half of all food and agricultural exports from LDCs to high income countries. But these products may be subject to greater food safety risks and potential trade barriers arising from sanitary regulation. This paper reviews the challenges and issues facing LDCs in meeting food safety standards for export. These issues include: (a) the importance of fresh food product trade by region and the kinds of issues that arise from those products; (b) the role of farm to table approaches and hazard analysis critical control points (HACCP) in ensuring safety; (c) the role of the public sector in LDCs in facilitating trade; (d) the potential role of the SPS Agreement in resolving disputes and determining equivalency of standards between high and low income countries.     

Rural employment in industrialised countries⋆

This paper assesses the recent changes in rural employment in the OECD countries, highlighting the growing role of employment in services and, in some cases, manufacturing activity. In many, but not all, rural areas the secular decline in agricultural employment has been more than counterbalanced by growing employment in these other sectors. However, the diversity of employment growth within and between rural areas is stressed, as are the implications of this diversity for policy. A range of explanations for the relative economic success of some rural areas is explored. These include the impacts of globalisation; restructuring of the labour market; new‘consumption’ demands on the rural areas; and human mobility. The paper concludes that traditional theories do not explain the diversity of outcomes in rural areas. New approaches are needed. Recent analyses under the banner of‘the new economic geography’ has advanced our understanding of the pre‐conditions for rural development to occur, but understanding the diverse pattern of rural employment outcomes within the same kind of geography remains a challenge which needs to be addressed by inter‐disciplinary approaches and methods.     

Market Risk of Developed and Emerging Countries During the Global Financial Crisis

This study compares the performance of the widely used risk measure, value at risk (VaR), across a large sample of developed and emerging countries. The performance of VaR is assessed using both the unconditional and conditional tests of Kupiec and Christoffersen, respectively, as well as the quadratic loss function. The results indicate that VaR performs much more poorly when measuring the risk of developed countries than of emerging ones. One possible reason might be the deeper initial impact of the global financial crisis on developed countries. The results also provide evidence of the decoupling of the market risk of emerging and developed countries during the global financial crisis.     

How and why transition made income inequality increase in urban Russia: A local study

Using sample surveys from the city of Taganrog in 1989 and 2000, we investigate household income, its composition, and its distribution in urban Russia. Income inequality increased greatly as real income at the lowest part of the distribution decreased considerably. Earnings are more concentrated in the upper part of the income distribution in 2000 than in 1989. For many households, public transfers, allowances, private transfers, or subsidiary earned income prevented income from falling further. However, Russia did not inherit from its Soviet past an efficient progressive tax system or programs to protect jobless workers and households facing severe drops in income. Journal of Comparative Economics 33 (4) (2005) 772–787.     

China: Workshop of the world?

Because China's transformation process is complex and remains open-ended, there are many partial answers provided to the many questions asked by foreign observers and Chinese people alike about where China is heading. The argument here is that it is wrong to assert China's coming collapse, just as it is not correct to assert that the dynamics so visibly at work in China will lead to China becoming the world's workshop. It is closer to the truth to maintain that the dynamics at work in China can lead in any direction, and that the necessary, let alone the sufficient conditions for them leading to a desirable outcome are daunting, but not impossible to achieve. This article suggests both necessary and sufficient conditions for China to emerge as the world's workshop, and then looks forward to assess whether we may expect regime change or political development.     

Modeling Energy and Development: An Evaluation of Models and Concepts

Most global energy models are developed by institutes from developed countries, focusing primarily on issues that are important in industrialized countries. Evaluation of the results for Asia of the IPCC/SRES models shows that broad concepts of energy and development, the energy ladder and the environmental Kuznets curve, can be observed in the results of the models. However, improvements can be made in modeling the issues that underlie these concepts, like traditional fuels, electrification, economic structural change, income distribution, and informal economies. Given the rapidly growing importance of energy trajectories of developing countries for global sustainability, the challenge for the future is to develop energy models that include all these aspects of energy and development.     

Private savings and transition

After the collapse in the early transition years, saving rates in Eastern European EU‐accession countries have recovered strongly. But is private saving in these countries now driven by the same forces as in the EU? A GMM estimator is applied to analyze the determinants of private saving in both country groups. The main results are: saving rates are rather persistent; income growth increases saving, whereas public saving crowds out private saving. There is evidence that in both country groups domestic saving and foreign capital operate at least partly as substitutes, which is an indicator for international financial integration. The long‐run effects of income growth and public saving are larger in the EU‐15 than in the EU‐accession countries.