The competitiveness of firms in open
economies is increasingly determined by access to low-cost
and high-quality producer services - telecommunications,
transport and distribution services, financial
intermediation, etc. This paper discusses the role of
services in economic growth, focusing in particular on
channels through which openness to trade in services may
increase productivity at the level of the economy as a

According to Myint's "vent-for-surplus"
theory, development of the economies of Indonesia, the
Philippines, and Thailand from the nineteenth century on
depended on the natural advantage of large tracts of unused
"empty land" with low population density and abundant natural
resources of the type typically found in Southeast Asia and
Africa at the outset of Western colonization. When these
economies were integrated into international trade, hitherto

This paper looks at the evidence on the
magnitude and impacts of forest illegal acts, examines the
vulnerabilities of the forest sector, and proposes a
strategy for combating forest crime. Forest crime
prominently includes illegal logging but acts against the
law also affect other sector operations such as forest
products transport, industrial processing, and trade. Almost
universally, criminal exploitation of forest products and

A major objective of this report is to provide a deeper, more policy relevant understanding of the welfare impacts of the coffee crisis - including the effects of the crisis on household income, consumption, poverty, as well as on basic human development outcomes, such as education and child nutrition. To do this, the study has generated a body of new empirical evidence, drawing from an unusually rich collection of household survey data from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

There is still a long road ahead before all Indonesian's can benefit from the full potential of ICT. That road seems even longer to rural women. Despite some improvements in access and the rapid deployment of lower cost wireless technologies, not much has changed in rural areas of Indonesia. Infrastructure in rural areas is limited and existing services are expensive and practically outside of rural women's reach. Women still face enormous barriers and access to communications and information relevant to their realities is very limited.

Following the endorsement of the Millennium Development Goals, there is an increasing demand for methods to track poverty regularly. This paper develops an economically intuitive and inexpensive methodology to do so in the absence of regular, comparable data on household consumption. The minimum data requirements for the methodology are the availability of a household budget survey and a series of surveys with a comparable set of asset data also contained in the budget survey. The methodology is illustrated using a series of Demographic Health Surveys from Kenya.

Despite sustained output growth since 1997, low-income Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries (CIS-7) have not experienced growth in employment, a phenomenon observed elsewhere in transitional economies and labeled as "jobless growth." The author addresses the causes of this phenomenon in the CIS-7. He argues that the lack of job creation is explained by a combination of structural factors, including capital-intensive growth, large potential for productivity gains among existing workers, and compartmentalized economies best depicted by a dual labor market framework.

The authors describe and analyze management in the Murray-Darling basin of Australia, long regarded as a model for integrated river basin management. This interior basin of over 1 million k

This paper uses the Ricardian approach
to examine how farmers in 11 countries in Africa have
adapted to existing climatic conditions. It then estimates
the effects of predicted changes in climate while accounting
for whatever farmer adaptation might occur. This study
differs from earlier ones by using farmers' own
perceptions of the value of their land. Previous research,
by contrast, has relied on either observed sale prices or

Successive armed conflicts, which lasted
almost three decades after independence, have devastated
Angola and its economy. However, since the peace accord of
April 2002, Angolans have begun a transition toward national
reconciliation and lasting peace. For the Government of
Angola (GoA), one of the main challenges ahead is to
reconstruct the economy and reunite society after a war that
has left its most visible marks on the millions of displaced

The importance of distributional issues in policymaking creates a need for empirical tools to assess the social impact of economic shocks and policies. This paper reviews some of the modeling approaches that are currently in use at the World Bank and other international financial institutions. The specification of these models is dictated by the issues at stake, the knowledge about the nature of the process involved, and the availability and reliability of relevant data. Furthermore, shocks and policies have macroeconomic, structural, and distributional implications.

The author surveys the empirical literature on the political economy of agricultural protection. He uses a detailed data set of agricultural Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions over five U.S. congressional election cycles over the 1991-2000 period to investigate the relationship between lobbying spending and agricultural protection. A detailed graphical analysis of campaign contributions by the agricultural PACs indicates that although there are very many PACs, in most sectors the majority of contributions are made by very few PACs.