and participants at a World Bank seminar, for useful comments. The views expressed here are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Bank or its affiliated organizations. iii ABSTRACT Labor market integration is typically assumed to raise welfare in the absence of distortions because it allows labor to move to where returns are highest. This result is examined in a simple general ...

Livestock in Africa represent on average 30% of the agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) and about 10% of the national GDP. Up to 300 million people depend on livestock for their income and livelihood. Accordingly, livestock are considered to be important for the African continent. Despite this, little or no provision for animal welfare is made in the laws and regulations of most African c...

Development of village chicken production can be a sustainable way of helping to meet the welfare needs of rural populations and raise their living standards. There is a dearth of information on research conducted to characterize, understand and develop the village chicken production systems in Zimbabwe. This review focuses on constraints, opportunities and research needs for the improvement of...

This paper examines how country, industry and firm characteristics interact in general equilibrium to determine nations’ responses to trade liberalization. When firms possess heterogeneous productivity, countries differ in relative factor abundance and industries vary in factor intensity, falling trade costs induce reallocations of resources both within and across industries and countries. Thes...

This paper proposes a simple model that formalizes a variant of Ohanian's (2001) conjecture explaining the productivity declines observed in the Great Depression. If a large payment shock like an asset-price collapse renders many firms insolvent, other economic agents become exposed to a higher risk of not being paid (payment uncertainty). The payment uncertainty causes endogenous disruptions o...

abstract protection policies in the agricultural sector is an inevitable necessity, its accomplish effects individuals welfare and economic sectors. protection policies account for a major economic strategy in agricultural sectors of developing and developed countries. applying ardl, the study investigates effects of protection policy in agricultural sector on total factor productivity of this ...

A major source of oppression in industrial and post-industrial society is the restrictive and highly authoritarian nature of the workplace. One response is to democratize the workplace by increasing the participation of workers in making decisions and in choosing and evaluating managers as well as sharing in the ownership of the firm. These are not new ideas, and there are many examples of orga...

Abstract This paper makes comparative statics in a model which oligopolistic and monopolistically competitive firms that are heterogeneous productivity compete. We demonstrate (i) entry of incumbents, (ii) reduction cost entrants, (iii) market size expansion improve the average whole economy. However, raise welfare, but may lower welfare because presence firms.

During the 1980s, the relationship between information technology (IT) and productivity became a source of debate: the astonishing improvements in computers’ underlying capabilities proved almost impossible to assess in terms of their effect on productivity. Fueled in part by the emergence of empirical research on IT productivity that generally did not identify significant productivity improvem...