In the early and mid-1990s, most economists and policymakers supported rapid capital account liberalization for emerging markets. Liberalization was expected to have widespread benefits. It was predicted to increase capital inflows, thereby financing investment and raising growth. Capital inflows—especially in the form of direct investment—would provide improved technology and management techni...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a very important role in enhancing economic development in Laos. However, SMEs in Laos are small and lack competitiveness. The inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade liberalization in Laos bring opportunities and challenges for SMEs in Laos. Moreover, issues of SMEs and assessment of SMEs promotion policy are not well understood for la...

Using a new dataset of 369 manufacturing firms in developing countries, we present the first firm-level analysis of capital account liberalization and investment. In the three-year period following liberalizations, the growth rate of the typical firm’s capital stock exceeds its preliberalization mean by an average of 4.1 to 5.4 percentage points per year. We use a simple model of Tobin’s q to d...

The overall goal of this paper is to examine the impacts of trade liberalization on China's agriculture, in general, and poverty, in particular. The impacts on agriculture are analyzed by commodity and by region. Because different farmers (especially those in different income brackets) produce diverse sets of commodities, themain part of our paper analyzes the effects on households and their im...

Making Sense of Bolkestein-Bashing: Trade Liberalization under Segmented Labor Markets Trade liberalization is often met with sharp opposition. Recent examples include the so-called ''Bolkestein'' directive, which allows service providers from a given EU member to temporarily work in another member country. One way to view such a reform is that it simply widens the range of goods that are trade...

We study the interrelationship between capital °ows, returns, dividend yields and world interest rates in 20 emerging markets. We estimate a vector autoregression with these variables to measure the degree to which lower interest rates contribute to increased capital °ows and shocks in °ows a®ect the cost of capital among other dynamic relations. We precede the VAR analysis by a detailed examin...

This paper examines the business response taken by both automakers (Proton) and supplier (Ingress) in preparing them to face the regional market liberalization of AFTA. As the key automaker in Malaysia, Proton sale is mainly in domestic market and able to capture 68 percent of the total market because of the highly tariffs and custom tax is imposed on all foreign cars. However, things won’t be ...

This paper studies the dynamic behavior of risks and returns in Chinese stock markets. We characterize the time-series properties of stock-market return and volatility and test the market e–ciency hypothesis. We estimate an empirical model that captures the efiect of local and global information variables on the conditional mean of stock-market returns and characterize the second order conditio...

Acemoglu, D., 34n1, 270 Aflatoxins, 50, 66 Africa commodity characteristics in, 234 comparative perspective of commodity characteristics overview, 221, 224 non-traditional export crops, 223–224 staple food crops, 221–222 traditional export crops, 222–223 food exports from, 4, 50 income, effect on high standards economy, 148 liberalization in overview, 9, 235 liberalization process, 240 non-trad...