The increasing speed of globalisation has created both opportunities and challenges to many transitional economies. This paper analyses the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the productivity of the State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and concludes that SOE reform is inevitable. The SOEs’ obligations to provide social welfare should be removed to enable them to compete on an equal footing ...

What has been the effect of the shift in emerging market capital flows toward private sector borrowers? Are emerging markets capital flows more efficient? If not, can controls on capital flows improve welfare? This paper studies these questions in a world with two forms of default risk. When private loans are enforceable, but there is the risk of national default, constrained efficient capital ...

What has been the effect of the shift in emerging market capital flows toward private sector borrowers? Are emerging market capital flows more efficient? If not, can controls on capital flows improve welfare? This paper shows that the answers depend on the form of default risk. When private loans are enforceable, but there is the risk that the government will default on behalf of all residents,...

We analyze the influence of IMF and World Bank programs on political regime transitions. We develop an extended version of Acemoglu and Robinson’s [American Economic Review 91, 2001] model of political transitions to show how the anticipation of new loans from international financial institutions can trigger political transitions which would not otherwise have taken place. We test this unexplor...

Does official aid pave the road for private foreign investment or does it suffocate private initiative by diverting resources towards unproductive activities? In this paper we explore this question using data for a large number of developing and emerging economies. Controlling for countries’ institutional environment, we find that, evaluated at the mean, the marginal effect of aid on private fo...

This paper presents a simple model of the world economy, in which productivity gains in manufacturing are responsible for the global trend of manufacturing decline, and yet, in cross-section of countries, faster productivity gains in manufacturing do not necessarily imply faster declines in manufacturing. In doing so, it aims to draw attention to the common pitfall of using the cross-country ev...

This paper argues that the IMF financial and good technical assistance to Russia in the 1990s has been less than generous. Not only the size of the assistance might have not been adequate but also the timing and actual disbursements of these funds were in sharp discord with pledges. More importantly, the IMF made a number of serious policy mistakes in both design and the implementation of the r...

Three main changes in thinking about poverty have gained increasing currency over the past decade. First, the concept of poverty has broadened, with increasing attention to issues of vulnerability, inequality and human rights. Second, the causal structure has broadened to include causal variables, such as social, political, cultural, coercive and environmental capital. Third, the causal structu...

Escherichia coli is a common avian pathogen mainly associated with extraintestinal infections such as yolk sac infection (YSI). The aim of this study was to determine the serotypes and the presence of some virulence genes of E. coli strains isolated from different samples in a vertically integrated poultry operation in Mexico. Two hundred sixty-seven E. coli isolates from different samples were...