You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book supports three important messages: the global gag rule has failed to achieve its goal of reducing abortions; there is no definitive relationship between restrictive national abortion laws and abortion rates; and the 2017 expansion of the global gag rule will adversely affect a dashboard of health indicators.
Using country case studies from Latin America and Asia, this edited volume explores the effects of various development strategies and associated macroeconomic policies on women's well-being and progress towards gender equality.
This volume presents a comprehensive analysis of the linkages between inequality, development, and growth from a feminist economics perspective offering a rich array of policy options for promoting gender equality. This book was published as a special issue of Feminist Economics.
Social and Cultural Development of Human Resources is a component of Encyclopedia of Human Resources Policy, Development and Management in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. The Theme on Social and Cultural Development of Human Resources provides the essential aspects and a myriad of issues of great relevance to our world such as: Social and Cultural Development of Human Resources; Social Development Trends; Urban-Rural Dimensions of Social Development; Religious Belief and Resource Development; Use of Resources and Space; Consumption in Affluent Societies - Developing Societies; Consumption and the Environment; Globalization and the Consumer Society; Social and Cultural Development Indicators. This volume is aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College Students, Educators, Professional Practitioners, Research Personnel and Policy Analysts, Managers, and Decision Makers and NGOs.
The early start of the process of bank restructuring and privatization in Hungary provides a longer and richer amount of evidence than that available for any other transition economy. The authors analyze the dynamics of bank restructuring in Hungary with a focus on the role played by foreign ownership. They explore the performance over time of foreign-owned Hungarian banks and study the extent to which efficiency gains are affected by the chosen acquisition strategy-strategic acquisition in contrast with investment in a newly established bank (greenfield investment)-or by the management style adopted after the acquisition. The authors supplement previous results on the effects of foreign bank ownership in three ways. First, they explicitly consider the time span required for the change of ownership to affect bank performance. Second, the authors explore how important the chosen acquisition strategy is for the success of an acquisition. And third, they study how relevant the adopted management style is to this end, as proxied by the degree of reliance on foreign management.
Do and Iyer examine the impact of land reform in Vietnam which gives households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their land-use rights. The authors expect this change to increase the incentives as well as the ability to undertake long-term investments on the part of households. Their difference-in-differences estimation strategy takes advantage of the variation across provinces in the issuance of land-use certificates needed to enforce these rights. The results indicate that the additional land rights led to significant increases in the share of total area devoted to multi-year crops, as well as some increase in irrigation investment. These effects are stronger in areas that felt the impact of the land reform earlier. This paper--a product of the Poverty Team, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to investigate the impact of property rights.
De Nicolo, Honohan, and Ize assess the benefits and risks associated with dollarization of the banking system. The authors provide novel empirical evidence on the determinants of dollarization, its role in promoting financial development, and on whether dollarization is associated with financial instability. They find that: The credibility of macroeconomic policy and the quality of institutions are both key determinants of cross-country variations in dollarization. Dollarization is likely to promote financial deepening only in a high inflation environment. Financial instability is likely higher in dollarized economies. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for financial sector and monetary policies.
In 2000 the Argentine antitrust authorities conducted a study of the state of competition in the gasoline market. The study concludes with a set of policy recommendations (that is, limits to vertical integration and to the duration of contracts between oil companies and gasoline stations) which were subsequently implemented by the Argentine government. This was one of the rare occasions where the Argentine antitrust authorities exercised its advocacy role in a country that underwent an extensive process of deregulation and privatization. Serebrisky assesses the design and impact of the policies recommended by the Argentine antitrust authorities. In particular, he evaluates under which circumstances the new policies can reduce barriers to entry and foster competition in the Argentine gasoline market.
This paper describes a new cross-country database on the importance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This database is unique in that it presents consistent and comparable information on the contribution of the SME sector to total employment and GDP across different countries. The dataset improves on existing publicly available datasets on several grounds. First, it extends coverage to a broader set of developing and industrial economies. Second, it provides information on the contribution of the SME sector using a uniform definition of SMEs across different countries, allowing for consistent cross-country comparisons. Third, while we follow the traditional definition of the SME sector as being part of the formal sector, the new database also includes the size of the SME sector relative to the informal sector. This paper describes the sources and the construction of the different indicators, presents descriptive statistics, and explores correlations with other socioeconomic variables. This paper--a product of Finance, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to study SME-related issues.
This new study deals with the unfolding of the great political and economic transformations of the modern Egyptian state from the appointment of Muhammad Ali as governor of Egypt in 1805 to the era of President Mubarak, with a special focus on the period 1990 2005, which witnessed a rigorous implementation of structural adjustment policies, the acceleration of economic privatization and liberalization, the emergence of a group of neoliberals within the ruling National Democratic Party, and the consolidation of business interests and representation in parliament and government. The author asserts that the modernization process in Egypt over the last two centuries has been determined by power relations and their articulation, and so she investigates in depth the impact of power relations on development strategies, on political liberalization, on politicized Islam as a hegemonic ideology adopted by the state since the beginning of the 1970s, and on gender relations in development.