infonet-economy

A growing share of the world population is getting access to a formal bank account. This allows a move from cash to account based payments. Grounding our hypothesis in behavioral economics, we conjecture that being paid on an account instead of in cash can play a major role in encouraging savings. When paid on the account, the money is saved by default, while - as long as payments…

Agricultural innovation in low-income tropical countries ontributes to a more effective and sustainable use of natural resources and reduces hunger and poverty through economic development in rural areas. Yet, despite numerous recent public and private initiatives to develop capacities for agricultural innovation, such in itiatives are often not well aligned with national efforts…

This paper shows that debt crises do not always have a fiscal nature and suggests that fiscal retrenchment may not be the optimal response to a crisis that did not originate from irresponsible fiscal policies. The paper starts by discussing the origin of debt crises and the unexplained part of public debt and for avoiding debt explosions linked to financial crises or poor debt…

This article examines the procurement of goods and services by multilateral organisations from suppliers, based on a panel data including industrialised countries and emerging economies over 11 years. It presents the results of an empirical study – the first of its kind – on the explanatory factors of variations between countries, which are mainly attributable to such factors as the…

In the work of Karl Polanyi, the negative effects of a self-regulating market economy are described as being limited by societal forces such as the policies of the welfare state. With the decline of the modern welfare state since the late 1970s, social activities of business firms are increasingly regarded as an important complement to or even as a substitute for welfare state…

This paper studies how minimum wage policies affect firm employment in China using a unique county level minimum wage data set matched to disaggregated firm survey data. We investigate both the effect of imposing a minimum wage, and the effect of the policies that tightened enforcement in 2004. We find that the average effect of minimum wage changes is modest and positive, and that…

Fifteen years of experience with the commercial cultivation of genetically modified (GM) corps and countless national and international risk assessments of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) suggest that the risks related to this new technology are not any different from those already known in conventional agriculture. Despite these reassuring findings, public distrust toward GMOs…

A recurring puzzle to many academics and some policymakers is why impact evaluations, which have become something of a cottage industry in the development field, have so little impact on actual policymaking. In this paper, I study the impact of impact evaluations. I show, in a simple Bayesian framework embedded within a standard contest success function-based model of competition…