infonet-economy

In countries where rain-fed agriculture constitutes a significant portion of household livelihood, increased weather variability represents a source of vulnerability to stable consumption, food security and household well-being. Weather induced income changes affect household consumption and saving decisions. We evaluate saving and consumption responses to weather variation in South...

The make-up of the EU institutions, and their evolution, should explicitly be based on widely accepted federalism principles. This paper applies federalism principles to a few crucial questions, mainly fiscal policy, fiscal discipline and structural reforms, using where possible lessons from existing federations. After introducing the topic, Section 2 briefly reviews the key message...

We draw on a new data set on the use of Swiss francs and other currencies by European banks to assess the patterns of foreign currency bank lending. We show that the patterns differ sharply across foreign currencies. The Swiss franc is used predominantly for lending to residents, especially households. It is sensitive to the interest rate differential, exchange rate developments,...

Youth unemployment and disengagement from both education and work are negatively associated with levels of completed education and skill proficiency. Recent research highlights the importance of focusing on the quality of education and improving actual learning outcomes for all. Empirical findings show the central importance of preventive strategies targeted towards disadvantaged...

This paper introduces an infrastructure for the analysis of legal metadata and textual data on international investment and trade disputes. The developed database architecture consists of three main components: (1) a WebCrawler of two key web sites for international economic law dispute information; (2) a document analyzer to transform PDFs into text files, identifying structure and...

Globalization's 'second unbundling' has drastically altered the nature of international trade giving rise to what might be referred to as the trade-investment-service nexus. Today's RTAs are qualitatively different than those signed two decades ago, since they cover disciplines that go beyond preferential market access. This paper investigates whether the nature of RTAs matters when...

Public procurement for green innovation refers to tailoring public procurement policies in such a way as to promote green innovation within the wider economy. This study considers the nature of these policies, their legal limits, best practices, and how they have been implemented across a sample of four different OECD countries. The study begins with a general consideration of public...