infonet-economy

Contrary to widespread presumption, a surprisingly large number of countries have been able to finance a significant fraction of their investment for extended periods using foreign finance. While many of these episodes are in countries where official finance is important, we also identify episodes where a substantial fraction of domestic investment is financed by private capital...

In this double issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy we publish a set of papers concerned with the mobilization of domestic and foreign capital in support of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals that were launched in September 2015. The papers were originally presented at a conference on 'Financing for Development' organized by the International Monetary Fund and...

Creditor countries and international organizations continue to disagree whether Greece should receive additional official debt relief, and if so how much. This paper first shows that these disagreements can be attributed to competing assumptions about Greece's future capacity to repay, particularly about economic growth and the fiscal primary balance. It next evaluates the...

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...

This paper focuses on the nature of the Appellate Body's interpretative method in arriving at its decision to read-in that Article 2.1 of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement) will not prohibit a detrimental impact on competitive opportunities for imports in cases where such detrimental impact stems exclusively from a legitimate regulatory distinction....

This paper considers the intersection of income tax and WTO rules. It defends an interpretation of the non-discrimination obligations in line with customary rules of interpretation as stipulated by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. It, thus, departs from the historic assumption that income taxes are not or only to a very limited extent covered by the GATT. Subsequently,...

We develop a model of foreign direct investment (FDI) in which financially liquid foreign firms acquire liquidity-constrained target firms. Using a large dataset of emerging-market acquisitions, we find evidence supporting three central predictions of the model: (i) firms in external finance dependent and intangible sectors are more likely to be targets of foreign acquisitions; (ii)...