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The transformation since 1980 of many industrial countries, Communist nations and numerous developing countries entails a shift away from government involvement in economies toward greater reliance on market forces. This book analyses these dramatic changes in the context of the increasing economic interdependence under the influence of the revolution in computer technology and telecommunications.

Economic history --- Economic history

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This paper develops asymptotic distribution theory for instrumental variable regression when the partial correlation between the instruments and a single included endogenous variable is weak, here modeled as local to zero. Asymptotic representations are provided for various instrumental variable statistics, including the two-stage least squares (TSLS) and limited information maximum- likelihood (LIML) estimators and their t-statistics. The asymptotic distributions are found to provide good approximations to sampling distributions with just 20 observations per instrument. Even in large samples, TSLS can be badly biased, but LIML is, in many cases, approximately median unbiased. The theory suggests concrete quantitative guidelines for applied work. These guidelines help to interpret Angrist and Krueger's (1991) estimates of the returns to education: whereas TSLS estimates with many instruments approach the OLS estimate of 6%, the more reliable LIML and TSLS estimates with fewer instruments fall between 8% and 10%, with a typical confidence interval of (6%, 14%).

Economic history.

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This paper presents a general equilibrium approach to calculating labour adjustment costs induced by trade policy changes or external sector shocks, which we illustrate by analyzing the adjustment consequences of eliminating quotas and tariffs on U.S. imports. In our approach, factor adjustments in the presence of transactions costs are endogenously determined within the equilibrium structure. The conventional way of calculating such labour adjustment costs is to use full equilibrium models which exclude adjustment costs, and apply exogenous estimates of duration of unemployment to implied intersectoral labour reallocations. By using an equilibrium model in which adjustment costs are absent, the conventional approach tends to overstate the amount of labour that moves to other sectors and hence introduces an upward bias to estimates of adjustment costs. As well, such an approach tends to ignore the impact on intersectoral wage rates. Our results suggest that concerns over adjustment problems should focus as much on the consequences of adjustment costs in impeding factor mobility, as on the magnitude of the adjustment costs themselves. Compared to the redistributive effects they induce by inhibiting labour movement in response to policy or other changes, these costs may be small.

Economic history.

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Should countries in Latin America and Eastern Europe follow the Chilean approach to economic restructuring, market liberalization, and stabilization? Following years of hyperinflation and domestic turmoil, Chile undertook a series of dramatic economic reforms. Chile has also served as a social laboratory for such policies as privatization and social security reform that are of interest to both developed and developing economies. Having implemented much of the original reform program and emerging in the 1990s with a new democratic government, Chile also raises interesting questions about what comes next in its policies to promote growth. The advent in the 1990s of Chile as a model for economic reform is something of a surprise. Many of the reforms were actually introduced in the 1970s, and for a number of years many seemed to have failed to achieve their primary objectives. The more recent, positive view of the Chilean experience results from developments after 1983. Since then, the Chilean economy has grown robustly. What remains controversial is the question why the benefits of the reforms took so long to emerge. In this book, international scholars review the reforms in Chile and assess their effectiveness. They evaluate stabilization policy, economic growth, privatization, reform of the social security system, and the politics of economic reform. Now that many of the original reforms have been largely completed, and Chile has maintained a coherent macroeconomic policy with slowly declining inflation, the authors prescribe what Chile must do to sustain growth in the future. In addition to the editors, contributors include Eduardo Bitran, University of Chile; Vittorio Corbo, Catholic University of Chile; Peter Diamond, MIT; Sebastian Edwards, University of California, Los Angeles, and the World Bank; Stanley Fischer, MIT; Felipe Larrain B.,

Economic history. --- Economic policy.

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Economic geography --- Economic history --- -Economic geography --- Economic history -