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For decades, agricultural price and trade policies in Sub-Saharan Africa have hampered farmers' contributions to economic growth and poverty reduction. Although there has been much policy reform over the past two decades, the injections of agricultural development funding, together with ongoing regional and global trade negotiations, have brought distortionary policies under the spotlight once again. A key question asked of those policies is: How much are they still reducing national economic welfare and trade? Economy-wide models are able to address that question, but they are not available for many poor countries. Even where they are, typically they apply to just one particular previous year and so are unable to provide trends in effects over time. This paper provides a partial-equilibrium alternative to economy-wide modeling, by drawing on a modification of so-called trade restrictiveness indexes to provide theoretically precise indicators of the trade and welfare effects of agricultural policy distortions to producer and consumer prices over the past half-century. The authors generate time series of country level indexes, as well as Africa-wide aggregates. They also provide annual commodity market indexes for the region, and a sense of the relative importance of the key policy instruments used.

Agriculture --- Benchmark --- Competitive markets --- Consumers --- Development assistance --- Economic Theory & Research --- Emerging Markets --- Equilibrium --- Exchange rates --- Exports --- Free Trade --- GDP --- Gross value --- Index numbers --- International Economics and Trade --- International trade --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Markets and Market Access --- National income --- Price elasticity --- Private Sector Development --- Taxation --- Trade negotiations --- Trade policies --- Trade Policy --- Transition economies --- Welfare economics

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Countries are increasingly being ranked by some new "mashup index of development," defined as a composite index for which existing theory and practice provides little or no guidance to its design. Thus the index has an unusually large number of moving parts, which the producer is essentially free to set. The parsimony of these indices is often appealing - collapsing multiple dimensions into just one, yielding unambiguous country rankings, and possibly reducing concerns about measurement errors in the component series. But the meaning, interpretation and robustness of these indices are often unclear. If they are to be properly understood and used, more attention needs to be given to their conceptual foundations, the tradeoffs they embody, the contextual factors relevant to country performance, and the sensitivity of the implied rankings to changing the data and weights. In short, clearer warning signs are needed for users. But even then, nagging doubts remain about the value-added of mashup indices, and their policy relevance, relative to the "dashboard" alternative of monitoring the components separately. Future progress in devising useful new composite indices of development will require that theory catches up with measurement practice.

Agriculture --- Air pollution --- Competitive markets --- Decision making --- Development policy --- Economic competitiveness --- Economic resources --- Economic Theory & Research --- GDP --- GDP per capita --- Governance --- Governance Indicators --- Income --- Inflation rate --- Information and Communication Technologies --- Information Security & Privacy --- Living standards --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- National income --- Poverty Reduction --- Property rights --- Purchasing power --- Regional Economic Development --- Rural Poverty Reduction --- Shadow prices --- Tradeoffs --- Unemployment --- Unemployment rate --- Wealth

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Using enterprise data for the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, this study examines the effects of corruption on productivity. Corruption is defined as a "bribe tax" and is compared with another form of institutional inefficiency, which is often believed to be closely linked with corruption: the "time tax" imposed on firms by red tape. When testing their effects in the full sample, only the bribe tax appears to have a negative effect on firm-level productivity, while the effect of the time tax is insignificant. At the same time, there is no evidence of a trade-off between the time and the bribe taxes, implying that bribing does not emerge as a second-best option to achieve higher productivity by helping circumvent cumbersome bureaucratic requirements. When the sample is split between European Union and non-European Union countries, the time tax turns out to have a negative effect only in European Union countries and the bribe tax only in non-European Union countries. This suggests that the institutional environment influences the way in which firm behavior affects firm performance. In particular, the impact of bribing for individual firms appears to vary depending on overall institutional quality: in countries where corruption is more prevalent and the legal framework is weaker, bribery is more harmful for firm-level productivity.

Competitive markets --- CPI --- Developed countries --- Economic activity --- Economic development --- Economic growth --- Economic Theory & Research --- Emerging Markets --- Empirical evidence --- Empirical studies --- Environment --- Environmental --- Environmental Economics & Policies --- Environments --- Equilibrium --- Expenditures --- Externalities --- Government regulations --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Political Economy --- Private Sector Development --- Producers --- Property rights --- Public Sector Corruption & Anticorruption Measures --- Public Sector Development --- Resource allocation --- Technological change --- Technological progress --- Transaction costs

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June 1999 - Can Hungarian firms cope with competitive pressures and market forces within the European Union market (a criterion for joining)? The empirical evidence suggests that Hungary can withstand such competitive pressures without suppressing the real incomes of Hungary's citizens. Hungary has achieved impressive results in reorienting both its production and trade. Between 1989 and 1992, as the former CMEA markets collapsed and Hungary liberalized imports and the exchange rate regime, exports to the European Union (EU) expanded, with manufactured exports redirected largely to Western (mostly EU) markets. During this first phase of expansion, characterized by a dramatic reorientation and explosion of trade, the value of Hungary's exports increased 84 percent. In 1993 export expansion lost steam and EU-oriented exports fell 12 percent. In a second phase of expansion (in 1994-97), driven by restructured and rapidly changing export offers, exports again registered strong performance, their value increasing 132 percent. There was a dramatic shift from an export basket dominated by resource-intensive, low-value-added products to one driven by manufactures, with a rapidly accelerating growth of engineering products. Machinery and transport equipment rose from 12 percent of exports to the EU in 1989 to more than 50 percent in 1997. The shift from natural resource and unskilled-labor-intensive products to technology- and capital-intensive products in EU-oriented exports suggests the potential for integration higher in the value-added spectrum. More stringent EU environmental regulations will affect a relatively low, and falling, share of Hungary's exports. The Hungarian share of environmentally dirty products imported by the EU has increased, but these products have not been trendsetters among Hungarian exports, their share in exports falling from 26 percent in 1989 to 16 percent in 1996. The rapid pace of Hungary's turnaround seems to reflect the emergence of second-generation firms, mostly foreign-owned. Foreign-owned firms tend to be more export-oriented. Hungary has been one of the more successful transition economies because its economy was receptive to foreign direct investment from the outset. Between 1990 and 1997, Hungary absorbed roughly half of all foreign capital invested in Central Europe. This paper - a product of Trade, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to study regional integration. The author may be contacted at bkaminski@worldbank.org.

Access to Markets --- Agribusiness and Markets --- Agriculture --- Capital --- Central Planning --- Comparative Advantage --- Competitive Markets --- Competitiveness --- Debt Markets --- Economic Relations --- Economic Theory and Research --- Emerging Markets --- Environment --- Environmental Economics and Policies --- Exports --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Free Trade --- GDP --- General System Of Preferences --- Goods --- Industry --- International Economics & Trade --- Investment --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Markets --- Markets and Market Access --- Private Sector Development --- Production --- Public Sector Development --- Rural Development --- Shares --- Trade --- Trade Barriers --- Trade Policy --- Transition Economies --- Transition Economy --- Value --- Water and Industry --- Water Resources

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The concept of general equilibrium, one of the central components of economic theory, explains the behavior of supply, demand, and prices by showing that supply and demand exist in balance through pricing mechanisms. The mathematical tools and properties for this theory have developed over time to accommodate and incorporate developments in economic theory, from multiple markets and economic agents to theories of production. Yves Balasko offers an extensive, up-to-date look at the standard theory of general equilibrium, to which he has been a major contributor. This book explains how the equilibrium manifold approach can be usefully applied to the general equilibrium model, from basic consumer theory and exchange economies to models with private ownership of production. Balasko examines properties of the standard general equilibrium model that are beyond traditional existence and optimality. He applies the theory of smooth manifolds and mappings to the multiplicity of equilibrium solutions and related discontinuities of market prices. The economic concepts and differential topology methods presented in this book are accessible, clear, and relevant, and no prior knowledge of economic theory is necessary. General Equilibrium Theory of Value offers a comprehensive foundation for the most current models of economic theory and is ideally suited for graduate economics students, advanced undergraduates in mathematics, and researchers in the field.

Microeconomics --- Value --- Equilibrium (Economics) --- AA / International- internationaal --- 330.01 --- 380.1 --- Theorie van het economisch evenwicht. --- Waardeleer. --- Standard of value --- Cost --- Economics --- Exchange --- Wealth --- Prices --- Supply and demand --- DGE (Economics) --- Disequilibrium (Economics) --- DSGE (Economics) --- Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (Economics) --- Economic equilibrium --- General equilibrium (Economics) --- Partial equilibrium (Economics) --- SDGE (Economic theory) --- Statics and dynamics (Social sciences) --- Theorie van het economisch evenwicht --- Waardeleer --- E-books --- Value. --- Jacobian matrix. --- Slutsky matrices. --- Walras law. --- aggregate excess demand. --- budget constraint. --- classical consumer theory. --- competitive markets. --- constant returns. --- constrained utility maximization. --- consumer demand. --- consumer preferences. --- consumer theory. --- consumers. --- consumption. --- decreasing returns. --- demand functions. --- demand. --- economic agents. --- economic theory. --- economy. --- equilibrium manifold. --- equilibrium solutions. --- exchange model. --- firm. --- firms. --- general equilibrium model. --- general equilibrium models. --- general equilibrium. --- global coordinate system. --- linear spaces. --- maximization. --- modern economies. --- natural projection. --- net supply correspondence. --- no-trade equilibria. --- no-trade equilibrium. --- prices. --- pricing mechanisms. --- private owership. --- private ownership. --- privately owned firms. --- production set. --- production. --- profits. --- properness. --- regular economies. --- revealed preferences. --- scale firms. --- scale forms. --- smooth manifold. --- smooth manifolds. --- smooth production. --- standard model. --- supply functions. --- supply. --- utility functions. --- utility maximization.