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The Millennium Development Goal of achieving near-zero malaria deaths by 2015 has led to a re-examination of wider use of DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane) in indoor residual spraying as a prevention tool in many countries. However, the use of DDT raises concerns of potential harm to the environment and human health, mainly because of the persistent and bio-accumulative nature of DDT and its potential to magnify through the food chain. This paper quantifies the adverse effects of DDT on human health based on treatment costs and indirect costs caused by illnesses and death in countries that use or are expected to re-introduce DDT in their disease vector control programs. At the global level where the total population exposed to DDT is estimated around 1.25 billion, the findings indicate that while the use of DDT can lead to a significant reduction in the estimated USD 69 billion in 2010 U.S. dollars economic loss caused by malaria, it can also add more than USD 28 billion a year in costs from the resulting adverse health effects. At the country level, the results suggest that Sub-Saharan African countries with high malaria incidence rates are likely to see relatively larger net benefits from the use of DDT in malaria control. The net health benefits of reintroducing DDT in malaria control programs could be better understood by weighing the costs and benefits of DDT use based on a country's circumstances.

Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases --- DALY --- DDT --- Disease Control & Prevention --- Energy --- Environment --- Health externality --- Health Monitoring & Evaluation --- Health Systems Development & Reform --- Malaria endemicity --- Population Policies --- Treatment costs

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Active economic policies by developing countries' governments to promote growth and industrialization have generally been viewed with suspicion by economists, and for good reasons: past experiences show that such policies have too often failed to achieve their stated objectives. But the historical record also indicates that in all successful economies, the state has always played an important role in facilitating structural change and helping the private sector sustain it across time. This paper proposes a new approach to help policymakers in developing countries identify those industries that may hold latent comparative advantage. It also recommends ways of removing binding constraints to facilitate private firms' entry into those industries. The paper introduces an important distinction between two types of government interventions. First are policies that facilitate structural change by overcoming information and coordination and externality issues, which are intrinsic to industrial upgrading and diversification. Such interventions aim to provide information, compensate for externalities, and coordinate improvements in the "hard" and "soft" infrastructure that are needed for the private sector to grow in sync with the dynamic change in the economy's comparative advantage. Second are those policies aimed at protecting some selected firms and industries that defy the comparative advantage determined by the existing endowment structure-either in new sectors that are too advanced or in old sectors that have lost comparative advantage.

Achieving Shared Growth --- Comparative advantage --- Comparative advantages --- Debt --- Debt Markets --- Development Economics --- Development strategies --- Economic growth --- Economic theory --- Economic Theory & Research --- Emerging Markets --- Environment --- Environmental Economics & Policies --- Exports --- Externalities --- Externality --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- GDP --- Gross domestic product --- Growth rate --- Income --- Industrialization --- Macroeconomic management --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Poverty Reduction --- Private Sector Development --- Structural Change --- Unemployment --- Wealth --- Wealth creation

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The authors systematically document remarkably high degrees of concentration in manufacturing exports for a sample of 151 countries over a range of 3,000 products. For every country manufacturing exports are dominated by a few "big hits" which account for most of the export value and where the "hit" includes both finding the right product and finding the right market. Higher export volumes are associated with higher degrees of concentration, after controlling for the number of destinations a country penetrates. This further highlights the importance of big hits. The distribution of exports closely follows a power law, especially in the upper tail. These findings do not support a "picking winners" policy for export development; the power law characterization implies that the chance of picking a winner diminishes exponentially with the degree of success. Moreover, given the size of the economy, developing countries are more exposed to demand shocks than rich ones, which further lowers the benefits from trying to pick winners.

Absolute advantage --- Access to Markets --- Airports and Air Services --- Brand --- Capital markets --- Economic Theory and Research --- Exports --- Externality --- Free markets --- GDP --- GDP per capita --- International Economics & Trade --- International Trade --- Law and Development --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Market failure --- Market penetration --- Marketing --- Markets and Market Access --- Price index --- Price level --- Productivity --- Purchasing --- Sales --- Substitution --- Tax Law --- Total factor productivity --- Transport --- Wealth

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Poor countries are rarely challenged in formal World Trade Organization trade disputes for failing to live up to commitments, reducing the benefits of their participation in international trade agreements. This paper examines the political-economic causes of the failure to challenge poor countries, and discusses the static and dynamic costs and externality implications of this failure. Given the weak incentives to enforce World Trade Organization rules and disciplines against small and poor members, bolstering the transparency function of the World Trade Organization is important for making trade agreements more relevant to trade constituencies in developing countries. Although the paper focuses on the World Trade Organization system, the arguments also apply to reciprocal North-South trade agreements.

Dumping --- Economic Theory and Research --- Economics Literature --- Emerging Markets --- Externality --- Free Trade --- Generalized System of Preferences --- International Economics & Trade --- International Trade --- Law and Development --- LDCs --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Private Sector Development --- Trade Law --- Trade Liberalization --- Transparency --- World Trade Organization --- WTO

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The differences in financial systems between industrial and developing countries are pronounced. It has been observed, both theoretically and empirically, that the differences in countries' financial systems are a source of comparative advantage in trade. Do and Levchenko point out that to the extent a country's financial development is endogenous, it will in turn be influenced by trade. They build a model in which a country's financial development is an equilibrium outcome of the economy's productive structure: in countries with large financially intensive sectors, financial systems are more developed. When a wealthy and a poor country open to trade, the financially dependent sectors grow in the wealthy country, and so does the financial system. By contrast, as the financially intensive sectors shrink in the poor country, demand for external finance decreases and the domestic financial system deteriorates. The authors test their model using data on financial development for a sample of 77 countries. They find that the main predictions of the model are borne out in the data: trade openness is associated with faster financial development in wealthier countries, and with slower financial development in poorer ones. This paper-a product of the Development Research Group-is part of a larger effort in the group to investigate the relation between finance and trade.

Comparative Advantage --- Cred Development --- Debt Markets --- Economic Theory and Research --- Economy --- Emerging Markets --- Equilibrium --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Financial Sector --- GDP --- Goods --- Income --- Increasing Returns --- Increasing Returns To Scale --- International Trade --- Liquidity --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Markets --- Positive Externality --- Private Sector Development --- Production --- Property Rights --- Total Output --- Trade --- Wealth