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Publications (18)
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– Recent Evidence and Trends
This paper examines the nature and extent of global and regional income distribution and inequality using the most recent country level data on income distribution drawn from World Bank and UNU-WIDER studies for the period 1993-2000. The methodology used is a recently developed technique to fit...
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This paper reviews Finnish economic history during the 'long' twentieth century with a special emphasis on policies for equity and growth. We argue that Finland developed from a poor, vulnerable, and conflict-prone country to a modern economy in part through policies geared at both growth and equity...
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– Lessons from Brazil
In the last twenty years, Brazil has undergone several attempts of improving sustainable growth through stabilization programmes, and more recently, structural reforms in line with the Washington Consensus Agenda. The results, however, have been disappointing, as the per capita output growth has...
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– A Spurious Controversy?
In the age of globalization, the question whether inequality in the world rose or fell down, is a hot topic. Leading scholars in the field of economic inequality measurement developed methods to estimate empirically the distribution of welfare (income) amongst world citizens. Despite their similar...
The relationship between growth and poverty lies at the heart of development economics. While many see aggregate growth as both necessary and sufficient for reducing poverty, and consequently focus their efforts on achieving the desired macroeconomic outcomes, others stress that the benefits from...
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In this paper we present two composite indices of globalization. The first is based on the Kearney/Foreign Policy magazine and the second is obtained from principal component analysis. They indicate which countries have become most globalized and show how globalization has developed over time. The...
– A Fair Deal for Consumers?
Latin American countries have now privatized a large number of their utility industries and make more use of market approaches to delivery through networks. Privatization has major consequences for efficiency, long-term growth, consumer welfare and income distribution but insufficient attention has...
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In spite of not being ‘public goods’ in the strict sense of the term, public provision has been a common way of supplying utilities services around the world. Among the major reasons underlying the dominant position of the public sector as the provider of infrastructure are the recognition of the...
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– Subsidies and Service Obligations
Any infrastructure reformers concerned with social issues in a developing country need to address two problems. The first is increasing access by the poor, and the second is ensuring consumption affordability, i.e. the ability of the poor to pay for both consumption and the amortization of the...
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The privatization of the national public utilities that took place almost a decade ago in Argentina seem to be explained by the persisting deficits of the enterprises, a general dissatisfaction with their performance and the difficulties government faced in their control. During the period of...
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– Access to Basic Services in Bolivia
This paper analyses the privatization of utilities in Bolivia, detailing the particularities of the capitalization mechanism which was used for this purpose. The analysis suggests that capitalization and regulation, and the liberalization of the utilities sector more generally, succeeded in...
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Relying on a general equilibrium model of Argentina’s economy calibrated for 1993 and internalizing all productivity and scale gains achieved up to 1999, this paper isolates the distributional effects of utilities reform from the impact of other reforms taking place in the country during the 1990s...
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Privatization has been one of the primary factors generating changes in the Chilean economy over the last decade. Privatization has faced some opposition due part to its uncertain effect on employment and prices. Despite the importance of the topic, only few attempts have been made to analyse...
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Almost five years after privatization took place in electricity and telecommunications, and major reforms had been carried out in the administration of water, the results is not clear a priori. In order to elucidate the panorama, this research tries to assess the consumption and welfare impacts of...
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– A Global Perspective
This paper presents a global perspective on infrastructure coverage and the poor that many people will think they have seen before but in fact have not. It is widely assumed that the poor in developing countries have fewer infrastructure services than middle and upper- income households, but there...
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This paper analyses the reforms that have taken place in the utilities sectors in Spain, with a focus on the political role in shaping the process of these reforms. We argue that the deregulation process was marked by the historical close collaboration between the government and the industry, which...
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