World Bank

About: World Bank is a other organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poverty. The organization has 7813 authors who have published 21594 publications receiving 1198361 citations. The organization is also known as: World Bank, WB & The World Bank.

Market Integration and Investment Barriers in Emerging Equity Markets

Abstract: This article develops a return-based measure of market integration for nineteen emerging equity markets. It then examines the relation between that measure, other return characteristics, and broadly defined investment barriers. Although the analysis is exploratory, some clear conclusions emerge. First, global factors account for a small fraction of the time variation in expected returns in most markets, and global predictability has declined over time. Second, the emerging markets exhibit differing degrees of market integration with the US market, and the differences are not necessarily associated with direct barriers to investment. Third, the most important de facto barriers to global equity-market integration are poor credit ratings, high and variable inflation, exchange rate controls, the lack of a high-quality regulatory and accounting framework, the lack of sufficient country funds or cross-listed securities, and the limited size of some stock markets.

Social capital : the missing link?

Abstract: Sustainable development has been defined as a process whereby future generations receive as much capital per capita as--or more than--the current generation has available (Serageldin). Traditionally, this has included natural capital, physical or produced capital, and human capital. Together they constitute the wealth of nations and form the basis of economic development and growth. In this process the composition of capital changes. Some natural capital will be depleted and transformed into physical capital. The latter will depreciate, and we expect technology to yield a more efficient replacement. This century has seen a massive accumulation of human capital. It has now become recognized that these three types of capital determine only partially the process of economic growth because they overlook the way in which the economic actors interact and organize themselves to generate growth and development. The missing link is social capital. There is, however, no consensus about which aspects of interaction ad organization merit the label of social capital, nor in fact about the validity of the term capital to describe this. Least progress has been made in measuring social capital and in determining empirically its contribution to economic growth and development. This report addresses each of these issues in turn.

Exporting Jobs? The Impact of Import Competition on Employment and Wages in U. S. Manufacturing

Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of increased import competition on U. S. manufacturing employment and wages, using data for a panel of manufacturing industries over the 1977–1987 period. The empirical analysis uses previously unavailable industry import price data and an instrumental variables estimation strategy. The estimates suggest that changes in import prices have a significant effect on both employment and wages. The dramatic appreciation of the dollar between 1980 and 1985 is estimated to have reduced wages by 2 percent, and employment by 4.5–7.5 percent on average in this sample of trade-impacted industries.

Measuring living standards with proxy variables

Abstract: Very few demographic surveys in developing countries have gathered information on household incomes or consumption expenditures. Researchers interested in living standards therefore have had little alternative but to rely on simple proxy indicators. The properties of these proxies have not been analyzed systematically. We ask what hypotheses can be tested using proxies, and compare these indicators with consumption expenditures per adult, our preferred measure of living standards. We find that the proxies employed in much demographic research are very weak predictors of consumption per adult. Nevertheless, hypothesis tests based on proxies are likely to be powerful enough to warrant consideration.