Showing papers on "Developing country published in 2002"

Global Economic Prospects

Abstract: The global economic recovery is continuing but at a somewhat slower pace than was anticipated six months ago. Specifically, using the country weights from the IMF's World Economic Outlook, the forecast for real GDP growth in the world economy during 2002 (i.e., on a fourthquarter- to-fourth-quarter basis) is cut by about half a percentage point to 3 percent-- a pace that is slightly below my estimate of the potential growth rate for world GDP. This downward revision reflects primarily slower growth than earlier expected during the first half of 2002 in most industrial countries and the expectation that growth will remain somewhat more sluggish than earlier expected at least through year-end. For 2003, the forecast for global economic growth is also cut by about half a percentage point--to 4 percent--reflecting both general factors suggesting slightly weaker performance in many industrial and developing countries and the particular economic risks arising from possible military action against Iraq and from potential credit events affecting key developing countries. Despite these downward revisions, however, there is little doubt that the world economy will see significant improvement this year from the 1 percent growth recorded in 2001, and it is still reasonable to expect further improvement to a growth rate modestly above global potential during 2003.

The neglected epidemic: road traffic injuries in developing countries

Abstract: Road traffic injuries are a major cause of death and disability globally, with a disproportionate number occurring in developing countries. 1 2 Road traffic injuries are currently ranked ninth globally among the leading causes of disability adjusted life years lost, and the ranking is projected to rise to third by 2020.1 In 1998, developing countries accounted for more than 85% of all deaths due to road traffic crashes globally and for 96% of all children killed.2 Moreover, about 90% of the disability adjusted life years lost worldwide due to road traffic injuries occur in developing countries.1 The problem is increasing at a fast rate in developing countries due to rapid motorisation and other factors (fig 1).3 However, public policy responses to this epidemic have been muted at national and international levels. Policy makers need to recognise this growing problem as a public health crisis and design appropriate policy responses. #### Summary points Injury and deaths due to road traffic crashes are a major public health problem in developing countries More than 85% of all deaths and 90% of disability adjusted life years lost from road traffic injuries occur in developing countries Among children aged 0-4 and 5-14 years, the number of fatalities per 100 000 population in low income countries was about six times greater than in high income countries in 1998 The highest burden of injuries and fatalities is borne disproportionately by poor people in developing countries, as pedestrians, passengers of buses and minibuses, and cyclists Fig 1 Trends in fatalities due to road traffic injuries for different regions of the world, 1980-95. Data from Transport Research Laboratory3 Road traffic injuries in developing countries particularly affect the productive (working) age group (15-44 years) and children. (A developing country is defined as a country that has an annual per …

Low Schooling for Girls, Slower Growth for All? Cross-Country Evidence on the Effect of Gender Inequality in Education on Economic Development

Abstract: Using cross-country and panel regressions, this article investigates how gender inequality in education affects long-term economic growth. Such inequality is found to have an effect on economic growth that is robust to changes in specifications and controls for potential endogeneities. The results suggest that gender inequality in education directly affects economic growth by lowering the average level of human capital. In addition, growth is indirectly affected through the impact of gender inequality on investment and population growth. Some 0.4-0.9 percentage points of differences in annual per capita growth rates between East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East can be accounted for by differences in gender gaps in education between these regions.

Schools and Skills in Developing Countries: Education Policies and Socioeconomic Outcomes

Abstract: This paper reviews recent research on the determinants of educational outcomes, and the impact of those outcomes on other socioeconomic phenomena. It addresses three questions: 1) What sch...

Globalization and the Decline of the Welfare State in Less-Developed Countries

Abstract: Why have trends in government welfare spending in developing countries diverged from those in developed countries? I address this question by investigating the effects of capital and trade flows on government welfare spending in fifty-three developing countries. Using an original measure of labor power in developing countries, I test the links between international markets, labor's political strength, and the welfare state. I argue that labor's collective-action problems, caused by large populations of low-skilled and surplus workers, offset labor's potential political gains from globalization. I show that when the proportion of low-skilled workers in a nation is high, globalization will lead to a decline in welfare spending. Most significantly, the results suggest that in nations where labor-market institutions are not yet well developed, government social-welfare spending is constrained by international market, forces.

Kicking away the ladder

Abstract: There is currently great pressure on developing countries to adopt a set of “good policies” and “good institutions” – such as liberalisation of trade and investment and strong patent law – to foster their economic development. When some developing countries show reluctance in adopting them, the proponents of this recipe often find it difficult to understand these countries’ stupidity in not accepting such a tried and tested recipe for development. After all, they argue, these are the policies and the institutions that the developed countries had used in the past in order to become rich. Their belief in their own recommendation is so absolute that in their view it has to be imposed on the developing countries through strong bilateral and multilateral external pressures, even when these countries don’t want them.

Imagine There's No Country: Poverty, Inequality, and Growth in the Era of Globalization

Abstract: Developing country growth rates have accelerated. Instead of the developing world losing out to globalization, it has in fact been growing faster than the industrialized world. These are the conclusions reached in this discussion - debunking the popular myth that the trend towards greater integration of the world economy, which began roughly in the mid-1980s, has resulted in lower overall growth rates for poor countries, increasing world inequality and causing the poverty level to stagnate. The author, Surjit Bhalla, develops a methodological framework to examine the evolution of poverty and inequality in the era of globalization. He critically examines the conventional wisdom, finding that productivity, wages and incomes in the poor countries are catching up with those obtained by comparable individuals in the West. Indeed, absolute poverty has declined sharply; it is estimated to be only 12 per cent of the developing country population. The volume also attempts to explain what makes international organizations produce poverty figures so out of sync with reality.

Global production networks and the changing geography of innovation systems : implications for developing countries

Abstract: The paper addresses disruptive changes that globalization imposes on the geography of innovation systems, and identifies potential benefits that developing countries could reap from international linkages. The analysis is centered on three propositions. First, developing countries need to blend diverse international and domestic sources of knowledge to compensate for initially weak national production and innovation systems. Second, a greater variety of international knowledge linkages is possible, as globalization reduces the spatial stickiness of innovation. Third, globalization has culminated in an important organizational innovation: the spread of global production networks (GPN) combines concentrated dispersion with systemic integration, creating new opportunities for international knowledge diffusion. We argue that GPN provide firms and industrial districts in developing countries with new opportunities for reverse knowledge outsourcing. We explore resultant challenges that define the need for publi...

Linking agribusiness and small-scale farmers in developing countries: Is there a new role for contract farming?

Abstract: This article examines a new role for contract farming in developing countries in the light of the industrialisation of agriculture and the globalisation of world markets. A theoretical rationale for contracting in developing countries is developed on the basis of adopting new institutional economic theory for the purpose of matching governance forms to market failure problems and transaction characteristics. The history of contract farming is reviewed, together with the advantages and disadvantages to the various players, for the purpose of developing a list of key success factors, problems and some possible solutions.

Foreign Direct Investment, Economic Freedom and Growth: New Evidence from Latin-America

Abstract: This paper explores empirically the interplay between economic freedom, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and growth. We pursue a panel data analysis on a sample of 18 Latin-American countries over the period 1970-1999. Basic findings are two: First, economic freedom in the host country is found to be a positive determinant of FDI inflows into that nation. Second, FDI is positively correlated with economic growth in the host countries of the sample considered. We attribute this empirical regularity to the idea that FDI may help the process of technological diffusion from leaders to developing countries. The empirical analysis also points out to the need of a certain level of social capacity in the host country to benefit from the entrance of FDI.

Street Children, Human Rights, and Public Health: A Critique and Future Directions

Abstract: ▪ Abstract This review presents a critique of the academic and welfare literature on street children in developing countries, with supporting evidence from studies of homelessness in industrialized nations. The turn of the twenty-first century has seen a sea change of perspective in studies concerning street youth. This review examines five stark criticisms of the category “street child” and of research that focuses on the identifying characteristics of a street lifestyle rather than on the children themselves and the depth or diversity of their actual experiences. Second, it relates the change of approach to a powerful human rights discourse—the legal and conceptual framework provided by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child—which emphasizes children's rights as citizens and recognizes their capabilities to enact change in their own lives. Finally, this article examines literature focusing specifically on the risks to health associated with street or homeless lifestyles. Risk assessmen...

Aid and Reform in Africa : Lessons from Ten Case Studies

Abstract: Winner of Choice magazine's Outstanding Academic Title award! Since the early 1980s, virtually every African country has received large amounts of aid to stimulate policy reform. The results have varied enormously. Ghana and Uganda were successful reformers that grew rapidly and reduced poverty. Ethiopia and Cote d'Ivoire have shown significant reform in recent years, but it remains to be seen whether it will be sustainable. 'Aid and Reform in Africa' summarizes the findings from case studies that investigate whether, when, and how foreign aid has affected economic policy in Africa. The main findings are: Policy formation is primarily driven by domestic political economy. Large amounts of aid to countries with poor policies sustain those policies. Overall, donors have not discriminated effectively among different countries and different phases of the reform process. The book concludes that donors have three basic instruments that they can use to encourage adoption of good economic policies in developing countries: money, conditionality, and technical assistance/policy dialog. The case studies in this project show examples in which each of these instruments helped countries' improve their policies."

Brain drain and health professionals.

Abstract: Migration of medical professionals from developing countries has become a major concern. This brain drain worsens the already depleted healthcare resources in poor countries and widens the gap in health inequities worldwide. It is time that international organisations collaborated to protect the value of this “intellectual property”: where medical professionals cannot be dissuaded from moving, the country that trained them should at least gain from their movement. In Africa alone, where health needs and problems are greatest, around 23 000 qualified academic professionals emigrate annually.1 Information from South African medical schools suggests that a third to a half of its graduates emigrate to the developed world.2 The loss of nurses has been even more extreme—for example, more than 150 000 Filipino nurses3 and 18 000 Zimbabwean nurses4 work abroad. A recent report from the United Kingdom estimated that 31% of its doctors and 13% of its nurses are born overseas; in London the figures are 23% and 47% respectively.5 These reported figures are likely to be underestimates as many migrate unofficially. The cost implications are significant. With 600 of its medical …

Voices of the poor from many lands

Abstract: This is the final book in a three-part series entitled, "Voices of the Poor." The series is based on an unprecedented effort to gather the views, experiences, and aspirations of more than 60,000 poor men and women from sixty countries. The work was undertaken for the "World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty." This publication is organized as follows: Each country chapter opens up with a brief life story. These life stories were chosen because they highlight concerns raised not only by poor women and men living in that particular community, but because the same concerns were echoed in other parts of the country. The chapters then unfold around particular sets of issues that emerged repeatedly in group discussions and individual interviews. While the findings reported in the chapters cannot be generalized to represent poverty conditions for an entire nation, the chapters bring to life what it means to be poor in various communities, in fourteen countries, from the perspective of poor people. In the final chapter, four major patterns emerge: Poor people need a diverse set of assets and capabilities if they are to survive and overcome poverty. Economy-wide policies and shocks deplete poor people's assets and increase their insecurity. The culture of mediating institutions often negatively distorts the impact of well-intended policies and excludes the poor from gains. Gender inequity within households is persistent and children are acutely vulnerable.

Financial development and poverty reduction in developing countries

Abstract: Empirical investigation of the link between financial development and economic growth has established that finance exerts a significant and positive influence on growth. This paper extends this line of analysis by examining the contribution that financial development makes to poverty reduction in low-income countries. The results reported support the contention that financial sector development policy can contribute to achieving the goal of poverty reduction in developing countries. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Globalization and Similarities in Corporate Governance:A Cross-Country Analysis

Abstract: Some scholars have argued that globalization should pressure firms to adopt a common set of the most efficient corporate governance practices, while others maintain that such convergence will not occur because of a variety of forms of path-dependence. With new data on governance in 24 developing countries as well as data on laws protecting shareholders and creditors in 49 developed and developing countries, we search for evidence that globalization is correlated with similarity in corporate governance. We find robust evidence of de jure similarity in governance. Interestingly, this is not driven by convergence to U.S. standards. Rather pairs of economically interdependent countries - especially if the countries are both economically developed - appear to adopt common corporate governance standards, even after accounting for the effects of common legal origin. In contrast to the de jure results, we find virtually no evidence of de facto similarity in corporate governance in a battery of estimations at the country, industry and firm levels. This is consistent with either the proposition that complementarities result in different national systems appropriately having different corporate governance systems, or the proposition that globalization is not strong enough to overcome local vested interests. We conclude that globalization may have induced the adoption of some common corporate governance standards but that there is little evidence that these standards have been implemented.

Bridging the Digital Divide: New Route to Development or New Form of Dependency?

Abstract: The Catholic Church has the practice of appointing a devil's advocate (Advocatus Diaboli) when considering a person for sainthood. The role of the advocate is to ferret Out all the reasons why that person should not be made a saint and present them forcefully in the discussion among the cardinals who make the decision. The current campaign to promote the uptake of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in developing countries and to get aid donors to redirect their aid budgets needs devil's advocates to challenge what John Stuart Mill once called "the deep slumber of a decided opinion." In the first half of this article, I argue that ICTs are being oversold as the key both to higher efficiency of corporate and public organizations and to stronger responsiveness of government to citizen-customers. ICT tools can help people learn how to absorb knowledge generated elsewhere and combine it with local needs and local knowledge, and they can help raise real economic returns to investments; but they are being touted in the development community as though they can leapfrog over the more familiar development problems. This is like saying that cheap books can cure illiteracy. Once the illiteracy problem is solved (as in Kerala, India), cheap books are a great boon, but giving illiterate people cheap books does not solve illiteracy. My purpose is not to throw out the whole idea of an ICT-for-development campaign but to signal traps that will cause the campaign to lose credibility. By engaging with these issues, ICT proponents can ensure that the ICT fad ends up with benefits greater than resource misal locations, in contrast to some earlier development fads. In the second half of the article, I suggest that efforts to bridge the digital divide may have the effect of locking developing countries into a new form of dependency on the West. The technologies and "regimes" (international standards governing ICTs) are designed by developed country entities for developed country conditions. As the developing countries participate in ICTs, they become more vulnerable to the increasing complexity of the hardware and software and to the quasimonopolistic power of providers of key ICT services. Worse, the Western aid industry, by linking aid to good governance and good governance to programs to digitalize the public sector ("e-govemance"), may be reinforcing the overall dependency of developing countries. Less developed country (LDC) governments should not take the technologies and international regimes as given. They should press for standards and pricing regimes that make it easier for entities in their countries to access the global information economy. They need more rep resentation in the standard-setting bodies and more support in the ICT domain for the principle that "simple is beautiful." Beware the Assumption that ICTs Are a Top Development Priority In taking for granted that "bridging the digital divide" is the central issue of development, literature from the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Group of Seven (G7) governments, and individual academics displays a high aspiration-to-evidence ratio and a disregard of trade-offs between specific ICT investments and alternative investments. The unwillingness to grapple with choices is signaled in the commonly heard refrain, "It is not either/or," meaning that ICT investments do not compete with other investments. A kind of groupthink has emerged such that, in the words of a well-known World Bank ICT expert who has become skeptical of the claims, People react as though you are mouthing obscenities in St. Peters if you suggest that there might be problems with treating the digital divide as the number one development priority. For that reason, I've been very cautious in sharing my skepticism within the Bank, although I'm trying a process of gentle acclimatization. …

What can be done about the private health sector in low-income countries?

Abstract: A very large private health sector exists in low-income countries. It consists of a great variety of providers and is used by a wide cross-section of the population. There are substantial concerns about the quality of care given, especially at the more informal end of the range of providers. This is particularly true for diseases of public health importance such as tuberculosis, malaria, and sexually transmitted infections. How can the activities of the private sector in these countries be influenced so that they help to meet national health objectives? Although the evidence base is not good, there is a fair amount of information on the types of intervention that are most successful in directly influencing the behaviour of providers and on what might be the necessary conditions for success. There is much less evidence, however, of effective approaches to interventions on the demand side and policies that involve strengthening the purchasing and regulatory roles of governments.

Investigating New Product Diffusion Across Products and Countries

Abstract: As firms jockey to position themselves in emerging markets, firms need to evaluate the relative attractiveness of market expansion in different countries. Since the attractiveness of a market is a function of the eventual market potential and the speed at which the product diffuses through the market, a better understanding of the determinants of market potential and diffusion speed across different countries is of particular relevance to firms deliberating their market expansion strategies. Despite a recent spurt in research on multinational diffusion, there exist significant gaps in the literature. First, existing studies tend to limit their analysis to industrialized countries, thus reducing the ability to generalize the insights to many emerging markets. Second, these studies tend to focus on the coefficients of external and internal influence in the Bass diffusion model but do not analyze the determinants of market potential. Third, the choice of variables that affect the parameters of the Bass diffusion model has been rather limited. In this paper, we seek to address these gaps in the literature. To address the scope issue, we assembled a novel dataset that captures the diffusion of 6 products in 31 developed and developing countries from Europe, Asia, and North and South America. The set of countries in our dataset encompasses 60% of the world population and includes such emerging economies as China, India, Brazil, and Thailand. This should provide us with a stronger basis to make empirical generalizations about the diffusion process. For firms seeking to expand into emerging international markets, our findings about penetration potential have considerable significance. For example, we find that for the set of products that we analyze the average penetration potential for developing countries is about one-third 0.17 versus 0.52 of that for developed countries. We also find that it takes developing countries on average 17.9% 19.25 versus 16.33 years longer to achieve peak sales. Thus, despite the well-known positive effect of product introduction delays on diffusion speed, we find that developing countries still continue to experience a slower adoption rate, compared to that of developed countries. Our study also investigated the impact of several new macroenvironmental variables on penetration potential and speed. For example, our findings indicate that a 1% change in international trade or urbanization level can potentially change the penetration potential by about 0.5% and 0.2% respectively. These are some of the key variables projected to change significantly over the coming years for developing countries. While business managers have relatively little influence on such variables, our findings can still serve as valuable empirical guide for the variables that they should consider in evaluating diverse international markets and in performing sensitivity analysis with respect to their projected trends. Finally, our study also holds implications for managers seeking to combine information about past diffusion patterns across products and countries for better prediction. We pool information efficiently across multiple products and countries using a Hierarchical Bayes estimation methodology. By sharing information across countries and products in a single, coherent framework, we find that this pooling approach leads to substantial improvements in prediction accuracy. Our technique is particularly superior in predicting sales and BDM parameter values in the early years of new product introduction in a new country, when forecast estimates are managerially most useful. We also decompose the variance in the BDM model parameters into product, country, and product-country components. These results give guidelines to managers about which market experience they should weigh more to arrive at forecasts of market potential and diffusion speed. We find that while past experiences of other products in a country country effects are relatively more useful to explain penetration level cumulative sales, past experiences in other countries where a product was earlier introduced product effects are more useful to explain the coefficients of external and internal influence and thus the speed with which the product will attain peak sales.

Poverty, AIDS, and Children's Schooling : A Targeting Dilemma

Abstract: The authors analyze the relationship between orphan status, household wealth, and child school enrollment using data collected in the 1990s from 28 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and one country in Southeast Asia. The findings point to considerable diversity-so much so that generalizations are not possible. While there are some examples of large differentials in enrollment by orphan status, in the majority of cases the orphan enrollment gap is dwarfed by the gap between children from richer and poorer households. In some cases, even non-orphaned children from the top of the wealth distribution have low enrollments, pointing to fundamental issues in the supply or demand for schooling that are a constraint to higher enrollments of all children. The gap in enrollment between female and male orphans is not much different than the gap between girls and boys with living parents, suggesting that female orphans are not disproportionately affected in terms of their enrollment in most countries. These diverse findings demonstrate that the extent to which orphans are under-enrolled relative to other children is country-specific, at least in part because the correlation between orphan status and poverty is not consistent across countries. Social protection and schooling policies need to assess the specific country situation before considering mitigation measures.

Recent trends in breast cancer incidence and mortality

Abstract: Breast cancer accounts for one-third of cancer diagnoses and 15% of cancer deaths in U.S. women. Its 192,000 cases and 40,000 deaths in 2001 make it the most common incident cancer (excluding superficial skin cancers) and second leading cause of cancer death. Over one-half of the 300,000 breast cancer deaths worldwide in 1990 (the latest year with such data) occurred in developed countries, but annual mortality rates ranged from 27/100,000 women in northern Europe to 4/100,000 women in Asia. Incidence data are less complete, although 1988–1992 rates varied threefold: low in Asia, intermediate in South America and Eastern Europe, and high in North America and Western Europe. Migrant studies suggest that lifestyle factors largely explain these international differences. U.S. incidence rates are generally 20%−40% higher in white women than in non-white women, but are higher in young (under age 40) black women than in young white women. Incidence rates rose in the 1970s, leveled off in the 1990s, and are declining for young women. Women in some areas of the northeast U.S. have twofold higher mortality than that of other U.S. women, but reproductive and socioeconomic characteristics explain much of that difference. In the 1970s and 1980s, mortality rates held steady in developed countries but rose in developing countries. Since 1987 mortality rates fell by 25% as a result of earlier detection and improved treatment. Age–period–cohort analyses indicate that changes in recognized risk factors may affect mortality patterns. Continued analysis of international and intranational trends may reveal targets for multidisciplinary intervention and prevention efforts. Environ. Mol. Mutagen. 39:82–88, 2002. Published 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc.