We study the effects of fiscal policy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the firm, sector, country and global level. First, we estimate the impact of COVID-19 and policy responses on small and medium sized enterprise (SME) business failures. We combine firm-level financial data from 50...

I explore the connection between income inequality and health in both poor and rich countries. I discuss a range of mechanisms, including nonlinear income effects, credit restrictions, nutritional traps, public goods provision, and relative deprivation. I review the evidence on the effects of...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the medium-term determinants of current accounts for a large sample of industrial and developing countries. The analysis is based on a structural approach that highlights the roles of the fundamental macroeconomic determinants of saving and...

Motivated by a characteristic way in which firms in developed countries make their decisions regarding cooperation with potential partners from less developed countries, we design a simple model of a DC firm's search for an LDC partner/supplier and the subsequent relationship between the two...

Many technologies used by the LDCs are developed in the OECD economies, and as such are designed to make optimal use of the skills of these richer countries' workforces. Due to differences in the supply of skills, some of the tasks performed by skilled workers in the OECD economies will be...

Internationalized production, that is, production in a country controlled by firms based in another country, grew from about 4.5% of world output in 1970 to over 7% in 1995. The importance of internationalized output fell substantially in developing countries until around 1990 but has been been...

We analyze banking crises using a panel of macroeconomic and financial data for more than one hundred developing countries from 1975 through 1992. We find that banking crises in emerging markets are strongly associated with adverse external conditions. In particular Northern interest rates are...

Countries differ greatly in R&D spending, and these differences are particularly striking when comparing developed with developing countries. The paper examines the extent to which the benefits of R&D are concentrated in the investing countries. It is argued that significant benefits spill over...

We test the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth in a cross-country regression framework, utilizing data on FDI flows from industrial countries to 69 developing countries over the last two decades. Our results suggest that FDI is an important vehicle for the transfer of...

We examine the extent to which developing countries that do little, if any research and development themselves benefit from R&D that is performed in the industrial countries. By trading with an industrial country that has large 'stocks of knowledge' from its cumulative R&D activities, a...