Lal Jayawardena, who died in Colombo in April 2004, was an intellectual, a lover of life and a humane and gifted leader. He was a top Sri Lankan civil servant of the post-independence era and an influential policy maker. Lal was educated in Sri Lanka and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he...

This paper provides a critical analysis of the World Bank’s new thinking on industrial policy. After outlining the changing perspectives on industrial policy put forward by the World Bank over the last three decades, we argue that the bank’s economists have taken one step forward (the...

In their seminal work, The Calculus of Consent (1962), Buchanan and Tullock develop a decision model which embodies fundamental relation­ships relevant to institutional choices. However, the Buchanan-Tullock model remains "general," thus inviting others to specify details and to develop...

Using two alternative measures of expected inflation, this study investigates the impact of federal budget deficits on nominal long-term interest rate yields for the 1973.2-1995.4 period. Based on an open­ economy loanable funds framework, four instrumental variable esti­mates in first...

Abstract This paper investigates the relationship between information technology and the capital markets. The central analytical and policy question addressed here is what kind of financial system or capital market arrangements are most conducive to fostering information technology and its use...

This paper analyses a longitudinal dataset on legal protection of shareholders over a 36 year period, 1970-2005 for four advanced countries, UK, France, Germany and the US. It examines two aspects of the legal origin hypothesis - whether shareholder protection is higher in the common law...

Summary This paper examines the impact on labour markets in advanced countries (ACs) of the integration of the two giant fast-growing countries, China and India, with the liberalised global economy. The integration is taking place under “current globalisation,” which consists of free trade,...

After a brief recent empirical sketch of Islamic finance, the paper turns to its main theoretical and conceptual purpose. It seeks to relate the concepts of Islamic and conventional finance, and to examine certain important questions which arise from the interaction between these systems. The...

What would the true government expenditure and tax burden im­pacts of California's Proposition 4 likely be if it (or its equivalent) were enacted in all 50 states? What happened to actual state plus local government expenditures per capita over the period 1970-1976 is examined. Next, we examine...

Abstract During the 1980s and 1990s, many developing countries (DCs) have been engaged in far-reaching reforms of their financial systems, liberalising them and making them more market-oriented. This liberalisation, involving inter alia ‘financial de-repression’ has been inspired partly by...