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The lagging economic performance of the Southern Mediterranean (SOM) region over the past decade is often attributed to the region’s relative lack of openness to international trade. The closer analysis of the region’s trade patterns undertaken in this study suggest a more complex picture. These findings show that except for Syria and to a lesser extent Morocco, the region’s overall trade flows are above international norms, that is, levels predicted given the country economic characteristics. Moreover, they also suggest that intra-regional trade, with some qualifications, is relatively high given the region’s economic characteristics. Nevertheless, trade relationships in the Southern Mediterranean appear to lack the vitality of those in East Asia and even Eastern Europe. The Southern Mediterranean’s trade is expanding relatively slowly, exports are concentrated in relatively slow-growing sectors, and the region does not figure prominently in the multinational production strategies ...

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In principle, the sovereign credit rating industry could help mitigate the congestion externalities common to world capital markets that arise from the failure of market participants to internalise the social cost of external borrowings. This would require that modifications in ratings on government bonds convey new information to market participants, with changes in credit ratings leading to changes in country risk premia. Using panel data analysis and event studies this paper presents econometric evidence that changes in credit rating have a significant impact on international financial markets. In line with earlier studies, our event study finds a highly significant announcement effect when emerging-market sovereign bonds are put on review with negative outlook. Our findings imply that the sovereign rating industry has the potential to help dampen excessive private capital inflows into the emerging markets with negative rating announcements ...

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This paper sets out a framework within which the problem of corruption may be analysed in any specific country. It does not seek to establish the importance of such activity in a general sense, or seek to propose particular economic policy or institutional programmes that should be pursued in order to reduce the impact on the development process. Rather, the objective is to provide a structure for two distinct areas of analysis. Firstly, it considers the investigation of the determinants of corruption, emphasising the environment in which corruption evolves — whether shaped by international, national or specific institutional factors — and the manner in which the different parties to corruption interact and organise themselves in conducting these activities. Secondly, the paper focuses on the importance of corruption for economic development by considering the different forms of corruption and the characteristics of these forms that are most critical for economic activity ...

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This paper provides statistically significant international evidence on the interaction between funded pensions and aggregate savings, after controlling for country-specific effects and for other saving determinants that have typically been identified in earlier cross-country studies. Using panel data for eleven countries (both OECD and non-OECD), this study goes beyond earlier work which has been based on individual country studies only (which have suffered from a small number of degrees of freedom). Building several proxies of pension wealth based on internationally comparable pension fund and life insurance data, the paper estimates the relationship between aggregate saving rates and pension wealth using ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares over the 1982-93 period. The empirical analysis supports the predictions of a simple two-period life-cycle saving model that incorporates tax treatment of pension returns, population heterogeneity, capital market imperfection and ...

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The paper evaluates the economics of foreign investment regulation for pension funds, with a focus on developing countries, where fully-funded pension systems are being started de novo. The analysis produces three observations. First, the benefits of global portfolio diversification apply particularly to developing-country pension assets because the volatility of asset returns is high while the risk tolerance of pensioners is low. Second, restrictions of foreign investment by domestic pension funds can hardly be justified on grounds of financial-development arguments: cross-country evidence which little support for the claim that the accumulation of pension assets would provide strong externalities for financial development. Moreover, the home bias generally observed in pension fund investment should translate into sufficient potential demand for domestic financial assets so as to deepen markets and develop the institutional infrastructure. Third, a case for initial localisation ...

Development