Income growth in rural areas is a considerable challenge to further poverty reduction and economic development. Using a survey of rural Bhutanese households, we investigate the impacts of a vocational skills training programme that was intended to diversify incomes outside agriculture. We find that the programme had limited positive impacts along various economic and psychosocial dimensions, but ...

The paper proposes a method that refer toa s the 'multiple mirror technique'. By conducting a cross-check of the results of various bilateral mirror analyses, we are able to identify the magnitude of the misclassification committed on the side of the test country. By applying the multiple mirror technique, the paper focuses specifically on the inaccuracy of trade statistics caused by two types of ...

Regionalism in East Asia by Richard Pomfret is a relatively short and readable book, but it provides readers with useful insights on the past, current and future of East Asian regionalism to outline the prospects of future regionalism. While this is not a book on contemporary economic history of Asia, as he notes, the historical perspective is critical to analysing relatively 'recent' phenomena of ...

This paper focuses on post-Soviet regional integration as a special case where integration projects are established by countries that originally comprised a single political entity after its collapse. It shows that in this framework the existing economic ties between countries are likely to affect adversely the interest of functional bureaucracy to support regional integration given that cutting ...

In view of the ongoing financial and economic crisis originated during 2008–09 and the possibility of a double dip recession in advanced economies, export-dependent economies of Asia and the Pacific need to rebalance its growth toward domestic and regional demand for sustainable growth of Asia and the world. Despite remarkable growth during the last decade, the region still faces extensive basic ...

This paper examines productivity and returns to scale under the assumption of monopolistic competition using Japanese firm-level data. Although differentiating products (services) is considered important in firms’ strategies and productivity growth, it has not been sufficiently investigated in previous studies. In this paper, we study this issue in two retail trade industries, department stores and ...

We compare emissions taxes and quotas when a (strategic) regulator and (non-strategic) firms have asymmetric information about abatement costs, and all agents use Markov perfect decision rules. Firms make investment decisions that affect their future abatement costs. For general functional forms, firms’ investment policy is information-constrained efficient when the regulator uses a quota, but not ...

The Korean economy was hit harder than anticipated by the global financial crisis. In the first phase, large capital outflows led to a severe liquidity strain in the foreign exchange market, resulting in a rapid depreciation of the exchange rate. Then, in the second phase, the contraction of global demand led to a collapse of exports and a sharp decline in economic activity, raising concerns about ...

In the present study, we develop a stochastic frontier production model that allows for different groups of firms to have different patterns of technical efficiency over time. We apply our model to the Malaysian manufacturing sector to decompose total factor productivity growth into technical efficiency change and technical progress for different plant size groups (e.g. large and small) in seven ...

The global energy requirement has grown at a phenomenonal rate and the consumption of primary energy sources has had a very high positive growth. This article focuses on the consumption of different primary energy sources and identifies that coal will continue to remain as the primary energy in the foreseeable future. It examines the energy requirement perspective for India and demand of coal as the ...