This paper examines the extent to which Pakistan's growth has been, or is likely to be, constrained by its balance of payments. Evidence presented suggests that Pakistan's maximum growth rate consistent with equilibrium on the basic balance is approximately 5% per annum. This is below the long-term target GDP growth rate of 7–8% per annum. This balance-of-payments constrained growth approach provides ...

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 ...

In the wake of recent food price spikes, plus growing demands for food in emerging Asia and for biofuels in Europe and the United States, governments are re-examining their strategies for dealing with both short-term and long-term food security concerns. This paper argues that long-run trends in real agricultural prices have policy implications for food security that are at least as important as ...

Invasive animal pests reduce crop and livestock output, require management and control measures, and threaten native plants, animals and their habitat. The agricultural and management costs are often directly measurable. But the costs to protect threatened native plants and animals are harder to assess. The Rural Lands Protection Boards were the government agency in New South Wales that managed ...

The close linkages between climate change adaptation and development have led to calls for addressing the two issues in an integrated way. ‘Mainstreaming’ climate information, policies and measures into ongoing development planning and decision-making has been proposed as one solution, seen as making more sustainable, effective and efficient use of resources than designing and managing climate ...

The paper considers the optimal transition path for China's exchange rate regime. How can China successfully make the shift from the current dollar peg regime to a more desirable regime, whether a basket peg or a floating regime? To answer this question, we develop a dynamic small open economy general equilibrium model. We construct four transition policies based on a basket peg or a floating regime ...

Over the past three decades, there has been a rapid expansion of processed food exports, replacing traditional agriculture exports such as coffee and tea. However, this development and its policy implications have received little attention in the literature. This paper provides an overview of key characteristics and growth patterns of processed food exports in developing countries. The determinants ...

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 state-contingent approach to production uncertainty presents a more general model than the conventional stochastic production approach. Here we investigate whether the state-contingent approach offers a tractable framework for representing climatic uncertainty at a farm level. We developed a discrete stochastic programming (DSP) model of a representative wheat–sheep (mixed) farm in the Central ...

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 ...