Implications of Africa’s Transportation Systems for Development in the Era of Globalization

Colonial road-building, Colonial railways, Transportation planning, Economic development, Africa,

The Development Theory of Transportation Infrastructure Examined in the Context of Central and West Africa

Airports, Central Africa, Developing countries, Inland transportation, Navigable waterways, Roads, Rural transportation, Railways, Sub-Saharan Africa, Transportation infrastructure, West Africa,

The development of urban labour markets: China's urban wage curve, 1980-92

This study explores the effect of China's economic reforms and growth on a critical outcome of labour market interactions: wage levels. Provincial data from 1980 to 1992 are used to analyse changes in interregional wage differentiation, and the relationship between average and real wages and a variety of economic variables. The results illuminate the increasing role of market forces, particularly labour demand variables such as economic growth and foreign investment, in determining wage levels and explaining the pattern of first declining, and then sharply rising, interregional wage differentials in the 1980s and early 1990s. At the same time, the empirical results highlight the persistence of barriers to labour mobility across regions and enterprises of different ownership types. These findings suggest that the evolution of China's urban labour market to date is marked by a combination of unprecedented flexibility as well as old and new forms of rigidity.

Is public capital productive in Europe?

This paper addresses the issue of whether and by how much public investment or public capital can increase GDP. In comparison with the literature on the subject, we apply many different methodologies to answer these questions. A vector autoregressive (VAR) model (for France, Italy, Germany, the UK and the USA), a panel composed of 6 European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands) and a regional panel (French regions) are estimated. Public investment is shown to be a significant determinant of output; this is also true for public capital but to a lesser extent than public investment with a VAR methodology. The size of the estimated coefficient is also more realistic than those obtained in the literature. This empirical result confirms that the focus of some economists on safeguarding the level of public investment is not misplaced. The debate on the introduction of a ‘golden rule of public finance’ in the European Monetary Union is legitimate in this respect.public capital, public investment, VAR, panel data, European countries, E62, H54, C23,