Growth and Equity in Developing Economies

Paper by Ronald Solig

Introduction

Paper by Ronald Soligo and Fred R. von der Mehde

The Genealogy of the Labor Hoarding Concept

The modern concept of labor hoarding emerged in early 1960s, and soon became a standard part of mainstream economists' explan ation of the working of labor markets. The concept represents the convergence of three importa nt elements: an empirical fi nding that labor productivity was procyclical; a framing of this fi nding as a "puzzle" or anomaly fo r the basic neoclassical theory of the firm, and a proposed resolu tion of the puzzle based on optimizing behavior of the firm in the presence of costs of hiring, firing, and training workers. Th is paper recounts the history of each of these elements, and how they were woven together into the labor hoarding concept. Each history involves people associated with various research traditions and motivated by an array of questions, many of which were unrelated to the qu estions that the modern labor hoarding concept was ultimately created to address

Tariff Protection, Import Substitution and Investment Efficiency

A chronic deficit in the balance of payments is a problem which plagues almost all developing countries. In Pakistan, as in other countries, the develop¬ment plans have contained a two-pronged approach to the problem: to increase exports and to reduce the need to import through a process of import substi¬tution. Exports have bsen encouraged by giving numerous concessions and subsidies to the exporting firms1 but the best known and most successful of the export promotion schemes is the bonus voucher system2;3. Industrialization has been pursued behind a wall of tariffs and import licen¬sing which have provided generous incentives for the establishment in Pakistan of import-substituting industries. Within this framework of high protection to .........

The International Oil Companies

The volatile oil prices of the 1990s and ensuing wave of consolidations has led to a shift in the role of international oil companies in the international energy industry