Developing country experience in trade reform

During the 1980's, many developing countries received financial and policy support for trade policy reform. There has been major reform in exchange rate policy, in the reduction of export restrictions, and in removing impediments to the imports of inputs needed by exporters. Import regimes in many countries have been improved by substituting tariffs for quantitative restrictions. The lowering of import protection has been more modest in the face of foreign exchange constraints. Through adjustment lending, the World Bank has supported trade reform in more than 40 countries. Considering this emphasis, one might expect stronger reforms. Four factors that have constrained reform action are: (a) macroeconomic instability; (b) inadequate conviction about the benefits of reform; (c) weak implementation capacity; and (d) conflicts in design. When considering the impact of policy reform on growth performance, the evidence supports the need for continued stronger efforts to reform trade regimes and complementary policies as part of adjustment lending.TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Trade Policy,Economic Stabilization

Issues in adjustment lending

Reaping the full benefit of adjustment packages depends on a government's commitment to reform as well as a variety of complementary factors, many of which have not been duly considered because of the lack of time, resources, and skills. It is becoming increasingly clear that if these packages are to be more effective and credible, the menu of policy options might be expanded in three areas. One is translating adjustment policies into improved economic performance -- the objective of domestic strategy. The second is reconciling policy reforms with changing external strategy. The third is improving the process of adjustment itself. The report concludes that attention needs to be placed on the commitment to price reforms and nonprice areas. Support might increase for the outward orientation of countries -- if discussions are extended to consider external factors and if nondistortionary ways of promoting domestic production are explored. There must also be greater government commitment to building support for the reforms as well as flexiblity in the external financing community.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Country Strategy&Performance,Achieving Shared Growth,ICT Policy and Strategies

It Is Time to Factor Natural Disasters into Macroeconomic Scenarios

Over the recent year, humanity has faced natural disasters of unprecedented magnitude and impact. However, governments and international aid organizations do not systematically plan for preventing and mitigating the effects of natural disasters, and macroeconomic scenarios seldom take into account the results of their increasing incidence, damages, and costs. Using evaluative lessons from the experience of the World Bank, this note highlights the urgent need to invest in climate change mitigation, disaster preparedness, early response, and postdisaster reconstruction.earthquake, climate change, mitigation, adaptation, flood, drought, development, developing countries, weather, World Bank, emergency planning

Imports and growth in Africa

Broad comparisons show that growth is linked to imports, but country coomparisons over short periods show the link to be more flexible than fixed. In these stringent times, the big question for African countries is whether they can reduce their historically high import dependence? Or put differently, can they resume growth without substantially increasing imports? What emerges from this analysis is that some policy changes and structural adjsutments in Africa can change traditional import intensities. But if African countries are to achieve faster sustained growth, imports will need to increase substantially from the recently depressed levels. Also, the countries will need to use those imports far more efficiently than in the past.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Achieving Shared Growth,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Inequality

Policies for economic development

This paper looks at the economic policies and institutions needed to generate and sustain economic growth and development. It argues that policy and institutional reforms are needed in three broad areas. First, the need for a fiscal policy and overall macroeconomic framework that ensures stability is critical. Second, sectoral pricing and investments ought to address key constraints to growth while respecting the requirement for stability. Third, the domestic economy needs to be integrated with the global economy to increase competition and improve competitiveness. Policy and institutional reforms in these areas are necessary both for adjusting to exogenous changes and for ensuring long-term growth and development. To enable the appropriate policies to emerge in these areas, government must act competently in the spheres that are its proper concern. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of some of the major remaining uncertainties.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Economic Stabilization,Achieving Shared Growth,Macroeconomic Management

Measuring education inequality - Gini coefficients of education

The authors use a Gini index to measure inequality in educational attainment. They present two methods (direct and indirect) for calculating an education Gini index, and generate a quinquennial data set on education Gini indexes for the over-15-population in 85 countries (1960-90). Preliminary empirical analysis suggests that: 1) Inequality in education in most of the countries declined over the three decades, with a few exceptions. 2) Inequality in education as measured by the education Gini index is negatively associated with average years of schooling, implying that countries with higher educational attainment are more likely to achieve equality in education, than those with lower attainment. 3) A clear pattern of an education Kuznets curve exists if the standard deviation of education is used. 4) Gender gaps are clearly related to education inequality, and over time, the association between gender gaps, and inequality becomes stronger. 5) Increases in per capita GDP (adjusted for purchasing power parity) seem to be negatively associated with education inequality, and positively related to labor force's average years of schooling, after controlling for initial income levels.Curriculum&Instruction,Teaching and Learning,Gender and Education,Education and Society,Primary Education

Addressing the education puzzle : the distribution of education and economic reform

No country has achieved sustained economic development without substantially investing in human capital. Previous studies have shown the handsome returns to various forms of basic education, research, training, learning-by-doing, and capacity-building. But education by itself does not guarantee successful development, as history has shown in the former Soviet bloc, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and the Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal. The question is, when and how does education bring high payoffs? Although theory has suggested a strong causal link between education and growth, the empirical evidence has not been unanimous and conclusive. The authors examine two explanatory factors. First, who gets educated matters a good deal, but the distribution of education is complex and not much has been written about it. They construct an asset allocation model that elucidates the importance of the distribution of education to economic development. Second, how education affects growth is greatly affected by the economic policy environment. Policies determine what people can do with their education. Reform of trade, investment, and labor policies can increase the returns from education. Using panel data from 12 Asian and Latin American countries for 1970-94, they investigate the relationship between education, policy reform, and economic growth. Their empirical results are promising. First, the distribution of education matters. Unequal distribution of education tends to have a negative impact on per capita income in most countries. Moreover, controlling for human capital distribution and the use of appropriate functional form specifications consistent with the asset allocation model makes a difference for the effect of average schooling on per capita income. Controlling for education distribution leads to positive and significant effects of average schooling on per capita income, while failure to do so leads to insignificant, even negative effects, of average education. Second, the policy environment matters a great deal. Our results indicate that economic policies that suppress market forces tend to dramatically reduce the impact of human capital on economic growth. Investment in human capital can have little impact on growth unless people can use education in competitive and open markets. The larger and more competitive these markets are, the greater are the prospects for using education and skills.Curriculum&Instruction,Economic Theory&Research,Decentralization,Public Health Promotion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Teaching and Learning,Curriculum&Instruction,Economic Theory&Research,Gender and Education

Development in the Balance: Equity and Sustainability at Century\u27s End

In many ways the 1990s concentrated the development experiences of the previous 40 years, providing approaches and cautions to guide policy action in the new century. While the experience confirms the essential contribution of market-friendly policies; it also brings out missing aspects. Foremost among them are distribution of human development, the protection of the environment, globalisation and financial regulations, and the quality of governance. The main message is that the quality of growth matters more than its pace

Audio Compression Using DCT and DWT Techniques

In today’s world multimedia files are used, storage space required for these files is more and sound files have no option so ultimate solution for this is compression. Compression is nothing but high input stream of data converted into smaller size. Speech Compression is a field of digital signal processing that focuses on reducing bit-rate of speech signals to enhance transmission speed and storage requirement of fast developing multimedia. In many applications, such as the design of multimedia workstations and high quality audio transmission and storage, the goal is to achieve transparent coding of audio and speech signals at the lowest possible data rates. Therefore, the transmission and storage of information becomes costly. However, if we can use less data, both transmission and storage become cheaper. Further reduction in bit rate is an attractive proposition in applications like remote broadcast lines, studio links, satellite transmission of high quality audio and voice over internet. This paper explores a transform based methodology for compression of the speech signal. In this methodology, different transforms such as Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) are exploited. A comparative study of performance of different transforms is made in terms of Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and  Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). The mean compression ratio is also calculated for all the methods and compared. The simulation results included illustrate the effectiveness of these transforms in the field of data compression. Keywords-DCT (Discrete cosine transform), DWT (Discrete wavelet transform), Quantization Compression Factor (CF), Signal to Noise ratio (SNR)