Evolution of various proposals under the Doha Round
Antoine Bouet and David Laborde, in a short IFPRI short brief, discuss tariffs rate in five different proposals that have evolved since 2001 under the Doha Round. Here are some of the points: In 2001 the WTO launched a highly ambitious program of multilateral liberalization. Eight years later, concluding the negotiations remains uncertain, though an opportunity still exists. From the onset, the negotiations were complicated due to the high number of participants (now 153 countries) and trade

FDI policy and investment climate in Nepal
Ramesh Chitrakar evaluates FDI policy and investment environment in Nepal in a new ADB report (see chapter 7). The report is about intra-regional trade and investment in South Asia. Sadly, most of the chapters include South Asia as India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh (where did Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives and Afghanistan go?). It would have been really helpful if Nepal was also included in the chapter on textiles and clothing, which was Nepal's top export bef

The quest for education: Exam on a playground!
What happens when the demand for education outstrips supply for education? Well, there won’t be enough teachers and rooms to fit them all! In the picture above, more than 1000 students from grade one to nine are giving mid-term exams out on the playground because of short supply of enough rooms for them to sit for exam. The students are

Development impact of the Doha Round
There has been a lot of debate about the gains from the Doha Round. It was initially estimated that the developing countries would gain tremendously and would help them not only achieve development goals (especially poverty reduction) but also bridge the income gap with the developed world. However, the exact benefit of Doha Round is still debatable. Generally, analysts use models (like CGE) and simulate the likely Doha scenarios (the likely framework that would be agreed upon) to estimate the impact of policy changes in the future as against the situation in the base year. Integrating the s

Elections and economy policy
We explore the impact of elections on the quality of economic policy and governance in developing countries. We argue that not only do elections likely have a positive structural effect on economic policy, but they may also have a disruptive cyclical effect. Elections introduce frictions; they are periodic events, the timing of which may affect politicians’ incentives to reform. We also argue that achieving accountability in developing countries requires more than elections. When the quality of the electoral process is poor, elections simply do not create the structural effect we would expect. We introduce into our estimations pr