Jan Willem Gunning

Developing countries frequently experience trade shocks and the policy implications of this have been debated for decades. This important book is Volume 2 of a comparative study covering 23 countries, using a common methodology to estimate the effects of shocks. The conventional wisdom has been that private agents, in particular peasant farmers, could not be trusted to use windfalls wisely. This was, and continues to be, the main rationale for stabilising taxation of export crops. The convention was also that windfalls accruing to the public sector were a bane since governments had low savings rates. The evidence in this definitive study supports neither generalisation. Trade shocks typically lead to high savings rates, irrespective of whether they accrue to private producers or to the government. However, the case studies find substantial policy errors so that windfalls are often not translated efficiently into permanent income increases and indeed often lead to a reduction in output. The studies argue for a drastic revision of the case for government action in response to trade shocks. Volume 1 deals with Africa, Volume 2 with Asia and Latin America.

This volume analyses and compares economic growth in Nigeria and Indonesia during the period from 1950 to 1985, addressing questions as to why one country was so much more successful than the other. In providing some surprising answers for those who believed that the divergence would be found in deeply rooted, long term trends, the authors also offer insight into what has become a reversal of fortune in the late 1990's, as Indonesia has experienced decline, and the Nigerian economy had stabilized.

In this book, original essays by outstanding authors consider key issues in the external economic relations of developing countries.

In this book, original essays by outstanding authors consider key issues in the external economic relations of developing countries.

This book is the first of two companion volumes by these authors on trade shocks in controlled economies. Both theoretically innovative and drawing on extensive applied work, it addresses a number of issues in the forefront of economics, principally the relationship between macro and micro economics, by analysing the impact of an external macro shock - the coffee price boom - on each of two developing countries which have much in common but whose governmental organizations and objectives differ sharply. The authors focus on three important ways in which governments affect peasants: setting crop prices; controlling access to consumer goods; and provision of public services. They address these three areas using microeconomic analysis and household survey data collected in Kenya and Tanzania. Much of the analysis is relevant for a wide class of developing countries.