Analyzing the experience of Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 'Lessons from NAFTA' aims to provide guidance to Latin American and Caribbean countries considering free trade agreements with the United States. The authors conclude that the treaty raised external trade and foreign investment inflows and had a modest effect on Mexico's average income per person. It is likely that the treaty also helped achieve a modest reduction in poverty and an improvement in job quality. This book will be of interest to scholars and policymakers interested in international trade and development.
Since Schumpeter, economists have argued that vast productivity gains can be achieved by investing in innovation and technological catch-up. Yet, as this volume documents, developing country firms and governments invest little to realize this potential, which dwarfs international aid flows. Using new data and original analytics, the authors uncover the key to this innovation paradox in the lack of complementary physical and human capital factors, particularly firm managerial capabilities, that are needed to reap the returns to innovation investments. Hence, countries need to rebalance policy away from R and D-centered initiatives †“ which are likely to fail in the absence of sophisticated private sector partners †“ toward building firm capabilities, and embrace an expanded concept of the National Innovation System that incorporates a broader range of market and systemic failures. The authors offer guidance on how to navigate the resulting innovation policy dilemma: as the need to redress these additional failures increases with distance from the frontier, government capabilities to formulate and implement the policy mix become weaker. This book is the first volume of the World Bank Productivity Project, which seeks to bring frontier thinking on the measurement and determinants of productivity to global policy makers.
Productivity has again moved to center stage in two critical academic and policy debates: the slowing of global growth amid spectacular technological advances, and developing countries’ frustratingly slow progress in catching up to the technological frontier. Productivity Revisited brings together the new conceptual advances of 'second-wave' productivity analysis that have revolutionized the study of productivity, calling much previous analysis into question while providing a new set of tools for approaching these debates. The book extends this analysis and, using unique data sets from multiple developing countries, grounds it in the developing-country context. It calls for rebalancing away from an exclusive focus on misallocation toward a greater focus on upgrading firms and facilitating the emergence of productive new establishments. Such an approach requires a supportive environment and various types of human capital--managerial, technical, and actuarial--necessary to cultivate new transformational firms. The book is the second volume of the World Bank Productivity Project, which seeks to bring frontier thinking on the measurement and determinants of productivity to global policy makers.
The Manual of Upper Gastrointestinal Surgery was compiled as an aid to surgeons, residents, and students who want to acquire a broader knowl edge of the surgical techniques used in the upper gastrointestinal area. Of necessity, a considerable amount of the work of a general surgeon will be confined to this region. The techniques described herein are those preferred by the authors and most, but not all, of their colleagues at the Mayo Clinic. No attempt has been made to include all of the available possibilities and technical varia tions. Likewise, no attempt has been made to include many of the stapling techniques. Although they are good and quite useful, their inclusion would require a complete and separate volume. The omission of an accepted procedure is not meant as a criticism; our aim was to emphasize only the techniques that are most commonly used in day-to-day practice. Gains in knowledge about the anatomy and physiology of the esopha gus, stomach, and duodenum have been highly instrumental in the devel opment of surgical procedures in these areas, particularly the techniques for benign diseases (for example, ulcer, gastritis, and esophagitis).
Back cover blurb Rising agricultural productivity has driven improvements in living standards for millennia. Today, redoubling that effort in developing countries is critical to reducing extreme poverty, ensuring food security for an increasing global population, and adapting to changes in climate. This volume presents fresh analysis on global trends and sources of productivity growth in agriculture and offers new perspectives on the drivers of that growth. It argues that gains from the reallocation of land and labor are not as promising as believed, so policy needs to focus more on the generation and dissemination of new technologies, which requires stepping up national research efforts. Yet, in many of the poorest nations, a serious research spending gap has emerged precisely at the time when the challenges faced by agriculture are intensifying. The book focuses on how this problem can be redressed in the public sector, as well as on reforms aimed at mobilizing new private sector actors and value chains, particularly creating a better enabling environment, reforming trade regulations, introducing new products, and strengthening intellectual property rights. On the demand side, the book examines what recent research reveals about policies to reduce the barriers impeding smallholder farmers from adopting new technologies. Harvesting Prosperity is the fourth volume of the World Bank Productivity Project, which seeks to bring frontier thinking on the measurement and determinants of productivity to global policy makers. “As rightly argued by the authors, growth in agricultural productivity is the essential instrument to promote development in low-income agriculture-based countries. Achieving this requires research and development, upgrading of universities, reinforcement of farmer capacities, removal of constraints to adoption, and the development of inclusive value chains with interlinked contracts. As important, such efforts also need to be placed within a context of comprehensive agricultural, rural, and structural transformations. However, in many countries implementation of the requisite policies has been lagging. This book, with contributions from many top experts in the field, provides the most up-to-date presentation of this argument and explains in detail how to successfully put its ideas into practice. Governments, the private sector, and civil society organizations need to study it carefully to turn the promise of agriculture for development into a reality.“ Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet Professors of the Graduate School, University of California at Berkeley
Rat Island rises from the icy gray waters of the Bering Sea, a mass of volcanic rock covered with tundra, midway between Alaska and Siberia. Once a remote sanctuary for enormous flocks of seabirds, the island gained a new name when shipwrecked rats colonized, savaging the nesting birds by the thousands. Now, on this and hundreds of other remote islands around the world, a massive-and massively controversial-wildlife rescue mission is under way. Islands, making up just 3 percent of Earth's landmass, harbor more than half of its endangered species. These fragile ecosystems, home to unique species that evolved in peaceful isolation, have been catastrophically disrupted by mainland predators-rats, cats, goats, and pigs ferried by humans to islands around the globe. To save these endangered islanders, academic ecologists have teamed up with professional hunters and semiretired poachers in a radical act of conservation now bent on annihilating the invaders. Sharpshooters are sniping at goat herds from helicopters. Biological SWAT teams are blanketing mountainous isles with rat poison. Rat Island reveals a little-known and much-debated side of today's conservation movement, founded on a cruel-to-be-kind philosophy. Touring exotic locales with a ragtag group of environmental fighters, William Stolzenburg delivers both perilous adventure and intimate portraits of human, beast, hero, and villain. And amid manifold threats to life on Earth, he reveals a new reason to hope.
Does what economies export matter for development? If so, can industrial policies improve on the export basket generated by the market? This book approaches these questions from a variety of conceptual and policy viewpoints. Reviewing the theoretical arguments in favor of industrial policies, the authors first ask whether existing indicators allow policy makers to identify growth-promoting sectors with confidence. To this end, they assess, and ultimately cast doubt upon, the reliability of many popular indicators advocated by proponents of industrial policy. Second, and central to their critique, the authors document extraordinary differences in the performance of countries exporting seemingly identical products, be they natural resources or 'high-tech' goods. Further, they argue that globalization has so fragmented the production process that even talking about exported goods as opposed to tasks may be misleading. Reviewing evidence from history and from around the world, the authors conclude that policy makers should focus less on what is produced, and more on how it is produced. They analyze alternative approaches to picking winners but conclude by favoring 'horizontal-ish' policies--for instance, those that build human capital or foment innovation in existing and future products that only incidentally favor some sectors over others.
Dwayne Cox and William Morison trace the twists and turns of the University of Louisville's two hundred year journey from provincial academy to national powerhouse. From the 1798 charter that established Jefferson Seminary to the 1998 opening of Papa John Stadium, Cox and Morison reveal the unique and fascinating history of the university's evolution. They discuss the early failures to establish a liberal arts college; tell the extraordinary story of the Louisville Municipal College, U of L's separate division for African Americans during the era of segregation; detail the political wrangling and budgetary struggles of the university's move from quasi-private to state-supported institution; and confront head-on the question of the university's founding date. The history of the University of Louisville defies the stereotype of orderly and planned growth. For many years, the university was essentially a consortium of two professional schools -- medicine and law. Not until the first decade of the twentieth century did the liberal arts gain a firm and permanent foothold. Because of its early emphasis on practical, professional education and the virtual autonomy of its separate units for many years, the University of Louisville is unusual in the annals of higher education.
Place matters for productivity and prosperity. Myriad factors support a successful place, including not only the hard infrastructure such as roads, but also the softer elements such as worker skills, entrepreneurial ability, and well-functioning institutions. History suggests that prosperous places tend to persist, while “left behind†? regions, or those hurt by climatic, technological, or commercial shocks, struggle to catch up. This division gives rise to demands to “do something†? about the subsequent spatial inequality. Such pressures often result in costly spatially targeted policies whose outcomes disappoint because of a lack of analysis of the underlying barriers to growth and structural transformation and a fair appraisal of the possibility of overcoming them. The latest volume of the World Bank Productivity Project series, Place, Productivity, and Prosperity: Revisiting Spatially Targeted Policies for Regional Development makes three broad contributions. First, it provides new analytical and empirical insights into the three drivers of economic geography—agglomeration economies, migration, and distance—and the way in which they interact. Second, it argues that these forces are playing out differently in developing countries than they have in advanced countries: urbanization is not accompanied by structural transformation, leaving cities simply crowded and accruing all the negative aspects of urbanization without being productively concentrated. Long-term amelioration of poverty in lagging regions requires advancing the overall national agenda of structural change and productivity growth. Third, the volume provides a heuristic framework with which to inform policy makers’ assessments of place-based policy proposals, enabling them to identify the regions in which policy is likely to have an impact and those that are nonviable; to clarify the implications of various policy options; to think critically about policy design priorities, including necessary complementary policies to, for instance, infrastructure investment; and to navigate implementation challenges.
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