Using a unique dataset obtained from rural Andhra Pradesh, India that contains direct observations of household access to credit and detailed time use, results of this study indicate that credit market failures result in a substantial reallocation of time use pattern by children, leading to a significant increase in remunerative work and a similarly significant decrease in leisure time. While the direct impact on schooling time per se does not appear to be large, longer work and shorter leisure could arguably constrain effective learning opportunities of children, hampering human capital formation.

Over the past two decades, global inequality changed little despite significant structural shifts. Sustained growth in China and India lifted millions out of poverty, while many African countries fell behind. This paper assesses the distribution effects of a continuation of these trends. Growth in China and India will still drive the convergence of per capita incomes at the global level. Millions of Chinese and Indian consumers will join the global middle class. However, these positive developments will be somewhat offset by widening income disparities within countries, as fast growth is often characterized by high urbanization and growing demand for skills.

This article examines the potential contribution of regional financing arrangements (RFAs) to the stability of the international monetary and financial system. To gauge the quality of an RFA, we establish a set of “optimal financing criteria” relevant for providing crisis financing using a first principles approach. We then evaluate the frameworks for the main regional arrangements for emerging markets in existence against these criteria. The results suggest that the design and operation of RFAs determine the extent to which they can help prevent and alleviate crises and thereby contribute to global financial stability.

This is not the first moment during the last half century when debates about a global reserve asset have assumed a prominent place on the international public policy agenda. Discussions of global reserve reform were extensive in the lead up to the creation of the SDR in 1969 and soon afterwards, and then again during the late 1970s. In these earlier episodes, political interest in global reserve reform was relatively short-lived, responding to temporary instability in the global monetary system. This article argues that political interest this time around is likely to be more long-lasting because it reflects three distinct structural concerns about the existing reserve system simultaneously, each of which is likely to continue to attract political attention in the coming years. These concerns relate to reserve growth, reserve switching and equity issues. The fact that these concerns are not likely to disappear soon does not guarantee that significant global reserve reform will take place, but it should provide advocates with more time to press their case.

Advocates of capital market liberalization argue that it leads to greater stability: countries faced with a negative shock borrow from the rest of the world, allowing cross-country smoothing. There is considerable evidence against this conclusion. This paper explores one reason: integration can exacerbate contagion; a failure in one country can more easily spread to others. It derives conditions under which such adverse effects overwhelm the putative positive effects. It explains how capital controls can be welfare enhancing, reducing the risk of adverse effects from contagion. This paper presents an analytic framework within which we can begin to address broader questions of optimal economic architectures.

In financial markets with asymmetric information about mean returns, borrowers with different default risks may pay the same rate of interest. If they do, the marginal borrower will have a high-risk, negative-value project. Under some conditions, technological change that increases each entrepreneur's output will attract a new set of negative-value projects. This adverse selection process will erode the ability rents of the inframarginal borrowers. I present an example in which it destroys the market. The results imply that a boom in a sector can lead to a crisis if institutional change to solve the screening problem does not occur.

Public finance pressures are a central concern in developing countries. With large informal economies, the tax base is narrow and the resulting revenue on average only about half the fraction of GDP seen in developed countries. In response to the resulting tax distortions favoring the informal sector, countries commonly impose a variety of restrictions favoring the formal sector and hindering the entry of new firms that likely join the informal sector. While these policies help protect the country's tax base, they also unfortunately can hinder economic growth, by discouraging entrepreneurial activity.The experiences in China show this trade off dramatically. When restrictions on firm entry were eliminated, economic growth rates jumped but tax revenue fell by two-thirds, since the growth largely took place in sectors that were hard to tax.How should a country then handle these revenue costs of growth-promoting policies? The choices are few: cut expenditures, borrow in the hopes of higher revenue in the future, come up with new sources of revenue such as user fees, or undertake only partial reforms that yield some growth but also help preserve the existing tax base. The paper argues that the latter approach is likely to be the most successful, in spite of the lower resulting growth rate.