The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition articles from March 2002

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition archives from March 2002

Editors' summary.
March 22, 2002... THE BROOKINGS PANEL on Economic Activity held its seventy-third conference in Washington, D.C., on April 4 and 5, 2002. This issue of Brookings Papers on Economic Activity includes the papers and discussions presented at the conference. The...

Catching up with the leaders: The Irish hare.(Statistical Data Included)
March 22, 2002... FOR MANY DECADES Ireland's output per capita ranked about twenty-fourth among the world's industrial nations. Suddenly, in the mid-1990s Ireland started to move up, from twenty-second in 1993 to eighteenth in 1997 and an amazing ninth in 1999....

Current unemployment, historically contemplated.(Statistical Data Included)
March 22, 2002... ELEVEN YEARS AGO, our Brookings Paper "Why Has the Natural Rate of Unemployment Increased over Time?" analyzed long-term changes in joblessness among American men. (1) We documented the dramatic rise between 1967 and 1989 in both unemployment...

Intangible assets: computers and organizational capital.(Statistical Data Included)
March 22, 2002... IN DEVELOPED ECONOMIES, production requires not only such traditional factors as capital and labor but also skills, organizational structures and processes, culture, and other factors collectively referred to as "intangible assets." Detailed...

The recent recession, the current recovery, and stock prices.
March 22, 2002... As OF APRIL 2002 THE signs of economic recovery are sprouting like spring flowers. The United States has emerged from the short but painful winter that followed the burst of the asset bubble in early 2000 and the anxiety caused by the events of...

First world governments and third world debt.
March 22, 2002... FIRST MEXICO, THEN Asia, then Russia and Brazil. Now Argentina and Turkey. As always when financial, crises occur, questions arise about whether first world governments should change their role in the restructuring of third world debt, by...

Resolving the debt crisis of low-income countries.(Statistical Data Included)
March 22, 2002... THE IDEA OF BANKRUPTCY FOR insolvent sovereign borrowers has been around a long time, at least since Adam Smith' s favorable mention of it in the Wealth of Nations. (1) Kenneth Rogoff and Jeromin Zettelmeyer have recently reviewed the history...

Sovereigns in distress: do they need bankruptcy?
March 22, 2002... SHOULD THERE BE a sovereign bankruptcy procedure for countries in financial distress? This paper explores the use of U.S. bankruptcy law as a model for a sovereign bankruptcy procedure and asks whether adoption of such a procedure would lead to...

Do we need a new bankruptcy regime?
March 22, 2002... RECENTLY THE DEBATE on the reform of the international financial architecture has centered on the development of an appropriate mechanism or regime to ensure orderly sovereign debt restructurings. Recent cases involving sovereign bonded debt...

How would a new bankruptcy regime help?
March 22, 2002... A KEV ISSUE IN THE debate over reform of the international financial system is whether to adopt a new international bankruptcy regime for sovereign debt, and an important aspect of that debate is the lack of consensus about the problems that...

Debt restructuring: evolution or revolution?
March 22, 2002... THE PAPERS BY BULOW, Sachs, and White illustrate the interconnections inherent in most important economic policy issues, not least those concerning the structure of the international financial system. One of the most timely of these issues is...