The Corruption Nexus and the People’s Republic of China: Current Thinking on Causes and Consequences.
A volume of research findings originally presented to the Department of Defense (Office of Net Assessment) on the impact of corruption on China’s economic, social, and political development.
|
Russia's Agricultural Policy Negotiations with the WTO: Are Institutional Rigidities Preventing Gains from Further Trade Lib.
In this paper we argue that the late start and relatively lengthy negotiations over the country’s agricultural policies have contributed to the delay of the Russia's WTO membership application.
|
Regulation of Payday Lenders in the United States.
An analysis of payday lending (PDL) transactions in the U.S., exploring the boom in PDL and the role of regulatory gaps, and current regulation and reform initiatives. Also explains the significance of PDL for South Africa's money-lending explosion.
|
Subsistence Agriculture in Russia: Representation of an Informal Sector in a Formal Economic Model.
It analyzes the role of subsistence-oriented agriculture in Russia in the 1990s.
|
The Relationship Between Legal Reform, Donor Aid, and International NGO Development in Transition Economies.
An explanation of the growth and legal impact of NGOs by disentangling the contributions of economic forces, donor aid, and the legal environment in the so-called “transition” econ-omies of Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union.
|
Retirement, Human Capital, and the Value of Life Span Extension.
An examination of the effects of an extension in life expectancy on retirement, education, and human captial investment.
|
Consistency of Choice and Non-constant Discounting.
Showing that uncertainty over hazard rates may lead to non constant discounting but not imply dynamically inconsistent behavior.
|
On the Share of Health in GDP.
Showing that as incomes rise, it may be optimal for society to spend a larger share of income on health expenditures.
|
Confronting the Institutional Obstacles to Trade Liberalization and its Benefits to SMEs.
By proposing options for institutional reform and the associated initial conditions, likely to be requirements for effectiveness, this paper illustrates how to apply the HPI framework to a USAID programmatic area.
|
Trade Liberalization: Winners and Losers, Successes and Failures: Implications for SMEs.
Identifying the types of trade liberalization policies, providing a summary of experience, and designating six of the obstacles to trade liberalization .
|
The New Institutional Economics Approach to Economic Development — An Analytic Primer.
By aligning the incentives of agents with the interests of principals, and improving information flows about actions and outputs can improve outcomes. Using Williamson’s hierarchy of institutions, the author introduces several conceptual ideas and theoretical insights from the New Insitutional Economics.
|
Incentives, Institutions, and Development Assistance.
Current thinking in development emphasizes institutions and their impact on incentives. This paper argues that a similar perspective is needed in examining development assistance.
|
Harnessing the Power of Incentives.
Before it reaches the targeted beneficiary, a development activity has to pass through the hands of many actors, each with their own objectives and idiosyncratic incentives (which may not be aligned with those of the donor). At the same time, many of these actors have skills and information that could contribute to the success of the activity. This paper lays out a series of practical steps to understand and harness incentives — and improve program effectiveness.
|
Systematic Planning for Export Marketing: A Must For Bangladesh's SMEs.
World markets are diverse, dynamic and competitive. Exporters in developing countries do not stand a chance to enter them without careful preparation and planning. Lack of just such preparation and planning is a major reason for the stagnation in export growth in many otherwise promising sectors in Bangladesh. Firms seeking to export to international markets must have a thorough and well-planned entry strategy and implementation plan before targeting any new market.
|
The Lens of Contract: Applications to Economic Development and Reform.
This paper examines economic development and reform through the lens of contract.
|
Making Aid Smart: Institutional Incentives facing Donor Organizations and their Implications for Aid Effectiveness.
Providing seven suggestions to aid agencies on how to make aid "smarter" in order to become more effective and to demonstrate their effectiveness.
|
Governance and Growth: Measurement and Evidence.
Describes the gradual accumulation of indicators and evidence of the links between governance and growth, focusing on broad cross-country analyses. It discusses the need for more institutionally-specific and transparently constructed governance indicators, and summarizes progress in identifying and collecting these “second generation” indicators.
|
Market Modernization and Median Democracy.
It reports on the economic analysis of law and norms as it pertains to
economic development.
|
Understanding and Measuring Social Capital: A Synthesis of Findings from the Social Capital Initiative.
A simple conceptual framework for apprehending the concept of social capital. Also includes a synthesis of the SCI studies, which have shown, using quantitative as well as qualitative analytical approaches, that social capital can have a major impact on the income and welfare of the poor by improving the outcome of activities that affect them.
|
Assessing the Value of Law in Transition Economies.
A compilation of essays that examine the role of legal and institutional measures in economic reform programs. Compiled from an IRIS research conference held in March 1999.
|
Contracting Practices in an African Economy: Industrial Firms and Suppliers in Tanzania.
Shedding light on the role of legal institutions in economic development through an examination of contract enforcement practices by industrial firms and their suppliers in Tanzania.
|
A New Institutional Approach to Economic Development.
New Institutional Economics analyzes issues in economic development using a multi-disciplinary approach. This book explores examples from developing and developed countries to examine the interaction between political, economic, legal, and social forces, with a particular focus on India.
|
Bolivian Customs Reform: A Case Study of Consolidating Democratic Institutions.
This study reviews the early stages of reform of corrupt Bolivian customs stressing the background of customs corruption in politics and economy, and the story of the reform process.
|
Changing Hands: A Case Study of Financial Sector Governance in Hungary’s Market Transition.
Post-socialist transition environments present severe and intractable problems. In Hungary, reformers faced a stew of hazy corporate networks, official cronyism, and corruption. This case study details how Hungary faced these problems, as well as a series of painful changes, and created one of the strongest financial systems in the region.
|
Enterprise Restructuring in Transition: A Quantitative Survey.
Providing new insights into the relative effectiveness of different reform policies, and how this effectiveness varies across regions.
|
Secured Credit for Jobs and Economic Growth.
Examining the weaknesses of substantive law in Bangladesh relating to movable property financing. The report outlines concrete policies that would improve the legal climate for movable property financing law.
|
Social Capital and Rural Development: A Literature Review.
This paper reviews selected issues relating to rural development, including common property and risk management, productivity, marketing, and vertical relations. A conclusion draws upon the positive as well as negative experiences with social capital in rural development.
|
Does Foreign Aid Promote Democracy?.
An analysis of the impact of aid on democratization in a large sample of recipient nations over the 1975-96 period. Uses several alternative democracy indexes and measures of aid intensity to locate evidence that aid promotes democracy.
|
Zambian Laws Affecting Microfinance: Review and Recommendations for Reform.
Microfinance institutions (MFIs) have emerged around the world in response to the need for deeper financial service provision in developing economies. Typically, not only are laws outmoded and sometimes detrimental to the responsible growth of microfinance services, but there is also much confusion regarding the need for supportive legislation.
|
Agricultural Extensions in Mali: Trust and Social Cohesion.
Social capital may be seen as interpersonal trust expressed through the relationships that exist among a society’s members, its institutions and organizations. The manner in which people relate to each other in and through the institutions that affect their lives helps determine the quality of those lives and the degree to which they will improve them. Given the fundamental quality of trust as it affects an institution's ability to help people realize their aspirations, development becomes more effective wh
|
The Effects of Social Capital on Technology Adoption: Evidence from Rural Tanzania.
This paper develops and tests a model of technology adoption which predicts that the probability of adoption is increasing in household-level human capital and land endowments and village-level adoption patterns and social capital.
|
Does Development Assistance Help Build Social Capital?.
There is by now a large literature on the importance of social capital in explaining social, political and economic outcomes.
|
Induced Social Capital and Federations of the Rural Poor.
Poor people's organizations embody a particular and important form of structural social capital.
|
A Not-so-Dismal Science: A Broader View of Economies and Societies.
This classic book shows how other social science disciplines make use of economic methods and theories and in turn influence economic thinking. Many of the greatest ideas of modern economics have arisen outside of the traditional boundaries of the discipline.
|
Power and Prosperity.
IRIS founder Mancur Olson was famous for providing simple and insightful answers to broad economic questions. His famous Logic of Collective Action first analyzed how interest groups influence and subvert public policy. Power and Prosperity, completed just before his death in 1998, takes on the broadest questions of his career: What sort of government best promotes economic well-being? How can governments best "augment" market structures?
|
Institutional Determinants of the Impact of Community-Based Water Services: Evidence from Sri Lanka and India.
An analysis of selected institutional determinants of impact and performance of community-based water services financed by three World Bank-financed projects in Sri Lanka and India.
|
Exploring the Concept of Social Capital and its Relevance for Community-based Development: The Case of Coal Mining Areas in.
The paper explores the concept of social capital through two coal mining areas in the state of Orissa, India.
|
The Optimal Number of Governments for Economic Development.
An examination of how replacing "broad, deep" governments with "shallow, narrow" governments increases stability and reduces corruption.
|
What Does Social Capital Add to Individual Welfare?.
The purpose of this paper is to test the instrumental significance of social capital empirically.
|
What Determines the Effectiveness of Community-Based Water Projects? Evidence from Central Java, Indonesia, on Demand Respon.
Why have some water services financed by community-based water projects succeeded, and why have others failed? To address this question, quantitative and qualitative data were collected in Central Java, Indonesia from 44 villages with water services that were funded by such projects.
|
Social Capital in Solid Waste Management: Evidence from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
This paper seeks to identify the role played by social capital in the private, community-based provision of a public good, in this case, trash collection.
|
Social Capital and the Firm: Evidence from Agricultural Trade.
Social capital is seldom used in the modeling of economic production processes. However, the returns to social capital in a real world with transaction costs might be as important as to labor and physical or human capital.
|
What Determines the Effectiveness of Community-Based Water Projects? Evidence from Central Java, Indonesia, on Demand Responsive.
Examining the performance and impact of water services financed by community-based water projects in Central Java, Indonesia associated with demand-responsiveness and existence of mechanisms to monitor household contributions to construction and operations and maintenance.
|
Ethnicity, Capital Formation, and Conflict.
Ethnicity plays an ambiguous role in the great transformation. On the one hand, ethnicity creates: by providing incentives that organize the flow of resources across generations, it provides the capital for urban migration and the acquisition of skills for industrial employment.
|
Market-Mobilized Capital.
Does commercial law reform payoff in terms of financial market development and economic growth?
|
Aid Dependence and Quality of Governance: An Empirical Analysis.
By analyzing cross-country data, this paper provides evidence that higher aid levels erode the quality of governance, as measured by indexes of bureaucratic quality, corruption, and the rule of law.
|
Mapping and Measuring Social Capital: A Conceptual and Empirical Study of Collective Action for Conserving and Developing Wa.
The project described in this paper stratified villages in Rajasthan watersheds in terms of high, medium or low performance in their restoration of degraded or vulnerable common lands.
|
Does Social Capital Matter in Rural Water Delivery? A Review of Literature.
The objective of this paper is to explore the role of social capital in community-based rural water and urban sanitation delivery.
|
Failures in Governance: Restrictions on the Dominion of Markets.
Two singularly lucid articles written 40 years ago summarized the then accumulated wisdom of welfare economics as to when and whether a government should intervene in the allocative workings of the private economy.
|
Social Capital, Growth and Poverty: A Survey and Extensions.
This paper surveys the major contributions to the rapidly growing empirical literature on social capital and economic performance, focusing primarily on cross-country approaches.
|
Is Social Capital an Effective Smoke Condenser?.
Social capital is defined as mutual trust. It is related to production by a key hypothesis: social capital determines how easily people work together. Social capital might be a new production factor which must be added to human and physical capital, or it might enter as a reduction in either transaction or monitoring costs.
|
Does Social Capital Facilitate the Poor's Access to Credit? A Review of the Microeconomic Literature.
This literature review examines the empirical evidence on the relationship between social capital and the performance of credit delivery programs in the developing world.
|
Napoleon, Bourses, and Growth: With a Focus on Latin America.
Stock markets are not merely casinos. A growing body of research suggests that access to well-functioning stock markets helps spur economic development.
|
Sufficient Conditions for Rapid Convergence.
Showing how poor countries that follow four basic policies—trade openness, protecting property right, investing in human capital, and controlling inflation—converge rapidly to the living standards of rich countries.
|
Governance Aspects of the East Asian Financial Crisis.
The authors attempt to show how poor political governance in Indonesia and other East Asian countries, compounded by poor corporate and financial governance and inadequate international financial governance, created the financial crisis of 1997. Each type of governance is discussed in a principal-agent framework, and possible reforms are considered.
|
Market-Augmenting Governent? States and the Corporations in Early Nineteenth Century America.
This paper discusses American corporate policy in the 19th century.
|
The Interactions of Donors, Contractors and Recipients in Aid Projects.
Examining the roles of contractors, donors, and recipients in foreign aid programs and suggesting the applications of existing theories to the successful organization of foreign assistance.
|
Some Basic Ways Good Law, Good Legal Institutions, and Sound Principles of the Rule of Law Can Help Augment Markets.
A summary of the elementary rudiments of how contract law and related law, good in form and good in content, can help augment markets in developing economies.
|
Biosphere, Markets, and Governments.
This paper deals with two cases adopting different routes, the Montreal and Kyoto protocols. The former embodies the classic regulatory approach, dictating what can and cannot be done. The latter is centered much more about economics incentives generated by a market. It seeks to internalize externalities by creating and distributing property rights where none previously existed and then allowing these to be traded. the market here is central and is government created. The same is true of the markets in the
|
Does Social Capital Matter in Water and Sanitation Delivery? A Review of Literature.
Analyzing the role of social capital in community-based irrigation, rural drinking water, and urban sanitation delivery by reviewing the relevant literature.
|
Do Competition and Ownership Affect Enterprise Efficiency in the Absence of Market Institution? Evidence After Privatization.
Mongolia's mass privatization program was implanted in a country that lacked the very basic institutions of capitalism.
|
Social Capital: Conceptual Frameworks and Empirical Evidence--An Annotated Bibliography.
This paper reviews the major contribution to the conceptual and empirical literatures on social capital and offers more than 30 summaries of seminal works.
|
Social Capital and Poverty.
Paul Collier investigates the concept of social capital from an economic perspective. He suggests that social capital is 'social' because it generates externalities arising from social interaction, and it is 'capital' only if its effects persist.
|
Secured Finance for SMEs in Bangladesh.
Modern secured finance mechanisms offer a powerful means of mobilizing the value of a broad range of capital as a loan security, and thereby creating profitable opportunities for a wide spectrum of potential users and providers of financial services in Bangladesh.
|
Pragmatic Solutions for Post Flood Rehabilitation in Bangladesh.
Small enterprises in the Dhaka area were badly damaged by the 1998 flood. This paper reviews the damage incurred in the worse effected areas around Dhaka and presents several actions that may be taken to assist these enterprises to recover from the losses incurred in the flood.
|
Trust and Growth.
A presentation of a general equilibrium growth model in which an assortment of agents transact and face a moral hazard problem.
|
Governance and Growth: A Simple Hypothesis Explaining Cross-Country Differences in Productivity Growth.
Authors settle the argument that to explain why the fastest growing countries are a subset of developing countries, while at the same time having no tendency for general convergence, it is necessary to focus on the quality of governance.
|
Understanding Rural Institutions.
A discussion of the importance of institutions and instututional arrangements for agricultural and rural development, illuminating how one may approach institutional analyses in the rural section.
|
The Allocation of Publicly-Provided Goods to Rural Households in India: On Some Consequences of Caste, Religion and Democracy.
Drawing on characteristics of India's institutional structure and the implications of existing literature to address the question: What determines the allocation of publicly-provided goods to rural households in India?
|
The Relationship Between Economic Growth and the Speed of Liberalization During Transition.
Usding exisiting results, examining the simultaneous relationship between growth and speed of liberalization during transition.
|
The Forgotten Rationale for Policy Reforms: The Productivity of Investment Projects.
Using economic rates of return from World Bank-funded investments to investigate how country characteristics and policies that influence aggregate performance affect investment productivity.
|
Which Enterprises (Believe They) Have Soft Budgets after Mass Privatization? Evidence from Mongolia.
To ascertain the prevalence of soft budgets and to find causes of softness, we surveyed 251 privatized Mongolian enterprises, asking whether state aid was expected when financial difficulties arose.
|
Improving the Delivery of Water and Sanitation: A Model of Coproduction of Infrastructure Services.
Analyzing how the performance of coproduction depends on the behavior of community memebers and civil servants administering the program, and how such behavior can be influenced by proper incentive mechanisms.
|
Enterprise-State Relations After Mass Privatization: Their Character in Mongolia.
A changing relationship between state and enterprise is one central element in the economic reforms of post-socialist countries.
|
Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff? A Cross-Country Investigation.
Presenting evidence that “social capital” matters for measurable economic performance, using indicators of trust and civic norms from the World Values Surveys for a sample of 29 market economies.
|
Determinants of Lasting Democracy in Poor Countries.
One of the most widely recognized and empirically documented findings in social science is the association between a country's level of economic development and the democratic character of its political institutions.
|
Why Don't Poor Countries Catch Up? A Cross-National Test of an Institutional Explanation.
Using various indicators of institutional quality, including the rule of law, the pervasiveness of corruption, and the risk of expropriation and contract repudiation, to show that the ability of poor countries to catch up is determined in large part by the institutional environment in which economic activity in these countries takes place.
|
Observations on the Use of Law by Russian Enterprises.
An analysis of the extent to which enterprises use law and legal institutions in structuring exchange relations, completed by four specialists on the Russian economy.
|
Decentralized Public Finance and Effective Governance in West Africa.
An analysis of public finance and governance issues in West Africa that places research findings within a broader comparative context, while reviewing the literature on decentralized public finance in developing nations. The paper provides a series of parameters for assessing fiscal decentralization and its accompanying system of accountability.
|
La Fraude Douaniere au Tchad: Une Approche Pratique au Controle.
Ce rapport prdsente une approche pratique au contr6le de la fraude douanibre au Tchad.
|
The Impact of Ownership on the Grameen Bikas Banks' Current and Future Performance.
Under funding by USAID/‘Nepal through the IRIS project, a team of consultants was hired from December 1996 to February 1997 to assess the performance of the majority governmentowned Grameen Bikas Banks (GBBs) in Nepal, and to determine whether a change in their ownership might make them more effective. The consultancy team consisted of two members:Dr. Muzammel Huq, General Manager of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, and Mr. Peter BUVIIZ, economist and financial analyst from SRI International in the United St
|
Efficiency and Equity in Public Investment in Education in India.
This paper discusses the efficiency and equity of public investment in education in India.
|
Nepal: Changing Laws and Regulations to Improve Access to Credit by the Poor.
This report sets out several recommendations that would permit such an expansion of access to credit in Nepal. These recommendations apply to both institutions that specialize in micro-lending and to other lenders and creditors that might provide micro-credits.
|
Towards Collective Action for State Funding of Elections? A Comparative Perspective on Possible Options.
This paper explores the issue of state funding for elections in India with a collective action perspective, focusing on the incentives for political behavior created by various political reforms.
|
Political Institutions and Economic Reform: Lessons from the Indian Experience.
The paper analyses India’s stabilization and structural adjustment program since mid-1991 to advance the theorizing on the politics of adjustment in democratic developing countries.
|
Policy on Small Scale Industries in India and Structure, Growth and Productivity of SSI Sector.
Given that the development of small-medium enterprises is desirable on both allocative efficiency and equity considerations, particularly in the new technological and market scenario, what are the major policy instruments available to governments to promote the small medium sector?
|
Institutions and Economic Development.
The puzzles of economic development and post-communist transitions, according to Christopher Clague and his colleagues, can be illuminated by a serious economic analysis of institutions.
|
Opportunism Knocks?: Legal Institutions, Contracting, and Economic Performance in Africa.
The decision to exchange and enter into a contract depends on the existence of reliable institutions that can ensure compliance with the terms of contract. In other words, the nature of contracting institutions determines the transactions an individual is ready to assume.
|
Indigenous Institutions and Industrial Development in Eastern Nigeria.
Nigerian industrial promotion policies in the first few postindependance decades were dominated by two main strategies: the promotion of local participation in previously foreign dominated industries, and the general protection of industries through trade policies.
|
Electoral Systems and Fragmentation: The Indian Experience.
The main purpose of this paper is to compare the actual fractionalization in state legislatures with the extent of fractionalization which would have occurred in legislatures elected under PR systems.
|
Trade Protection in India: Economics vs. Politics?.
This paper investigates economic and political determinants of protection across the secondary (manufacturing) sector.
|
Improving Income Tax Policy and Administration in India: The Need for Institutional Reform.
This study utilizes a panel data analysis of Indian income tax returns to answer two critical questions.
|
Economic and Political Determinants of Inflation Rates: An Empirical Investigation Using a Panel Data Set.
The objective of this paper is to empirically investigate the impact of economic and political variables, that have been suggested as important in the theoretical literature, in determing inflation.
|
Fertility, Literacy, and the Institution of Child Labour.
The paper demonstrates how the institution of child labor can generate a poverty trap when fertility is driven by the need for old-age security.
|
Regional Poverty and Access to Public Services in India.
This study analyzes the extent of access to public social services the poor have in different regions in rural India based on the National Sample Survey data (42nd round) at the household level.
|
Center-State Relations in India and Brazil: Privatization of Electricity and Banking.
This paper uses four focused case studies to explore the following question: “When and why do state governments oppose (or support} privatization programs initiated by the central government?”
|
The Food Corporation of India: Successes and Failures in Indian Foodgrain Marketing.
This paper evaluates the role and performance of the Food Corporation of India in Indian foodgrain marketing.
|
Economic Reforms and Agricultural Parastatals: The Cotton Corporation of India and Maharashtra Federation.
This paper examines the performance of several parastatals in India.
|
Rational Pricing of Electric Power in India.
Outlining the standards and criteria that should be adopted to evaluate electric pricing policies and determining whether electric pricing policies in India meet the standard tests of a sound pricing policy.
|
The Political Economy of Privatization in India.
Why has privatization not made much of a headway in India? This paper attempts to answer this question and in so doing it explores the political economy aspects of the privatization process in India.
|
Property and Contract Rights in Autocracies and Democracies.
The debate on whether democratic or authoritarian government is more favorable to economic performance has been inconclusive with respect to both theory and empirical evidence.
|
Privatization and India's Economc Reforms.
Despite the early success of India’s economic reform program, the public sector deficit continues to pose a major threat to the vitality of the Indian economy.
|
The Design of Decision Making: A Study in Economic Administration with Special Reference to Indian Economic Reform.
Decision-making structures in economic administration-can assume a variety of forms.
|
Financial Intermediaries, Rationing and Spillover in a Rural Credit Market in Chile: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis.
Chilean agriculture provides a useful case study of the rise of new intermediary structures, the development of markets for financial contract forms, and their impact on economic growth and distribution.
|
Group Lending, Moral Hazard, and the Creation of Social Collateral.
This paper proposes a simple but quite general framework that is useful for analyzing the design of, and choice between, different financial intermediary structures and contract forms in a rural credit market setting.
|
Can Technological Progress Lower Incomes? New Results on Lemons Models.
In many credit markets, borrowers have better information than lenders do about the risks that they face. If lenders cannot perfectly distinguish the riskiness of different borrowers at the moment of contracting, heterogeneous borrowers will be charged the same rate of interest. The implicit subsidy from the lowest risk borrowers to the highest risk borrowers may cause negative value projects to be financed in equillibrium.
|
Cuba’s Reforms: A New Institutional Economics Perspective.
Assessing the nature of developing market reforms in Cuba by looking at implications in terms of three related ideas about the operation of market economies.
|
Income Tax Enforcement in Spain.
Describing the system of income tax administration in Spain, including its evolution since 1978, and providing a summary of perspectives and directions of further changes that are necessary.
|
Industrial and Trade Policy Reforms in India.
An overview of the steps taken by the Government of India, from 1991 to 1996, to liberalize the country’s trade and industrial policies.
|
Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk: Why Some Nations Are Rich and Others are Poor.
An assistant professor is walking along with a full professor when he sees a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk. As he bends to pick it up, his senior colleague restrains him, pointing out that if the bill were real it would have already been picked up. This article discusses theories about the efficiency of markets, and how the differences between poor and rich countries test those theories.
|
The Health and Medical Sector in India: Potential Reforms and Problems.
The economic reform process begun in India in 1991 has not significantly affected the health sector.
|
Legal and Institutional Prerequisites of Market Reform in India.
The traditional attitude of international economic development research has treated the legal structure of a nation as superfluous.
|
Labor Markets as Social Institutions in India.
This paper traces the evolution of labor market institutions in India since Independence.
|
Returns to Scale in a Highly Regulated Economy: Evidence from Indian Firms.
This paper examines returns to scale for a panel of large Indian manufacturing firms spanning the period from 1976 to 1985.
|
Cultural Evolution and Constitutional Public Choice: Institutional Diversity and Economic Performance on American Indian Res.
This paper argues that the foundations of effective collective institutions rest on the processes of normative and positive acculturation of individuals, and we refer to socially shared normative and positive conceptions (or “norms”) of proper and feasible behavior in the realm of human action as “culture.”
|
Governance and the Economy in Africa: Tools for Analysis and Reform of Corruption.
This volume discusses the ways in which contemporary developing nations have begun to impose discipline on those holding power, and more importantly how African societities can do so more fully and on a more permanent basis.
|
Institutions and Economic Performance: Cross-Country Tests Using Alternative Institutional Measures.
Using alternative indicators provided by country risk evaluators to potential foreign investors, this study aims to quantify the relationship between institutions, investment, and growth.
|
The Varieties of Eurosclerosis: The Rise and Decline of Nations Since 1982.
Valuable as tehy are, conventional economic models have not succeeded in explaining the great differences in economic performance in different countries or historical periods.
|
On the Role of Informal Finance in Japan Its Prototype: Mujin (Rotating Finance) and It's Public Substitute: The Postal Savi.
This paper studies the economic role of two contrasting financial intermediaries in Japan.
|
The Role of State Governments in Fiscal Adjustments.
In this paper, an attempt is made to identify the problem areas in States’ revenue and expenditure policies and suggest policy changes needed to improve fiscal management in the States.
|
Institutions and Economic Performance: Cross-Country Tests Using Institutional measures.
Previous attempts to analyze empirically the impact of institutions on economic performance have employed only very crude proxies of property rights, such as Gastil’s indices of political freedoms and civil liberties, and frequencies of acts of political violence.
|
Institutions and the Convergence Hypothesis: The Cross-National Evidence [RP #68].
DeLong and others have shown that cross-country convergence in per capita incomes is limited to samples of currently-industrialized nations, or universal-literacy nations.
|
Economic Policymaking: The Nepal Experience.
This paper uses our experiences in the Economic Liberalization Project of USAID to point out factors that, have been important to the policy reform process in Nepal during the last four years.
|
Economic Policymaking: The Nepal Experience.
This paper uses our experiences in the Economic Liberalization project of USAID to point out factors that have been important to the policy reform process in Nepal during the last four years.
|
Mongolia: Avoiding Tragedy in the World's Largest Commons.
In Mongolia 300,000 nomadic people herd 25 million animals over an unfenced area twice the size of France.Current economic theories assert that efficiency requires privatizing land until the savings from reduced congestion equal the costs of exclusion.
|
Indian Fiscal Federalism: Political Economy and Issues for Reform.
India is a federal state where the institutions of fiscal federalism have been determined by a-complex political, social and economic history, in addition to the guidelines imposed by its constitution and legal institutions.
|
Reforming India's Technology Policies: Impacts of Liberalization on Self-Reliance and Welfare.
This paper reviews the history of India’s technology policies from independence to the present. The historical record indicates that while “self-reliance” has always been a prominent theme in India’s political arena alterations in India’s technology policies were always precipitated by foreign exchange crises.
|
Tax Amnesties in India: An Empirical Evaluation.
The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical estimates of the revenue impact of Indian income tax amnesties between 1965 and 1993.
|
Reforming Indian Income Tax Enforcement.
The purpose of this paper is to document and trace the causes of the poor and declining revenue performance of the income tax in India and to suggest measures for improvement based on a review of international experience.
|
The Hazard Rate of Political Regimes.
Political instability has long been an issue of interest among social scientists. There is widespread consensus that political stability is a necessary condition for growth and prosperity.
|
Recent Trends in Income Tax Administration in the CIAT Countries.
This paper reviews recent trends in income tax administration reforms in a group of countries belonging to ClAT.
|
Bureaucratic Structures and Economic Performance in Less Developed Countries.
Recent work in the sociology of economic development has emphasized the establishment of a professional government bureaucracy in place of political appointees as an important component of the institutional environment in which private enterprise can flourish.
|
Choosing a Dictator: Bureaucratic Structures and Welfare in Less Developed Polities.
Recent work in the sociology of economic development has emphasized the establishment of a professional government bureaucracy in place of political appointees as an important component of the institutional environment in which private enterprise can flourish
|
The Political Foundations of Modern Economic Growth, England 1540-1800.
Did political changes in Britain in the late seventeenth century create a stable property rights regime that established the pre-conditions for the Industrial Revolution?
|
The Land Market in Pre-Industrial Society: England and Wales, 1540-1837.
It is widely believed that land in pre-industrial societies was sought for status and political power as well as for material returns.
|
A Simple Analytic of a Selfish Hegemon.
This paper deals with the concept of hegemonic stability and Kindleberger's attributes leading to the main cause of the great depression after World War II.
|
A Theory of Ambiguous Property Rights in Transitional Economies.
A widely held belief in economics is that institutions of clearly defined property rights are the pre-conditions for economic prosperity. Based on this conventional wisdom, rapid privatization has been accepted as the main strategy of the post-socialist transition. The rest of the question is who should be the owner or who should enjoy property rights.
|
History vs. Policy: How Much Does Enterprise Governance Change After Mass Privatization?.
This paper explores the determinants of the configuration of decision-making power in large enterprises immediately following a mass privatization program.
|
Specialization and Co evolution of Agricultural Markets.
The study focuses on the evolution of agrarian labor markets with a view toward building up a coherent theory explaining some pervasive patterns in developing countries.
|
Breaking the Policy Gridlock on Grazing and Other Uses of Public Lands.
The purpose of this project was to relate one dimension of environmental variability, namely, the local variability of rainfall, to economic behavior and institutional choice. It did so in two quite different contexts, the American West and one country of tropical Africa (Sudan).
|
The Local Variability of Rainfall and Tribal Institutions: The Case of Sudan.
This paper develops and tests hypotheses relating rainfall variability to two aspects of tribal institutions: the degree of commonality in property rights and the degree of centralization or hierarchy.
|
Economic Reform in Nepal: A Cursory Assessment.
The paper proposes that the Government give immediate attention to fiscal austerity as well as to monitoring and supervision of the financial market.
|
Utility Regulation, Economic Development, and Political Stability: The Contrasting Cases of Argentina and Chile.
Healthy, lasting economic development cannot be achieved in the absence of long-run capital investment.
|
Politics and Economics of Mongolia's Privatization Program.
While decisions on the extent and speed of privatization are still very much at the center of the politics of reform in both Eastern Europe and the successor states of the Soviet Union, in Mongolia such decisions are now largely moot.
|
Institutions and Economic Growth: Evidence for Postwar Europe.
The quarter century after World War II was a golden age of European economic growth.
|
Tax Incidence in African Economies - Evidence from Cote D'Ivoire.
This paper discusses tax incidence in African economies, reporting incidence results from a numerical general equilibrium tax model for Cote D'Ivoire.
|
The Politics of Nuclear Power in Japan and the United States.
In this paper we attempt to explain the differences in the outcomes of utility regulation in two advanced countries, the United States and Japan. We find that in Japan, national regulation serves to subsidize electric utilities and electrical-equipment manufacturers.
|
Commercial Legal Institutions in the West Bank and Gaza.
An assessment of the commercial legal and regulatory environment in the West Bank and Gaza. Provides recommendations for reform.
|
Polarization, Property Rights and the Links Between Inequality and Growth.
We argue that social polarization reduces the security of property and contract rights and, through this channel, reduces growth.
|
Markets and Legal Systems: The Development of markets in Late Medieval Europe and the transition From Community Responsibili.
The division of labor, and hence economic efficiency, depends on the extent of the market.Yet, for an individual to participate in market exchange he has to expect that those with whom he is exchanging will fulfill their contractual obligations.
|
Book Review: Local Suppliers of Credit in Third World, 1750-1960.
The consensus within development economics on the importance of studying informal financial institutions is shifting. One view has been that such institutions are efficient and that therefore if we want to study how societies (without government intervention) allocate resources, we need only study efficient resource allocations. An alternative view that has recently attracted significant scholarly attention is that institutions, including informal financial institutions, that provide incentives to savers, p
|
Russia, Federalism, and Political Stability.
This essay has two parts -- a text in English and one in Russian. The Russian version is a translation of a slightly abbreviated form of the English text and will be published sometime this year in Russia (Siberian Academy of Science’s Regional Economics and Sociology).
|
If Hamilton and Madison Were Merely Lucky, What Hope is There for Russian Federalism?.
The swirl of events in Russia lead in too many contradictory directions, and make it difficult if not impossible to confidently render conclusions about the future direction of events, and, in particular, the prospects for meaningful federal domestic relations.
|
The Political Economy of Food Pricing: An Extended Empirical Test of the Interest Group Approach.
The proposition that industrialized countries implicitly subsidize their agricultural producers while less developed ones discriminate against them has pained widespread acceptance by agricultural economists and political scientists.
|
Successful Economic Development and heterogeneity of Governmental Form on American Indian Reservations.
While it is clear that the institutions of governance matter crucially to the economic development of reservations, there is a wide variety of institutional and constitutional forms among even successful reservations.
|
Prices, Distribution Services and Supermarket Competition.
An economic function of retail institutions is to provide consumers a set of distribution services together with the explicit goods and services purchased from these institutions.
|
Contract-Intensive Money: Contract Enforcement, Property Rights and Economic Performance.
Markets are commonplace in all types of societies, including the poorest. The less-developed countries today have a profusion of bazaars, shops, and people who bargain with skill.
|
One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict.
One for All is an effort to understand the sway of groups in our time.
|
Economic Reform and Smallholder Agriculture in Tanzania: A Discussion of Recent Market Liberalization, Road Rehabilitation,.
This paper discusses the reforms affecting Tanzania’s small-farm sector during 1984-93.
|
Social Capital and Development Capacity: The Example of Rural Tanzania.
Which came first, economic development or cultural change? The usual paradigm would appear to order causality as in the title of the periodical economic development leads to changes in attitudes and behaviours.
|
Russia's Stormy Path to Reform.
Russia's Stormy Path to Reform is areport of a high-level seminar held in Moscow between leading Russian, American and British thinkers and politicians to discuss the hopes, aims, constraints and possible outcomes of the reform process in the Russian Federation.
|
Bureaucracy and Economic Development.
This paper discusses the role of organizational performance in economic development.Public agencies that produce outputs that cannot be readily measured vary greatly in theirefficiency. Some countries have overcome the difficulties associated with poorly measured outputs-of public agencies and have established highly efficient civil se&es, f&owing strategies that are discussed in the paper. These efficient bureaucracies have contributed substantially to economic development, as illustrated in this paper by
|
A Solution to the Problem of Externalities When Agents are Well-Informed.
Consider an economic environment in which agents take actions that impose benefits or costs on other agents. The agents involved know the relevant technology and the tastes of all other agents. However the “ regulator,” or has the responsibility for determining the final allocation, does not have this information. How can the regulator design a mechanism that will implement an efficient allocation?
|
Capital Markets and Industrial Development: A Comparative Study of Brazil, India, Mexico, and the United States, 1840-1930.
This paper seeks to understand the conditions under which imperfections in capital markets may persist for long periods of time and the long-run efficiency consequences of those imperfections.
|
Transition, Constitution-Making, and Separation in Czechoslovakia.
This paper considers the constitutional developments in Czechoslovakia and the two successor states, the Czech and Slovak Republics.
|
Market Liberalization in New Zealand: The Interaction of Economic Reform and Political Institutions in a Pluralitarian Democ.
During the past decade, New Zealand has undergone radical economic and political reforms. In economics, what probably the country moved from having was most protected, regulated, and state-dominated economy of any capitalist democracy to an extreme position at the open, liberal, free-market end of the spectrum.
|
Capital Immobilities and Industrial Development: A Comparative Study of Brazil, Mexico, and the United States.
This paper builds upon my earlier papers on capital markets and industrial development. It argues that there is a strong relationship between the efficiency with which a country mobilized capital for industrial development and the industrial structure that country developed. Differences in capital market development were a function of government regulatory policies and the costs of obtaining information. The analysis suggests that the development of financial institutions is not endogenous to the process of
|
Political Explanations of Economic Decline: Evidence from New Zealand.
New Zealand's protracted relative (and sometimes absolute) economic decline offers an opportunity to apply and test political explanations of economic stagnation offered by two eminent theorists, Mancur Olson and the late William Riker.
|
Constitutional Reform and Social Difference in New Zealand.
The new electoral system adopted by New Zealand in 1993 includes a little-known arrangement designed to assure fair and effective representation of the indigenous Maori minority in Parliament.
|
Big Bang vs. Gradualism: Why Were Economist too Optimistic about the Transformation in Eastern Europe and USSR and Why Is th.
Most Western economists (the present writer inciuded) were too optimistic about the big-bang transformation in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union around the time of its commencement around 1989-l 992. Most expected only moderate falls of output and relatively quick and strong recovery and growth. The actual fails have been much iarger and with the exception of Poland, the recovery has yet to take place.
|
Tax Structure and Revenue Instability Under External Shocks: Some General Equilibrium Calculations for Cote D'Ivoire.
The paper presents some general equilibrium calculations for Cote d'Ivoire which explore the significance of tax structure for the relationship between external shocks and revenue instability.
|
An Open or Closed Technology Policy? The Effects of Technology Licenses, Foreign Direct Investment, and Domestic and Interna.
One of the chief objectives of the Indian government since independence has been to achieve technological self-reliance in the industrial sector, where “self-reliance” refers to the ability of Indian firms to invent and implement new technologies on their own without having to purchase such technologies from foreigners. To varying degrees over the past three decades, India has pursued this objective through the adoption of a “closed” technology policy designed to shield Indian firms from foreign influences
|
Recombinant Property in East European Capitalism.
The starting premise of this paper is that the greatest obstacle to understanding change in contemporary Eastern Europe is the concept of transition.
|
Some Surprising Analytics of Rural Credit Markets.
Throughout the developing world, governments and international donor agencies have focused on rural credit subsidies as a primary instrument of agricultural development and, allegedly, aid to the small farmer.
|
Family Safety Nets Economic Transition: A Case Study of Poland.
Can those Eastern European families who are most severely impoverished during the transition from socialism to capitalism rely on private family safety nets for support?
|
The Economics of Autocracy and Majority Rule: The Invisible Hand and the Use of Force.
Suppose that the leader of a group of roving bandits in an anarchic environment can seize and hold some territory. If the bandit leader becomes a settled ruler with a definite and secure domain.
|
The Political Economy of Under investment in LDC's.
A simple model of political economy is constructed to capture the following view: Owners of sector-specific factors form lobbies and influence the government policy to lighten their own tax burden even if it means a decline in public investment.
|
A Theory of Misgovernance.
This paper studies the determinants of government performance. The paper identifies two specific reasons for apparently poor government performance.
|
The Importance of Institutions in Long Term Growth.
|
The Role of Informal Finance in Household Capital Accumulation: Evidence from Taiwan.
The emergence of Taiwan as an industrial economy is one of the most striking phenomena of recent economic history.
|
Worsening Relative Wage Dispersion in Chile During Trade Liberalization: Supply or Demand Driven Inequality.
Determining the path, trends and causes of the wage gap between more and less educated workers.
|
A Note on Recent Policies for Higher Education in Chile.
Educational expansion at the primary and secondary levels tends to have an equalizing effect on the distribution of earnings for a given wage structure. However, the resulting change in relative supplies of labor
generates an offsetting increase in the wages of more educated workers relative to less educated workers.
|
Relative Wage Structure in Chile, 1957-1992: Changes in the Structure of Demand for Schooling.
It is commonly hypothesized that moving from protectionism to liberalized trade will increase the demand for goods whose production is intensive in its use of unskilled labor.
|
Electoral Strategy Under Open-List Proportional Representation.
Imagine an electoral system whose chief attributes include open-list proportional representation, large multimember districts, candidate selection at the level of politically significant subnational units, and the possibility of immediate reelection.
|
Agrarian Institutions and Agricultural Productivity: Africa in the European Mirror.
Attempts to reform agriculture n underdeveloped countries have been informed by the idea that exclusive private property rights were a prerequisite to an efficient agricultural sector. Thus the 1989 World Bank Report Sub Saharan Agriculture. From Crisis to Sustainable Growth, stressed the need for changes in land law from communal property rights towards individualized rights. Yet there has been dispute about whether costly state intervention is required in these matters, or whether land rights will endogen
|
Do Better Polities Have Higher Economic Growth?.
Many people hold strong opinions about the economic implications of various forms of governance. Yet these views are seldom buttressed with systematic evidence. A recent book by Gerald Scully argues, after ingenious manipulation of cross-country data, that what might be called "better polities" have higher economic growth rates.
|
Brazilian Tax Collection reform and Its Effects.
This study uses data from the Brazilian tax collection authority Secretaria da Receita Federal) to examine the effects and effectiveness of a major reform instituted in 1989 to provide incentives for improvement in the enforcement of tax laws by inspectors. The reform provides monetary compensation to the collectors based on their individual and group performance in finding and collecting taxes from tax evaders. The size of the rewards is quite significant: incentive bonuses frequently constitute more than
|
An Approach to Institutional Reform in Higher Education.
Changes in the South African environment present severe challenges to the country’s universities,challenges that, in less strenuous forms, have devastated universities in many other countries.
|
The Effects of R&D, Foreign Technology Purchase, and Spillovers on Productivity in Indian Firms.
This paper is an abridged version of the authors' working paper at the United Nations University Institute of New Technologies (UNUINTECH) in Maastricht (Basant and Fikkert (1993));and Rakesh Basant acknowledges with thanks the financial and other support he received from UNU-INTECH.
|
Institutions and Incentives: The Prospects for Russian Democracy.
The lament that Russia is at the mercy of powerful personalities contesting for the reigns of power may be accurate.
|
Institutional Reform and the Challenges Facing South Africa.
The linkage between local cultural factors and the success of development projects was the focus of a December 1992 IRIS workshop.
|
IRIS Mini-Conference on The Paradoxes of Poverty.
“The fact that growth is a tremendous force in eliminating poverty -- is really essential is something that we have learned,” said Jagdish Bhagwati in an IRIS-sponsored miniconference held on May 27 at the State Department. In reviewing his own involvement in development work over four decades, Bhagwati described a “sea change” in development thinking over the past ten years, with the abandonment of “the notion that growth contributes to poverty.”
|
Coalition Structures, Duverger's Law, and the Split-Merger Stability Hypothesis.
This papaer focusses on developing a nonspatial, game-theoretic framework capable of capturing the complexity of electoral coalition formation process.
|
Rationalized Bureaucracy and Rational Compliance.
The focus of this paper is on the relationship between the trustworthiness of the bureaucracy, citizen compliance, and economic growth.
|
Civil and Political Liberties over Space and Time: A Markov Model of Transition Dynamics.
In this paper, we investigate the evolution of liberties for every country and protectorate in the worlk, 1972-1992. We pay separate attention to political vs. civil liberties, and we also weight the liberties data by population.
|
Incidence Theory, Specific Factors and the Augmented Hecksher-Ohlin Model.
The concepts of “true protection” and the “incidence of protection” are potentially very useful for the evaluation of commercial policy. These concepts have been developed in the context of a model in which the production functions are implicit.
|
Market Reform and Tanzanian Agriculture: Success and Failures in a Decade of Liberalization.
This paper reviews the history of Tanzanian agricultural marketing policy prior to the initiation of reforms in 1984, then discusses the reforms under the headings of cooperatives, foodcrop sector marketing, traditional export sector marketing, and incentive effects of consumer goods supply.
|
The Nature and Performance of Small Firms in Bulgaria.
Using new survey data for small private, state and cooperative manufacturing firms we find overall the Bulgarian small firm manufacturing sector probably is quite well developed compared to 0ther former socialist economies;
|
The Transformation of Socialist Economies: Alternative Approaches and Early Lessons of Experience.
The paper describes three approaches to the strategy of the transition from socialism to a market economy: the rapid privatization strategy, the evolutionary school, and the government planning approach.
|
Sequencing of Economic Reforms in the Presence of Political Constraints.
Several prestigious economists, such as Guillermo Calve, Vittorio Corbo, Sebastian Edwards, Stanley Fischer, Jacob Frenkel, Arnold Harberger, Anne Krueger, and Ronald McKinnon have argued for sequencing market-oriented reforms (such as macroeconomic stabilization and trade liberalization) in a particular order.
|
Access to Capital, Agrarian Classes, and Resources Allocation: The Punjab.
In recent work Eswaran and Kotwal (1986) have shown how, in agrarian economies, patterns of organization and resource-use can be explained in terms of differences in access to capital and supervision costs. This paper generalizes the model to incorporate family size and applies it in the context of colonial Punjab, using data on 144 households over the years 1933-36.
|
On the Political Foundations of the late Medieval Commercial Revolution: Genoa During the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.
Although the late medieval Commercial Revolution is considered to be a water-shed in the economic history of Europe, the analysis of the interrelationship between political and economic systems in bringing about this period of economic growth has been neglected.
|
Roadblock to Economic Reform: Inter-Enterprise Debt and the Transition to Markets.
Two American specialists on Soviet and East European economies examine the relationship between inter-enterprise payments for goods and services and economic reform in Russia.
|
Anti-Trust and the Evolution of a Market Economy in Mongolia.
This paper features two essential tasks in the transition: development of a democratic, transparent process for establishing the market rules of the game, and making the shift from socialistic givernment as economic planner/manager to government as rule arbiter and protector of market processes. The project aslo serves as a good illustration of a model for assisting developing countries with institutional reform.
|
Institutional Arrangements in Cattle-Raising Activities in the 19th Century American West and their Explanations.
Most analysis of the creation and evolution of property rights over any productive factor, such as land, capital or labor, stress the relevance of the scarcity value of the factor relative to the costs of excluding others from its use.
|
The Second Theorem of the Second Best.
This paper interprets many results from the literature on incentive compatibility and cost-benefit analysis as illustrations of a second theorem of the second best. The theorem states that if there exists any restriction on transactions required for first-best efficiency, then there is no presumption that a social welfare maximum entails equal marginal social utilities of income across individuals.
|
Property to the People: The Struggle for Radical Economic Reform in Russia.
This book focuses on the privatization of state enterprises and the opening of the Russian economy to private initiative.
|
Growing a Legal System in the Post-Communist Economies.
Legal systems in the post-Communist economies are not well adapted to a market economy.
|
Ownership and Governance on the Morning After: The Initial Results of Privatization in Mongolia.
This paper presents some empirical evidence on the initial effects of a mass privatization program of large enterprises conducted by the Republic of Mongolia.
|
Privatization in the Former Soviet Union and the New Russia.
We present a survey of the policies, processes and results of privatization in the waning years of the Soviet Union and the first years of the independent Russian Federation.
|
Growth Capabilities and Development: Implications for Transition Processes in Cuba.
Two conceptual issues are addressed in this paper: the distinction between growth and development and the definition of the standard of living.
|
Communism, Constitutionalism and the Transition to Market-Based Democracy.
The introduction of a modern constitutional regime in the post-communist countries would assist in overcoming the economic crisis and in preventing political crisis.
|
A Critical Perspective on the Yeltsin Economic Reform Program.
A number of reform alternatives have been worked out by Russian economists, some of which take into account unique features of the Russian political and economic landscape more comprehensively than the program initiated under Gaidar’s direction. The re-entry of Gaidar into the Yeltsin government, while probably a positive sign to some democrats in Russia and many Western leaders, suggests that many mistakes of the past two years may be repeated.
|
A Taxonomy of Post-Socialist Financial Systems: Decentralized Enforcement and the Creation of Inside Money.
This paper offers a classification of credit markets in transition economies. It describes a continuum of systems by identifying its polar cases: countries where the entire financial system still relies on outside money, mostly republics of the former Soviet Union; and those where a more decentralized intermediation system is developing (Central/Eastern Europe).
|
Industrial Organization in a Restructuring Socialist Economy: Evidence from Bulgaria.
Using new data for all state and cooperatively-owned Bulgarian establishments and enterprises in 1988 and 1989 we portray key aspects of Bulgarian industrial organization.
|
Risk, Scarcity, and Land Market: The Uneven Economies of Induced Institutional Change in the West African Sahel.
This paper theoretically shows that land scarcity by itself is insufficient to induce the emergence of an active land market in a relatively egalitarian agrarian economy.
|
Warr Neutrality and the Natural Egalitarianism of Voluntary Public Good Provision.
One of the more intriguing discoveries in economics in recent years is the result, due to Peter G.Warr(1983) and foreshadowed and developed by others of "neutrality": the finding that "when a single public good is provided at positive levels by private individuals, its provision is unaffected by the distribution of income".
|
Parallel Market for Foreign Currencies in Nepal.
Existence of parallel market for foreign currencies is a common phenomenon in many developing countries which are characterized by restrictive trade practices, capital control and official fixation of the exchange rate at an overvalued level.
|
Market for Public Goods?.
This is a critical review of a book of essays entitled “Public Goods and Market Failures,” edited by Tyler Cowen. The essays in the book argue that the private market is capable of handling many sorts of public goods and externalities problems, and that conventional theory that calls for public intervention is misleading.
|
Employer Size, Wages and the Nature of Employment in Peru.
The paper first describes wage, benefits and job tenure distributions across establishment size categories among urban Peruvian male private sector wage earners over 14 years of age.
|
After Maastricht: Public Investment, Economic Integration, and International Capital Mobility.
Economists have traditionally analyzed European integration by studying the successive relaxation of impediments to the free exchange of goods and factors among the member nations of the community.
|
Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development.
Under anarchy, uncoordinated competitive theft by "roving bandits" destroys the incentive to invest and produce, leaving little for either the population or the bandits.
|
Economic and Political Determinants of Agricultural and Food Prices: A Cross-National Study.
The Food and Agricultural Organization has recently collected a large body of data containing agricultural prices for many countries.
|
Economic and Political Determinants of Agricultural and Food Prices: A Cross-National Study.
The prices that farmers receive for their agricultural products and those paid by consumers for their food vary across countries as a result of both economic and political forces.
|
The Economic Role of Government: Reform as a Mechanism Design Problem.
Economic Reform in many countries now mean the establishment of well functioning markets. Yet the government must manage the process of reducing its own role in certain ways.
|
A Simple Test of the Nutrition-Based Efficiency Wage Model.
In the nutrition-based efficiency wage model, wages in labor markets in developing countries are rigid because lowering them would reduce worker productivitty and increase the cost per efficiency unit . This paper evaluates this claim, using data from rural India. It is found that,contrary to what has been assumed in these models a wage cut should lower the cost per efficiency unit of labor.
|
The Economic Role of Government: Property Rights, Externalities and Mechanism Designs.
This paper provides a discussion of the role of government as arbiter of property rights.
|
Collusive Trade Arrears in the Stabilization of Transition Economies.
This paper shows that in a transition economy with a rigid production structure and a core of unredeemable enterprises, a tight credit policy may subtract more liquidity than the corporate sector can generate by internal restructuring.
|
Rent Seeking and Rent Setting With Asymmetric Effectiveness of Lobbying.
Activities such as lobbying are motivated by the desire to capture economic rents. Given the potential for such rent seeking, self-interested regulators may find it profitable to create such rents, for which firms will then compete.
|
The Economic Role of Government: Managing Rent-Seeking.
This paper adopts an approach to rent-seeking which allows for such behavior, and therefore assumes that government may in fact be susceptible to rent-seeking because it is made up of self-interested individuals, but at the same time assumes that there might be others in authority who seek to mitigate the adverse consequences of rent-seeking.
|
Privatization in Hungary: Ownership Changes Involving the Former State Enterprises.
The intention of this paper is to describe the ongoing privatization process in an analytic and rather detailed way.
|
Fiscal Decentralization and Economic Development.
The point of departure for my contribution to this symposium is the striking contrast in the extent of fiscal centralization of the industrialized and the developing countries
|
Rule Obedience, Organizational Loyalty and Economic Development.
This paper attempts to advance our understanding of institutional differences across societies by exploring some of the determinants of rule obedience and organizational loyalty.
|
Why Don't Poor Countries Catch Up? A Cross National Test of an Institutional Explanation.
Since 1952 scholars have advanced the hypothesis that poorer countries should grow faster than richer ones.
|
A Theory of Imperfect Competition in Rural Credit Markets in Developing Countries: Towards a Theory of Segmented Credit Mark.
We set out a stylized representation of a rural credit market in a developing country in which the enforcement and screening technology is very limited: Banks can lend only to large farmers on the basis of land collateral, and small farmers can borrow only from moneylender-traders who market their output. We show that an expansion of bank credit has an ambiguous effect on the interest rate that moneylenders charge. The model thus provides a framework that can explain the failure of the expansion of rural ba
|
The Outputs of Retail Activities: French Evidence.
Developing a new economic framework for the empirical analysis of retail margins. This framework seeks to formalize the role of distribution services as outputs of retail activities.
|
Non-Leaky Buckets: Optimal Redistributive Taxation and Agency Costs.
It provides a counter-example in a model where private information gives rise to incentive constraints.
|
Coase, Competition, and Compensation.
This paper shows that the Pigdvian solution to a simple externalities problem and a particular Coasian solution can be viewed as competitive equilibria from different initial endowments
|
Urban Informal Credit in India: Markets and Institutions.
This study presents an analysis of urban informal credit in India. Unlike the better studied rural credit markets, focus on urban informal credit markets is relatively recent, a result of the increasing documentation of the diversity and large size of such credit in most of the poor economies.
|
The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law.
Why are some societies characterized by welt-defined. stable individual rights and others not? Why are constitutional provisions easily evaded or ignored in some societies and respected and binding in others?
|
Environment for Investment in Madagascar: Institutional Reform for a Market Economy.
To examine the environment for investment in Madagascar, and determine which institutional reform efforts would most encourage the growth of a market economy.
|
The Economics of Rural Organization, Published for the World Bank.
The Economics of Rural Organization explains the economic institutions, contractual arrangements, and technological constraints found in rural land, labor, and credit markets.
|
Optimal Sequencing of Land and Credit Market Reforms in Developing Countries: A Theoretical Perspective.
This paper proves two theoretical results that serve to qualify the orthodox view that privatizing land transfer rights should (or must) precede the extension on a wide scale of the formal credit market in the rural sectors of developing countries.
|
Russia's Transition to Democracy: Essays 11-18.
The eight essays contained herein are the second Inca series prepared for translation into Russian and publication in Moscow’s Indepetrdetu Gazefre.
|
Robin Hood and the Redistribution of Property Income.
This paper develops a theoretical model in which, if the competitively determined share of wages in total product is sufficiently small relative to the effectiveness of time allocated to extralegal appropriative activities then a tax-financed wage subsidy that reduces the net income of the property owners below what would be their competitively determined share could be consistent with maximizing the net income of the propertied class.
|
The Chadian Private Sector.
During the course of its post-colonial history, Chad’s private sector has been characterized by its resiliency under extreme difficulties.
|
Credibility, Rent-Seeking and Political Instability.
Describing conditions under which state institutions reduce political instability. Examining institutions that restrict the ability of any single state decision maker to act unilaterally.
|
Current Status of the Legal System and the Rule of Law in Chad and its Effect on the Private Sector.
Le Tchad est parmi les pays les plus pauvres du monde. II a recemment fait face a une crise economique de grande envergure aggravee par des conditions climatiques et d’autres evenements catastophiques survenues au cows des deux dernieres decennies.
|
Identifying the Free Riders: How to Partition a Group Into Positive and Zero Contributors to the Common Good.
This paper proposes a general algorithm for discovering with individuals in the group fall into which of these two classes.
|
Group Composition, Collective Consumption, and Collaborative Production.
An enduring question in the analysis of groups is: what determines their composition in terms of their individual constituents?
|
Property Rights and Residential Capitalization Rates.
The level of property rights associated with a dwelling has important implications for its value, as has been demonstrated in the recent literature. What has not been investigated is whether property rights have different effects on rents than on values. This paper documents this difference in the case of one city in a developing country, Cairo, Egypt.
|
The Culture of Policy Making In the Transition From Socialism: Price Policy in Mongolia.
Outlining some of the basic features of Mongolian price policy: dissonance within and among policy measures; a proliferation of price controls, controllers, and arguments in favor of controls; and spontaneity and decentralization of controls.
|
The Distribution Sector in a CPE: Cuba.
An examination of the distribution sector in Cuba, a centrally planned economy, placing emphasis on description, synthesis and interpretation rather than on analysis, a necessity due to the nature of the topic and the state of the literature.
|
From Socialism to Market: Changing the Rules of the Game.
This paper attempts to advance our understanding of institutional differences across so&tics by exploring some of the determinants of rule obedience and organizational loyalty.
|
Options for Reform of the Business Registration System: Nepal.
The existing business registration system in Nepal imposes excessive information and approval burdens, and high fees. Such a system has several negative consequences to small firms, government and economic growth.
|
Mongolia in Transition: The New Legal Framework For Land Rights and Land Protection.
It examines the new legal framework for land rights and land protection as an element of Mongolia's economic and political transition, focusing primarily on the draft law on land.
|
Checks and Balances, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development.
The credibility of agreements between the state and entrepreneurs regarding rents and security from expropriation affects the extent of damage caused by rent-seeking.
|
The Informal Sector in Chad.
This report is based on secondary sources, interviews in Chad
and in Washington D.C., and participation in the "Seminaire sur
la Promotion du Secteur Prive au Tchad."
|
The Emergence of Market Economies in Eastern Europe.
In this volume, a number of leading Western economists offer a comprehensive overview of all aspects of the economic problems facing Eastern Europe.
|
Economic Logic, International Security, and the Equilibrium Among Nations.
Since the first cracks in the Iron Curtain during the momentous autumn of 1989, to the accomplished reunification of Germany, to the present ruptures in the bonds of the Soviet Union itself, it has become more and more apparent that a Continent wide upheaval in the very configuration of nation states is in progress.
|
Prolegomena to the Economics of Rural Organization.
This paper presents an aggregative analysis of the informal sector in India. The hitherto ignored informal sector in developing societies is increasingly acquiring a central role in new thinking about development strategies.
|
Evolutionary and Radical Approaches to Economic Reform.
Discussing the breakdown in the consensus that the optimal approach to socialist economic reform involved immediate destruction of old institutions and rapid conversion to capitalist arrangements.
|
A Tale of Two Sectors: The Formal and Informal Sectors in India.
This paper presents an aggregative analysis of the informal sector in India. The hitherto ignored informal sector in developing societies is increasingly acquiring a central role in new thinking about development strategies.
|
Reform Issues in Mongolia.
A report on IRIS project "Mongolisa: Support for Economic Transition" and a brief survey of the Mongolian economic situation.
|
Chad Financial Sector and Private Sector.
One of the key constraints to improving economic performance in emerging countries is the absence of strong and dynamic financial systems. Healthy capital and credit markets serve the vital roles of mobilizing savings, intermediating funds, and allocating credit to productive uses.
|
The New Institutional Economics and the Cuban Economy.
Combining several literary aspects on transaction costs, property rights, and public choice in an effort to answer the question: What is the economic function of an institution?
|
The Economics of Retailing: Perspective and Prospective.
Providing a perspective and prospective view of three aspects of the economics of retailing: selected relevant trends, analyses of broad features of retailing institutions, and analyses of narrowly defined characteristics of retailing activities.
|
The Pure Theory of Unemployment Insurance: Hoping for the Worst When Insurance is Available.
Frequently, a resource owner can sell some or all of his endowment at a fixed price in good times, but be cut off from his market entirely in bad times.
|
Freedom of Association and Self-Selecting Groups.
The revolution in public economics embodied in the study of collective goods and the groups which provide them has produced essentially three paradigms of public good supply, the first due to Samuelson (1954), followed by Tiebout(1956)/ Buchanan (1965) and then Olson (1965).
|
Two-Party Representative Government.
Discussion and compareison of two modes of representations and an analysis of the specific procedures used to best achieve the relative advantages of each system.
|
Principles of Fiscal Federalism: A Survey of Recent Theoretical and Empirical Research.
Outling insights compiled from country experience with fiscal decentralization that would assist with the restructuring of the public sectors in “transitional” countries in Eastern Europe. Prepared for a meeting with representatives from Eastern European countries and public finance specialists.
|
Consequences of Limited Risk Markets and Imperfect Information for the Design of Taxes and Transfers: Overview.
The central thesis for this publication is that sound policies for the rural sector of developing countries must be based on an understanding of the structure of a rural organization and that rural organization can in turn be interpreted as partly the consequence of limitations on information and the absence of a complete set of risk markets.
|
Technological Change, Imperfect Markets, and Agricultural Extension: Overview.
It has long been recognized that the adoption of a more productive technology is facilitated by a complex institutional framework, including property rights, credit and insurance markets, and extension services.
|
An Evolutionary Perspective in Economies and in the Economic Reform of Centrally Planned Economies.
This chapter presents the lessons of the metaphor, “the evolutionary approach to economic reform.”
|
The Rise and Decline of Nations.
The second half of the twentieth century saw rapid shifts in the relative positions of different countries and regions. In this book, Mancur Olson brought forth a new and compelling theory to explain these shifts in fortune, and tested the theory against evidence from many periods of history and many parts of the world.
|
The No-Growth Society.
A panel of scientists, economists, and planners consider ways of channeling development for the improvement rather than destruction of the environment.
|
The Logic of Collective Action.
Professor Olson's influential work challenged a prevailing assumption about group behavior, namely, that people instinctively or naturally act on common interests, so inaction needed to be explained. Olson raised the issue of the "free rider problem," and discussed how the proper incentives could overcome it. Historical examples serve to support his theory.
|