Legal & Regulatory Reform for Access to Finance: A Policy & Programming Tool.
A user-friendly tool to assist USAID in identifying favorable conditions for supporting legal and regulatory reform programs designed to increase access to finance.
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Foreign Direct Investment and Corruption in China.
Existing literature on the connection between foreign direct investment(FDI) and corruption focuses almost exclusively on the impact of corruption in the host country on its FDI inflow.
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Policy Reform Toolkit for E-Commerce and Development.
Faced with binding budget constraints, how do governments in developing and transition economies identify the policy actions that can most advance their ability to compete on the global market? This toolkit offers policymakers a simple method to identify and prioritize the policy areas most likely to affect their ability to harness the Internet to develop their economies.
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Social Capital and Group Lending: Evidence from Joint Liability Seed Loans in Zambia’s Southern Province.
Does social capital reinforces incentives for repayment of collective loans of seeds in Zambia? The results presented here suggest that some factors facilitating collective action within seed groups, such as its size, are associated with higher repayment performance.
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Microfinance Regulation in Developing Countries: A Comparative Review of Current Practice.
Many, if not most, developing countries, have seen microfinance activity grow to the point where financial regulators need to frame a policy, and eventually to integrate some portion of the microfinance spectrum into the framework of regulated financial services institutions. This paper aims to provide the necessary comparative data and analysis to support sound regulatory policy in this field.
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Filling the Gap in South Africa's Small and Micro Credit Market - An Analysis of Major Policy, Legal and Regulatory Issues.
The most effective way to increase availability of low-end financial services is to address a few key incentive structures embedded in the laws and regulations governing the market. This paper identifies several key constraints to responsible growth of the low-end credit market in South Africa.
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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Report on Implementation of A Secured Transaction in Bangladesh.
A draft of the proposed Secured Transactions Act, designed to provide a more secure lending environment in Bangladesh. The Act provides for a Secured Transaction Registry that would allow lenders to establish perfection and priority in moveable goods when used as collateral.
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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.
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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.
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E-Commerce in Bangladesh: Status, Potential and Constraints.
This paper highlights the status, statues, potential and contraints to e-commerce development in Bangladesh.
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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.
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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.
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Institutions, Incentives and Economic Reforms in India.
Essays in this volume seek to illustrate the efficacy of the new institutional approach with reference to a number of policy areas -- privatization, fiscal policy, agricultural reform, labor policy, and financial sector development.
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Bank Loan Application Procedures.
This paper wil help you think and plan the future of your enterprise through the construction of a sound, basic business, marketing and financial plan. It is also a most important document, together with a net worth/financial statement, required by a bank in support of your loan application.
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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.
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Combating Rural Public Works Corruption: Food-for-Work Programs in Nepal.
Documents an innovation in the governance of local public works programs in Nepal. Analyzes the mechanisms of corruption in these programs, and examines the role of enabling local "ownership," monitoring, and management in reducing corruption and improving productivity.
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Induced Social Capital and Federations of the Rural Poor.
Poor people's organizations embody a particular and important form of structural social capital.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Global Challenges and the Need for Supranational Infrastructure.
Dating back to Adam Smith, economists have recognized that a well functioning market system needs some government provided activities in terms of a justice system,laws,national defense,and public goods (e.g roads,schools,police).
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Market-Augmenting Governent? States and the Corporations in Early Nineteenth Century America.
This paper discusses American corporate policy in the 19th century.
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Imperfect Commercial Law and Market Augmentation in Latin America.
Financial markets in developing and transitional economies are largely underdeveloped.
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Credit Information in the Bangladesh Financial System.
This report covers the condition of the credit information industry in Bangladesh and proposes a direction for future growth.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Institutional, Economic and Organizational Basis of Military Capability.
This book is a compilation of analytical papers commissioned by the Department of Defense (Office of Net Assessment) to gain a deeper understanding of the social and economic bases of military development, with particular emphasis on China and other Asian states.
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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.
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Constraints to SME Development in Bangladesh.
The development of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in developing countries is generally believed to be a desirable end in view of their perceived contribution to decentralized job creation and generation of output.
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Social Capital: The Missing Link?.
It has now become recognized that the "traditional" types of capital (natural, physical and human) determine only partially the process of economic growth because they overlook the way in which the economic actors interact and organize themselves to generate growth and development.
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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.
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Is There Life after Liberalization? Transaction Costs Analysis of Maize and Cotton Marketing in Zambia and Tanzania.
The paper explains the importance of marketing efficiency in an era of provatization.
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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.
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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.
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The Nepal Stock Exchange - A Review.
The New Issue Guidelines outline the Exchange policy on the conduct of public share issues by either listed or potential listed companies.The scope of the guidelines adopted extends well beyond its usually intended objectives and addresses issues pertaining to listings and prospectus requirements.
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La Fraude Douaniere au Tchad: Une Approche Pratique au Controle.
Ce rapport prdsente une approche pratique au contr6le de la fraude douanibre au Tchad.
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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
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Capital Market Development in Nepal.
Financial markets are a catalyst in the development of the country’s economy.
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Interest Group and Provision of Public Goods: A Test of the Concavity Hypothesis.
This paper revisits the controversy surrounding the relationship between provision of public goods and size of provider interest group.
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Critical Issues in Nepal's Micro-Finance Circumstances.
This study examines the effectiveness and outreach of microfinance organizations in Nepal, leading to the identification of critical issues currently faced by these organizations.
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Efficiency and Equity in Public Investment in Education in India.
This paper discusses the efficiency and equity of public investment in education in India.
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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.
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Restructuring and Privatization of Public Enterprises in India.
Within the broad contours of the public sector envisaged in the context of the planned development in India, public enterprises (PEs) have been used as a major instrument of policy.
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Some Economic Aspects of TRIPs.
This paper discusses the economics of intellectual property rights (II%) in the context of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement of the Uruguay Round.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Trade Protection in India: Economics vs. Politics?.
This paper investigates economic and political determinants of protection across the secondary (manufacturing) sector.
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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.
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Forms of Enterprise in Kazakhstan.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a perspective on the historical development of current business organization laws in Kazakstan, examine and compare in general terms the Kazak Company Law and then to provide some recommendations for their improvement and continued and development in Kazakstan.
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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.
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Incentive Structures and Performance of Rural Financial Institutions: The case of the Philippines.
The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to develop an institutional framework for understanding incentive structures in rural financial markets; and (2) to use this framework in exploring the diverse performance of Philippine rural financial institutions.
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Labour Policies, Employment & Worker Earnings: Indian and International Experiences.
In this paper we consider the labor market policies in East Asia and India in an attempt to understand the role that the labor laws in these countries might have played in these differing outcomes.
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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.
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Labour Institutions and Industrial Restructuring in India.
This paper approaches various questions by drawing conclusions from four levels of analysis.
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Water and Federalism: India's Institutions Governing Inter-State River Waters.
Analyzing the process of resolving inter-state water disputes in India. Emphasizing the role of complementary investments, and the need to expand the scope of bargaining.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Labor Markets as Social Institutions in India.
This paper traces the evolution of labor market institutions in India since Independence.
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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.
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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.
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International Commercial Transactions in the West Bank and Gaza: Model Contracts and Commentary.
This handbook offers guidance in crafting international business contracts in the effort of the Palestinian Legislative Council's challenge of bringing legislation up to date and strengthening the mechanisms of enforcement, such as courts and administrative agencies.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Regulation and Reform of the Financial Sector in India: An Analysis of the Underlying Incentives.
This paper analyzes the incentives faced by the various agents under the highly regulated banking environment in India prior to 1992 and uses it to provide an explanation of the various problems facing the Indian banking system.
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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.
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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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Exogenous and Opportunistic Financial Arrears: Evidence from a Survey of Bulgarian State Managers.
Following tight stabilization policies, in many transition economies enterprises have responded to reduced credit flows with a rapid development of interfirm trade credit.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Should Foreign Aid Finance Private of Public Investment?.
The paper examines from the welfare point of view whether it is better to give aid for private or public investment. Recently there has been discussion in bilateral and multilateral aid agencies on whether foreign development assistance should be directed to private instead of public sector invcstmcnt projects in order to promote welfare in the recipient countries and to accelerate their move towards self-reliance.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Financial Markets and Industrial Development: A Comparative Study of Government Regulation, Financial Innovation, and Indust.
This paper examines the experiences of Mexico and Brazil in the creation of modern banks and stock exchanges during the early stages of industrialization.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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A Theory of Misgovernance.
This paper studies the determinants of government performance. The paper identifies two specific reasons for apparently poor government performance.
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Credit Rating Services in Nepal: An Assessment Report.
Nepal is an economy in transition. Since the conversion to a constitutional democracy in 1991, economic reform and liberalization efforts have been undertaken in many sectors, particularly with respect to trade and industrial policies.
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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.
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Bureaucracy, Infrastructure and Economic Growth: Evidence from U.S. Cities during the Progressive Era.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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;
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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.
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Bank Restructuring in Nepal: Analysis of the Causes of Apparent Financial Difficulties of the Rastriya Banijya Bank.
The financial sector in Nepal is in the process of development. The stock market has been recently activated and the Securities Board is a young regulatory authority. The banking sector has been growing. In 1984 and 1985 three joint ventures with foreign banks began operating as banks licensed bv the Nepal’s Rastra Bank. In 1989 all of the commercial banks
have been freed to fix their ok rates on loans and deposits.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Growing a Legal System in the Post-Communist Economies.
Legal systems in the post-Communist economies are not well adapted to a market economy.
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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.
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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.
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Privatization in Bulgaria.
The policies, processes and some of the economic effects of privatization in Bulgaria are examined. The paper is organized around the main phases of Bulgarian privatization, though we focus on the fourth and still on-going period that began in the Spring of 1992.
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Import Liberization in Hungary.
In the following the Hungarian import liberalization experience is analyzes, and within this special attention is paid to the timing and sequencing of liberalization, to the social forces supporting and resisting the introduction of liberalization measures, and to the social consequences of structural change.
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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.
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Mediating Risk Through Markets, Rational Cooperation, and Public Policy: Institutional Alternatives and the Trajectories of.
The distribution of land in West Africa is and has traditionally been one of the most egalitarian in the world.
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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).
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Two Essential Characteristics of Retail Markets and Their Economic Consequences.
Incorporation of two characteristics into the analysis of retail markets generates novel results on the nature of pricing policies, on their interaction with the provision of distribution services, and on the effects of competitive behavior.
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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".
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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.
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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.
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Why Are Prices So Low in America?.
A well established empirical finding is that rich countries tend to have high national price levels.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Conference of Cultural Assessment.
The linkage between local cultural factors and the success of development projects was the focus of a December 1992 IRIS workshop supported by the World Bank and Rockefeller Foundation
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The Impact of Urban Land Taxation: The Pittsburgh Experience.
Land value taxation occupies a curious place in the lexicon of public finance. It has long and rich history both among tax theorists and among reformers who have extolled its properties on grounds of economic efficiency and equity.
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Pollution Charges as a Source of Public Revenue.
The existing literature in environmental economics explores the role of pollution taxes as instruments for environmental management. This paper expands the analysis to encompass their potential for improving the overall tax system.
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A System and Implementation Schedule for Simplifying Business Registrations in Chad.
This report describes work carried out under the contract to provide technical assistance toward simplifying GOC business registration proceduresand and follow-up recommendations to USAID/Chad.
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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.
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Airline Competition Policy in Nepal.
Recommandations from Steven Morrison to the Department of Civil Aviation in the Ministry of Tourism on airline pricing policy for the new private airlines.
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Price Policy in Mongolia: A Chronology of Development.
A chronology of policy developments, and related facts, in one area of the transition process -- the regulation and deregulation of prices.
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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.
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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.
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Federalism and Government Finance.
A survey of “fiscal federalism” and an overview of reflections on multi-level public finance with special attention to the challenging research agenda that remains.
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Poland: Small Business Project Outline of Recommendations.
The recent liberalization of the Polish economy has dramatically influenced the opportunities for private economic inrElative and laid the foundation for a radical restructuring Q an economy dominated for the past 40 years by large, state-owned enterprise.
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Designing Land Policies: An Overview.
Little economic activity would occur in the absence of rights, or powers, to consume, obtain income from, and transfer assets. The level of economic development of a region will therefore depend on its system of property rights.
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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.
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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.
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