Legal and Institutional Frameworks Supporting Accountability in Budgeting and Service Delivery Performance.
Malcolm Russell-Einhorn, in a chapter of the recent World Bank publication "Performance Accountability and Combating Corruption," highlights the critical need for legal and regulatory frameworks to address a number of procedural details that can help ensure more genuine and effective citizen participation in matters of budgeting and service delivery.
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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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Secured Transactions Law: Best Practices & Policy Options.
An overview of best practices in promoting commerce through wider access to business and consumer credit, including four strategies necessary in a well-crafted secured transactions law.
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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.
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Market-Augmenting Government: The Institutional Foundations for Prosperity.
Shows how governments and markets are complementary rather than opposing forces.
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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The Nexus between Violent Conflict, Social Capital and Social Cohesion: Case Studies from Cambodia and Rwanda.
This paper explores the depletion and restoration of social capital in two war-torn societies, Rwanda and Cambodia, which are among the worst cases of genocide.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Imperfect Information, Social Capital, and the Poor’s Access to Credit.
This literature review examines how social capital can help reduce the cost of imperfect information in small financial transactions, and thereby improve the performance of credit delivery programs in the developing world.
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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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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.
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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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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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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
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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.
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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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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.
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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?
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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.
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Combating Corruption in Africa: Institutional Challenges and Responses.
Breaking down the large and varied phenomenon of corruption, into components more easily subject to legal and policy analysis.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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On the Prospects of Legal Reform in the Kyrgyz Republic.
IRIS serves as USAID’s primary legislation drafting contractor in Kyrgyzstan. IRIS aims to draft and implement legislation from the Initial drafting stages through adoption of laws In Parliament.
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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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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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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.
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Working on Legal Culture Changes in Kyrgyzstan: Drafting Practical Commentaries on Civil Code.
From the time that Alfred Lord Maine spoke of the need to modernize the legal and political culture of India from one of “status” to one of “contract,” Western lawyers and legal scholars.
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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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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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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.
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Reforms in Income Tax Enforcement in Mexico.
The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the reforms in income tax enforcement carried out in Mexico since 1983 under the Salinas administration.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Deforestation in Colonial Kumaon: 1815-1947.
The forests of the Kumaon Himalayas offer a good case-study of the kind of institutional breakdown which ultimately leads to deforestation.
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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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How Many Parties Will New Zealand Have Under MMP?.
In November 1993 New Zealanders voted to replace their venerable First-Fast-the-Post (FPP) electoral system with Mifed-Member-Proportional (MMP), a version of proportional representation (PR) based on party lists.
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Towards an Independent and Accountable Judiciary: Report on Judicial Reform in Madagascar.
I wish to express my gratit.dde to the IRIS Center for having given me the opportunity of undertaking this study, in particular to David Fagelson, who was in charge of the project and provided useful comments on an earlier draft.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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The Importance of Institutions in Long Term Growth.
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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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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.
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Optimal Provision of Public Goods under Costly Exclusion and Corruption.
Laws and rules that underlie and enhance public safety, clean environments and public goods are promulgated with the intent of promoting social welfare.
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Analysis of Competition in Mongolia: Three Case Studies.
The IRIS-Mongolia Project and the Privatization Commission of the Government of Mongolia recently engaged in a cooperative effort to draft legislation to regulate industry conduct competition in Mongolia's industrial sector.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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The Transition to Republican Government.
Democratic republics are founded on the idea that th epeople must rule. But of central concern to the founding and maintenance of such republics is the manner in which the people accomplish self rule.
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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.
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Taking Trade Policy Seriously: Export Subsidization as a Case Study in State Capabilities.
In thinking about policy, academic economists alternate between theoretical models in which governments can design finely-tuned optimal interventions and practical considerations which usually assume the government to be incompetent and hostage to special interests.
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The Initiation of New Democratic Institutions in Eastern Europe and Latin America.
Much has been written about a possible incompatibility between democracy and economic liberalization, on the one hand, and democracy and the cultural legacy left by forty years of Leninist rule in Eastern Europe, on the other.
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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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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.
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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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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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Constitutional Reform: What Direction Now?.
Russia enjoys the apparent luxury of two official draft constitutions, one by the Constitutional Commission, another by President Yeltsin’s staff. Which is better? That is like asking which of two piles of building stones is better.
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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?
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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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Reform's Rhetoric-Realization Relationship: The Experience of Mongolia.
The rhetoric of reform denotes the terror and the level of ambition embodied in a governments initial comprehensive statements of its approach to reform.
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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.
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Dispute Resolution as an Alternative to the Ordinary Courts in Madagascar: A Guide to Choice in the International Arena.
This study will make recommendations to Madagascar's judicial system. Where appropriate, for the bolstering of the judicial system and will focus on identifying those effective alternatives which arc currently available to investors in that country.
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The Executive Branch.
A discussion of the problem and possible institutional solutions involving the definition of the executive branch in the constitution.
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