This paper estimates the impact of relative price volatility on sector-level investment allocation using a panel of 65 countries with data for 26 manufacturing industries over the period 1985-2003. Results indicate that volatility distorts efficient investment allocation in that investment is...

The present work summarizes a set of reports which have had the aim of diagnosing the civil service systems of seventeen countries: Argentina, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago,...

Using firm level data on 70,000 enterprises in 107 countries, this paper finds important effects of access to finance, business regulations, corruption, and to a lesser extent, infrastructure bottlenecks in explaining patterns of job creation at the firm level. The paper focuses on how the...

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) through its Regional Policy Dialogue, Public Policy and Management Network commissioned this study [update] of the Institutional Assessment of Civil Service systems (CSS) in Barbados. While reforms address key elements of the HRM system, the frameworks,...

The object of this document is to present an analytical framework that could serve as a common reference to assess national Civil Service (CS) systems in countries located within the Bank's scope of action. There are three goals of the document: 1) To facilitate the task of analysts of national...

This paper uses datasets from six surveys to describe entrepreneurship in Argentina. While the quantity of entrepreneurship in Argentina is high, its quality is low, given the high proportion of informal and necessity entrepreneurs. Income is found to play a greater role in determining...

A construção do Mercado Comum do Sul (MERCOSUL) é uma experiência inovadora no processo de integração latino-americana, ao se produzir num contexto de liberalização comercial e de abertura unilateral das nações que o integram. Seja pela proximidade geográfica, seja pelas vantagens...

Critics of privatization argue that poor labor force restructuring is a key concern and that governments should establish better retrenchment programs. Using new data from a random sample of 400 companies in the world, we test competing theories about the wisdom of retrenchment programs and...

Modernizers of the state have been busy during the past decade building new governance institutions and rehabilitating old ones in developing and emerging market countries.Abstract: La pasada década, los modernizadores del estado estuvieron bastante ocupados creando nuevas instituciones del...

Uruguays inability to sustain high levels of economic growth cannot be fully explained by external shocks, the prevailing institutional setting or the level of human capital accumulation. Instead, low investment in knowledge capital stands as a most likely explanation. This hypothesis is...