In 1989 the government of Guinea enacted far-reaching reform of its water sector, which had been dominated by a poorly run public agency. The government signed a lease contract for operations and maintenance with a private operator, making a separate public enterprise responsible for ownership...

Private sector participation in Guinea's urban water sector has benefited consumers, the government, and, to a lesser extent, the new foreign owners. Performance will improve further when the government starts paying its own water bill on time and when the legislature authorizes the collection...

In 1989 the government of Guinea enacted far-reaching reform of its water sector, which had been dominated by a poorly run public agency. The government signed a lease contract for operations and maintenance with a private operator, making a separate public enterprise responsible for ownershipof...

The objective of the South Africa Investment Climate Assessment (ICA) is to evaluate the investment climate in South Africa in all its operational dimensions and to promote policies to strengthen the private sector. The investment climate is made up of the many location-specific factors that...

This book sheds light on the characteristics of formal and informal manufacturing firms in Africa by comparing these firms with firms in other regions. Drawing on two data sources, the authors find that there is a very low share of manufacturing in GDP in Africa and in African exports. Most...

This paper uses firm-level data to assess whether telecommunication services are general-purpose technologies (technologies that benefit a large segment of the economy and have long-lasting effect). It finds that only Internet services are so: firm growth and productivity are much higher when...

This paper assesses the effect of institutional quality on research and development (R&D) expenditures in developing countries. The paper finds that the risk of expropriation and the rule of law are correlated with R&D expenditures. Since both institutional variables increase as institutional...

Many observers attributed the rapid productivity growth observed in the United States in the mid- to late 1990s, to the growing use of information, and the Internet. This in turn created concern that developing, and transition economies - where use of information technology, and the Internet was...

Based on results from country case studies, many researchers have claimed that political constraints affect bank privatization transactions, which in turn affect the post-privatization performance of the banking sector. But no study has either econometrically tested how political constraints...

Existing evidence on the effect of foreign bank penetration on lending to small and medium-size enterprises is ambiguous. Case studies of developing countries show that foreign banks lend less to such firms than domestic banks do. But cross-country studies find that foreign bank entry fosters...