Economic growth is below what would be needed to resume rapid convergence to average OECD living standards. On-going efforts to improve the business climate are laudable, but need to be widened and strengthened. Much progress has been achieved in reducing red tape, but it is only recently that...

The dissemination of best practices has been a major tool for public sector reform in Asia. There are two reasons why it is an effective tool, especially for reforming public entities (PE) such as state-owned enterprises and government-funded organizations, which have more flexibility in their...

Reforming PEs is a critical component of public sector reform. In order to approach such an important task more systematically, we need to know how PEs reformed themselves during the past 5 years under President Roh. By examining a survey on 125 public entities' best practices, it is possible...

Economic growth is below what would be needed to resume rapid convergence to average OECD living standards. On-going efforts to improve the business climate are laudable, but need to be widened and strengthened. Much progress has been achieved in reducing red tape, but it is only recently that...

We provide the first experimental test of the consequences of delegation in a mixed duopoly. Such delegation allows a profit maximizing private owner and a welfare maximizing public owner to weight sales in managerial contracts. Theory predicts that such contracts improve welfare. Our evidence...

The fundamental feature of private contracting is its relational nature. When faced with unforeseen or unexpected circumstances, private parties, as long as the relation remains worthwhile, adjust their required performance without the need for costly renegotiation or formal recontracting....

We mailed letters to non-existent business addresses in 159 countries (10 per country), and measured whether they come back to the return address in the US and how long it takes. About 60% of the letters were returned, taking over 6 months, on average. The results provide new objective...

A number of papers have suggested that pro-social behaviour in the workplace may be sensitive to the institutional environment, but there is little empirical research that attempts to test this directly using data on worker behaviour. This is the aim of this paper. We show that individuals in...

This Paper studies the objective function of state-owned banks. Using information on individual loan contracts, I compare the interest rate charged to two sets of companies with identical characteristics borrowing respectively from state-owned and privately owned banks. State-owned banks charge...

This working paper examines China’s investment policy since the publication of the 2008 OECD Investment Policy Review of China. China remains the largest recipient of FDI among developing countries and FDI continues to play a disproportionately large role in promoting China’s trade,...