The paper provides three principal results. First, we benchmark South African infrastructure performance in terms of access, pricing, and quality against key comparator groups of countries using the most recent World Bank benchmarking data base (2005). Second, we establish clear empirical links...

Evolutionary arguments are often used to justify the fundamental behavioral postulates of competive equilibrium. Economists such as Milton Friedman have argued that natural selection favors profit maximizing firms over firms engaging in other behaviors. Consequently, producer efficiency, and...

The paper measures economic loss from the problem of inadequate collateral in Bulgaria and proposes solutions consisting of creation of security interests, perfection, and enforcement.

We analyze markets in which the price of a traded commodity is such that the supply and the demand are unequal. Under standard assumptions, the agents then have single peaked preferences on their consumption or production choices. For such markets, we propose a class of Uniform Trade rules each...

A pure exchange economy with a financial market is studied where aggregate dividends are modeled as a diffusion. The dynamics of the diffusion are allowed to depend on factors which are unobservable to the agents and have to be estimated. With perfect information, the asset market would be...

This paper defines a general equilibrium model with exchange and club formation. Agents trade multiple private goods widely in the market, can belong to several clubs, and care about the characteristics of the other members of their clubs. The space of agents is a continuum, but clubs are...