This report studies impediments to investment and private sector development in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, and Serbia and Montenegro. It aims to yield fundamentally new insights for improving the region's...

The authors identify the ultimate ownership structure for 2,980 corporations in nine East Asian countries. They find that: A) More than half of those firms are controlled be a single shareholder. B) Smaller firms and older firms are more likely to be family-controlled. C) Patterns of controlling...

The East Asian financial crisis has been attributed in part to the corporate diversification associated with the misallocation of capital investment toward less profitable and more risky business segments. Much anecdotal evidence to support this view has surfaced since the crisis but there was...

The capital flows to Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (CEE/FSU) represent a relatively small, albeit growing share of capital flows to developing countries. Taking all flows together, the total net flows to these 25 countries (Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus,...

This paper is part of a larger effort to study the determinants and impact of foreign direct investment. The authors examine flows of foreign direct investment to 46 developing countries to test whether such flows are autonomous or accommodating vis-a-vis the current account and other capital...

The authors analyze the role of institutions in resolving systemic banking crises for a broad sample of countries. Banking crises are fiscally costly, especially when policies like substantial liquidity support, explicit government guarantees on financial institutions’ liabilities, and...

The authors investigate what has motivated the large portfolio flows to several developing countries in recent years. Using monthly data on U.S. capital flows to nine Latin American and nine Asian countries (instead of monthly reserves data), they analyze the behavior of bond and equity flows to...

By populism, this paper refers to an economic approach that emphasizes growth and income redistribution and deemphasizes the risks of inflation and deficit finance, external constraints and the reaction of economic agents to aggressive nonmarket policies. It analyzes two instances of populism -...

Inflation persists at moderate rates (15-30 percent) in all the countries that successfully reduced triple-digit inflation in the 1980s. Several other countries--for example, Colombia--have experienced moderate inflation for prolonged periods. The authors introduce types of theories of...