It has been increasingly recognized that the Chinese goverm-nent's newly acquired enthusiasm for economic development is a major factor explaining the relative success of China's transition from socialism. This paper argues that the changed behavior of the Chinese government is an outcome of a...

Taxes and cash transfers reduce income inequality more in France than elsewhere in the OECD, because of the large size of the flows involved. But the system is complex overall. Its effectiveness could be enhanced in many ways, for example so as to achieve the same amount of redistribution at...

To ascertain the prevalence of soft budgets and to find causes of softness, we surveyed 251 privatized Mongolian enterprises, asking whether state aid was expected when financial difficulties arose. One quarter of the enterprises expected such soft-budget aid, a large proportion of which have...

We address the impact of corruption in a developing economy in the context of an empirically relevant hold-up problem - when a foreign firm sinks an investment to provide infrastructure services. We focus on the structure of the economy’s bureaucracy, which can be centralized or decentralized,...

In many developing and transition countries, we observe rather high levels of corruption. This is surprising from a political economy perspective, as the majority of people in a corrupt country suffer from high corruption levels. Our model is based on the fact that corrupt offcials have to pay...

Since 1960, only one new country, Brazil, has succeeded in delivering more than one civil jet per month. Otherwise, all the countries now offering world-class planes were established in aviation by the end of World War I. This being said, low-cost producers within several of the newly emerging...

What are the determinants of economic reform efforts? This paper tries to throw light on this question by examining recent reforms in Brazil, a country which followed a gradualist approach and was a late-starter among Latin American economies. We argue that these first generation reforms (trade...

Economists have used cross-national regression analysis to argue that postcommunist economic failure is the result of inadequate adherence liberal economic policies. Sociologists have relied on case study data to show that postcommunist economic failure is the outcome of too close adherence to...

The economic reforms in Tanzania and Vietnam represent the two typical cases of transition economies in Asia and Africa, particularrly the transformation of the two developing economies from the planned to the market mechanism. In this paper, the two authors, Brian - a British economist and Dinh...

This paper investigates the role of structural reforms – privatization, financial reform and trade liberalization– as determinants of FDI inflows based on newly constructed dataset on structural reforms for 19 Latin American and 25 Eastern European countries between 1989 and 2004. Our main...