African cities are growing at an extraordinary rate. Unfortunately, many cities are growing so fast that national, provincial, and city governments cannot manage how they develop or assure the provision of the services people need. This has many negative consequences for national and city...

In many Russian cities, these growing demands for mobility are not adequately met by the existing urban transport infrastructure and services. Most municipalities have had difficulties in planning and managing the development of their urban transport systems in a coherent manner, which is a...

"With more than 20 percent, Switzerland is one of the countries with the largest foreign population. Since 1970 the government has tried to manage the flows of migrants in the hope of reconciling a chronic excess demand for labor with mounting pressures from nationalistic groups to control the...

"Its highly fragmented structure of local governments and serious horizontal fiscal imbalances make Switzerland a surprisingly powerful model for Eastern European countries that are currently facing the challenge of fiscal decentralization. In spite of the substantial differences in the...

The report focuses on the social safety net, particularly cash and in-kind transfers. The safety net can play an important role in addressing poverty and vulnerability; however, the process by which the safety nets have been developed in Swaziland has produced a fragmented system that leaves...

This paper provides an assessment of the Polish funded pension system and the quality of the regulatory framework for the accumulation phase. There are two elements that distinguish the Polish pension fund portfolios from other reforming countries': the relatively high component of domestic...

"The authors test competing theories of capital structure choices using firm-level data on firm borrowings. The majority of firms in the dataset are privately owned, young, micro or small and medium enterprise (SME) firms concentrated in the service sector. In general, the financing pattern of...