The objective of this report is to explore firm competitiveness, the investment climate, and growth in Malaysia. This report is structured as follows. The first two chapters provide an assessment of the investment climate. The last two chapters examine how productivity enhancing programs, skills...

Azerbaijan's early transition to an independent, market-based economy has been tumultuous, entailing significant economic costs, and social impacts. Yet, unlike many transition economies, sound economic reforms since 1995, have enabled the country to achieve macroeconomic stability, and resume...

Azerbaijan's early transition to an independent, market-based economy has been tumultuous, entailing significant economic costs, and social impacts. Yet, unlike many transition economies, sound economic reforms since 1995, have enabled the country to achieve macroeconomic stability, and resume...

Bangladesh has recorded impressive economic and social gains since the 1990s. Recent growth has been at levels close to six percent. The country has doubled per capita growth and taken large strides toward reaching many Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), ahead of many comparable countries....

"Trade costs and nontariff barriers are at the forefront of discussions on competitiveness and expanding trade opportunities for developing countries. This paper provides a summary overview of data and indicators relevant to these issues and has been informed by work underway at the World Bank...

Mauritius is facing a sharp transition from dependence on trade preferences to open competition in the global economy. And it must do so in an unusually difficult environment. After 20 years of remarkable performance, the economy has fallen off a high growth plateau of about 6 percent toward the...

This book aims to help policy makers take advantage of the opportunities presented by the global IT services and IT-enabled services (ITES) industry. It analyzes factors crucial to a country's competitiveness-including skills, cost, infrastructure, business environment; and presents a Location...

"In recent debates, trade preference erosion has been viewed by some as damaging to developing countries, and by others as insignificant, except in a few cases. But little data have been available to back either view. The objective of this paper is to improve our measures of the size,...