This Toolkit provides an overall framework with practical tools and information to help policymakers design and implement corporate governance reforms for state-owned enterprises. It covers the key elements of corporate governance, including legal and regulatory framework, state ownership...

Paying Taxes 2014 looks at tax regimes in 189 economies as part of the Doing Business series. The period covered by the study, 2004 to 2012, has seen the end of a sustained period of economic growth, a severe recession and a slow recovery. Governments continue to be under the pressure balance...

Twelfth in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 189 economies, Doing Business 2015 measures regulations affecting 10 areas of everyday business activity: • Starting a business; • Dealing with construction permits; • Getting electricity; • Registering property; •...

The recently released United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) social protection strategic framework and the World Bank social protection and labor strategy call for taking a systems approach to social protection as a way to help countries, communities, families and...

This note discusses two of the Philippines'biggest social assistance programs the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program, the government's first conditional cash transfer (CCT) program, and the rice subsidy program of the National Food Authority (NFA), one of the country's long-standing food-based...

In the past two decades, research on the informal sector has emphasized the heterogeneity of this part of the economy, example in terms of entry costs, firm size, and access to credit, forward- and backward linkages as well as human and physical capital endowments. Yet, not much research has...

In this paper the authors analyze the relationship between personal opinions about the social security system and levels of informal employment using data from a recent household survey carried out in Bulgaria. They compare different indicators of job informality, focusing on the lack of social...

The paper develops an operational definition of governance that can be applied to social protection. The 2004 World Development Report (WDR) accountability framework acts as a starting point, defining accountability in terms of a set of principal?agent relationships between policymakers,...

Demand for social protection is growing in low income countries and fragile situations. In recent years, the success of social protection (SP) interventions in middle income countries (MICs) like Brazil and Mexico, along with the series of food, fuel, and financial crises, has prompted...