The investment climate of a region reflects the location specific factors that provide opportunities and incentives for firms to invest, create jobs, and expand. A good investment climate removes unjustified costs, risks, and barriers to competition and encourages firms to invest and...

Liberalisation initiatives have been taken by India with a view to improve the efficiency of manufacturing industries and achieving faster GDP growth. The present paper investigates the influence of Investment Climate (IC) on the levels of total factor productivity (TFP) in the organised...

This paper develops an index for measuring the economic power of governments viewed as entities in themselves. The basic idea is to encapsulate the economic representative power of a nation’s government in the international arena in as simple and parsimonious a manner as possible. For...

The purpose of this study was to explore the role and importance of human resources for the scaling up of health services in low income countries. In the case studies, the following have been analyzed: (i) investigated the size, composition and structure of the current health work force; (ii)...

Government corruption is more prevalent in poor countries than in rich countries. This paper uses cross-industry heterogeneity in growth rates within Vietnam to test empirically whether growth leads to lower corruption. The analysis uses survey data collected from over 13,000 Vietnamese firms...

Deforestation in developing and middle income countries is an urgent global problem, affecting climate change, soil erosion, major river basins, and livelihoods of poor households living near the forests. Public discussions of the problem are frequently dominated by widely held beliefs...

There is perhaps only one broad certainty in the contemporary debate on climate change: not only does climate change affect different nations and communities differently, but the responses of individual stakeholders and institutions are also quite different, primarily because of their different...

Even though the economic and social benefits of thriving entrepreneurship and innovation are evident, it is critical to recognize that these benefits will only accrue if the key gaps in the ecosystem are addressed. Five key areas that an entrepreneur would need to address on a priority basis are...