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...

Barber B. Conable, President of the World Bank, discussed how in Mexico, the decade of the Eighties began with a massive increase in the size of government, its ownership and interventions, and with an unmanageable debt. By the decade's end, Mexico had launched one of the most ambitious,...

Thirty years of economic renovation reforms have catapulted Vietnam from the ranks of the world's poorest countries to one of its great development success stories. Critical ingredients have been visionary leaders, a sense of shared societal purpose, and a focus on the future. Starting in the...

"This paper deals with potential instabilities in the Eurozone stemming from an insufficient interplay between monetary policy and reform effort on the one hand and the emergence of intra-Euro area divergences on the other. As a first step, we assess the effect of EMU on structural reform and...

This paper examines the contemporaneous relationship between the exchange rate regime and structural economic reforms for a sample of CEEC/CIS transition countries. We investigate empirically whether structural reforms are complements or substitutes for monetary commitment in the attempt to...

This paper reviews the literature relevant to understanding political constraints to economic reforms. Reform refers to changes in government policies or institutional rules because status quo policies and institutions are not working well to achieve the goals of economic well-being and...

The effect of structural reforms on growth in Europe and Central Asia is assessed by looking separately at each supply-side channel: capital, labor, and productivity, with the last estimated using the stochastic frontier approach. By controlling for the interaction with the economic cycle, the...

This economic report records the economic activities of Armenia for the year 2013. A steep decline in construction caused economic growth to weaken to 0.6 percent in the second quarter of 2013 (year-on-year) from 7.5 percent in the first quarter and 7.2 percent in 2012 as a whole. Developments...

Economists recommend to partly redistribute gains to losers from a structural reform, which in many cases may be required for making the reform politically viable. However, taxation is distortionary. Then, it is unclear that compensatory transfers can support a Pareto-improving reform. This...

This chapter provides a critical overview of the state of the art in the economics literature on structural reforms. It takes stock of theoretical developments, measurement efforts and of the econometric evidence. We start with a simple theoretical framework for the relationship between...