Many countries spend significant resources on investment promotion agencies in the hope of attracting inflows of foreign direct investment. Despite the importance of this question for public policy choices, little is known about the effectiveness of investment promotion efforts. This study uses...

Recent international experience has shown that excessively complex administrative procedures, required to establish, and operate a business, discourage inflows of foreign direct investment. The authors present a new database on the administrative costs faced by private investors in 32 developing...

Like many other developing countries, South Asian nations have been experiencing increased foreign direct investment inflows over the past decade as developing countries get a larger share of cross-border investments that were once sent to developed countries. Nonetheless, South Asia's inflows...

This paper uses a large cross-country dataset to empirically examine factors associated with sovereign defaults on external private creditors and expropriation of foreign direct investments in developing countries since the 1970s. In the long run, sovereign defaults and expropriations are likely...

This paper assesses the impact of work-related migration by males on the labor market behavior of females in Nepal. Using data from the 2004 Nepal household survey, the authors apply the Instrumental Variable Full Information Maximum Likelihood method to account for unobserved factors that could...