This paper reviews the literature on the role of the investment climate reforms in job creation. It finds that the current landscape of employment and private sector activity in developing countries indicates a number of potential channels through which investment climate reforms can positively...

Since the early 1990s, a large number of studies have been undertaken to understand the causes and consequences of corruption. Many of these studies have employed firm-level survey data from various countries. While insightful, these analyses based on firm-level surveys have largely ignored two...

This paper analyzes the impact of donor fragmentation on the quality of government bureaucracy in aid-recipient nations. A formal model of a donor's decision to hire government administrators to manage donor-funded projects predicts that the number of administrators hired declines as the donor's...

Using calories in a unitary framework, previous literature has claimed lack of gender inequality in intrahousehold food distribution. This paper finds that while there is lack of gender disparity in the calorie adequacy ratio, the disparity is prominent among children, adolescents, and adults...

The paper augments Holmstrom’s (1982) team production model in the context of aid effectiveness. The analysis shows how donor proliferation leads to inefficient supply of aid in the recipient country because of the free-riding problem faced by the donors. The empirical findings support the...

Building on the pioneering work of Barro (1991) and Mauro (1995) to include the most recent years for which data are available (for Bangladesh in the 1990s), the authors investigate the relationships between corruption, and growth, and, between corruption and investment, both domestic and...

Informality is pervasive in developing countries. In Bangladesh, the majority of firms are informal and as such they might not have access to prime markets, while lowering the tax base. The authors implemented an information campaign on registration, including both the step-by-step procedures...

Research on the economic consequences of corruption has been hampered by the inability to directly measure corruption. Using an innovative methodology that allows respondents to report individual experiences with corruption while minimizing self-incrimination and an objective diagnostic to...