The authors analyze how education contributes to savings. There are many reasons to believe that education and savings may be linked, either positively or negatively. It is generally expected that people with higher education will earn greater income, thereby leading to higher savings, even if...

Too often, a good tax policy proposal is considered sufficient to improve the tax system - too little consideration is given to weaknesses in tax administration, perhaps because of measurement problems. Analyzing legal and administrative measures and quantitatively evaluating their impact on tax...

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...

Establishing an investment promotion agency has become a central part of most countries'development strategies. Today there are more than 150 investment promotion agencies worldwide. Yet very little is known about what these agencies have been really doing, notably in emerging countries, and...

The book contains complementary essays on the use of tax incentives, to attract foreign direct investment (FDI). The first essay presents results of the authors' original research, and explores FDI, and issues of tax incentives, in the context of Indonesia. Their results mostly support the...

Understanding how prices and quantities affect investment demand is important in analyzing adjustment policies in many developing countries. Recent literature emphasizes that uncertainty curtails private investment, adding a risk premium - the price of waiting. Several recent empirical studies...

Globalization has been a persistent phenomenon of the post-war period. The gross volume of cross-border capital flows has grown at an average of 25 percent a year, and trade in goods and services has also increased, albeit not as dramatically, but at least twice as fast as world GDP over the...

In the past 20 years, high and extremely volatile inflation rates in Latin America have generally been associated with unstable monetary policies and the (temporary) use of inflationary revenues to finance fiscal deficits. There seems to be a consensus that high inflation is bad for economic...

The price of debt on the secondary market reflects the risk that the debtor country might default on its external debt. Using the option-pricing theory, the authors identify the factors that influenced the risk of default in six highly indebted countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico,...

Africa has not succeeded in attracting much foreign direct investment in the past few decades. When countries did attract multinational companies, it was principally because of their (abundant) natural resources and the size of their domestic market. Angola, Cote d'Ivoire, Nigeria, and South...