Are there lessons to be learned about how Eastern European countries have dealt with problems in their banking systems? What role have these countries assigned to banks during the transition? How have they used banks in dealing with the enterprise problem? The author addresses these questions by...

The financial sector should be active in enterprise restructuring in the transitional economies, and should help channel resources to the private sector. What will best help the sector achieve these tasks: gradual reform or radical reform? Liberalization and privatization are the most urgent...

How well do rural households in developing countries mitigate the income risk of the rural sector? There are several sensible reasons why households cannot fully insure consumption against income fluctuations. The well-known problems of moral hazard, information asymmetries, and deficient...

Contrary to common perceptions, higher environmental standards in industrial countries have not tended to lower their international competitiveness, the author contends. There has been little systematic relationship between higher environmental standards and competitiveness in environmentally...

The authors explore options for Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) governments to make competition law enforcement more sensitive to trade and investment policy, thereby supporting liberal trade policy. The competition laws of these countries tend to resemble European Union (EU) competition...

In the late 1980s many developing countries experienced something of a pardigm shift: governments began to pursue more market-oriented domestic policies. There was an increasing perception that liberalizing access to service markets was a potentially low-cost, effective method for improving the...

Soviet growth for 1960-89 was the worst in the world, after controlling for investment and human capital. And relative performance worsens over time. The authors explain the declining Soviet growth rate from 1950 to 1987 by the declining marginal product of capital. The rate of total factor...

The policy failures associated with inappropriate acceptance of unitary models of household behavior are more serious than those associated with inappropriate acceptance of collective models, contend the authors. They support this claim with illustrations. Consider, for example, the effect of...

Except for two relatively minor statutes, U.S. environmental laws do not permit the balancing of costs and benefits in setting environmental standards. The Clean Air Act, for example, prohibits the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from considering costs in setting ambient air quality...

Between World War II and the early 1970s, Tanzania developed one of the world's largest cashew nut industries. In 1973-74, marketed production reached 145,000 tons (about 30 percent of world production), with cashews providing an important source of income to some 250,000 farmers and being the...