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...

In principle, financial regulation seeks to remedy recognized deficiencies in a nation's economic, political, and bureaucratic incentivestructures. But the social urgency of particular financial policy problems differ according to a country's stage of development. Regulatory strategies that make...

Over six decades, Chile experimented with three regulatory regimes and ownership patterns for its telecommunications sectors, each with radically different investment patterns. Until 1970, Chile relied on private ownership and rate-of-return regulation, but excess demand persisted. In the 1970s,...

The authors argue that traditional explanations of the fiscal crisis in reforming ex-socialist economies overlook crucial connections between key components of the deficit - particularly between reductions in spending and declines in revenues. Almost all studies of the fiscal aspects of the...

The widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policies. But the basis for this"stylized fact"is questionable, the authors argue. Widely cited evidence of a strong negative correlation between size and consumption per person is...

There are three main approaches to analyzing the effects of aid money and aid-supported reform: before-and-after comparison; control group (simple and modified) studies; and modeling. All three approaches have been used to carry out macroeconomic analysis of policy reform. But before-and-after...

The author presents a simple endogenous growth model (with two types of capital) that shows the sizable long-run effects on growth of distortionary policies. The model applies to many different types of distortions of relative prices common in developing countries - for example, price controls,...

The authors analyze the welfare effects of regional integration in a model of endogenous protection. They show that introducing preferential trading leads to an increase in protection against countries outside the preferential trading area. Moreover, the important Meade result of preferential...

In the past decade the United Kingdom has emerged as a world pacesetter for institutional change in the telecommunications sector. In particular, British Telecom has been divested, price-cap regulation has been introduced, a new regulatory institution (Oftel) has been set up (with its Director...

The authors show that the potential benefit to a host country of forward markets or of foreign exchange guarantees depend on the investor's country of origin and on specific characteristics of investment. They show this in terms of the effects on foreign-exchange risks and on the amount of...