This paper reviews some issues relevant to the delivery of public services. Itreviews some of the debates and flags some issues that are significantworldwide, especially in Africa. It emphasises how the debate has movedalong in terms of defining the relative responsibilities of the public...

Using U.S. manufacturing data, Griliches (1969) found evidence suggesting that capitalequipment was more substitutable for unskilled than skilled labor. Griliches formulated thisfinding as the capital-skill complementarity hypothesis. The purpose of this study is todetermine whether the...

Does fractionalization change over time? If so, are there any substantial implications foreconomic performance? To answer such questions, we construct a new panel data set withfractionalization measures for 26 former communist countries covering the period from 1989to 2002...

In the early 1990s, a consensus emerged among the leading experts in the field of small and micro business finance. It is based on three elements: The focus of projects should be on improving the entire financial sector of a given developing country; a commercial approach should be adopted,...

Zugang zu Krediten ist für kleine und mittelgroße Unternehmen in Entwicklungsländern von großer Bedeutung, um ihre ökonomischen Möglichkeiten besser auszuschöpfen und so die Einkommen ihrer Besitzer, aber auch ihrer Mitarbeiter zu erhöhen. Deshalb hat die Entwicklungshilfe in der...

The paper is a follow-up to an article published in Technique Financière etDeveloppement in 2000 (see the appendix to the hardcopy version), which portrayedthe first results of a new strategy in the field of development finance implemented inSouth-East Europe. This strategy consists in creating...

This paper analyses how tax morale and countries´ institutional quality affect the shadoweconomy, controlling in a multivariate analysis for a variety of potential factors. The literaturestrongly emphasizes the quantitative importance of these factors to understand the level andchanges of...

This paper analyses how governance or institutional quality and tax morale affect the shadoweconomy, using an international country panel and also within country data...

This chapter develops a unified analytical framework, drawing on and extending the existing literatureon the subject, for studying the role of property rights in economic development. Itaddresses two fundamental and related questions concerning the relationship between propertyrights and...

This paper analyzes how group lending programs use joint liability to utilize localinformation that borrowers have about each other’s projects through self-selection of groupmembers in the group formation stage. These schemes are shown to lead to positiveassortative matching in group...