This paper contains abstracts of Policy Research Working Paper series Numbers 2619-2679.

Assistance to support services for exports has rarely boosted manufactured exports from developing countries whose export policies were less than fully satisfactory. This is particularly true of services that involve consultant advice, export promotion, marketing assistance, and provision of...

North (1984) argues that it is not the cost of transport but the cost of transactions that prevents economies from realizing well-being - and that institutions matter because they affect the costs of transactions. The authors analyze the role of the deliberation council - an institution common...

The issue of trade in services is the subject of increasing interest. Evidence of this is its inclusion in the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations. As a contribution to the analysis of the issue, this paper analyzes the influence of a country's resource endowments on its net trade in financial...

The authors analyze national and international policy options to encourage the international transfer of technology, distinguishing between four major channels of such transfer: trade in products, trade in knowledge, foreign direct investment, and intra-national and international movement of...

This report analyzes the World Bank's experience with project analysis from a sample of 1,105 projects. The authors compare estimated rates of return at appraisal with re-estimated rates of return at the project completion. Their findings confirm a high degree of uncertainty in project analysis....

This study shows that in developing countries with no more than partly favorable policies toward manufactured exports, outside assistance to services that promote and support manufactured exports has had little discernible impact on exports and has rarely been effective in expanding them. The...

Until recently, trade in services was mostly ignored by iinternational economists, reflecting a perception that services were nontradable. This has never been true. Transportation and travel, for example, have always been important economic activities. In 1995, services trade climbed to a...

Developing viable new business is critical to recovery, and long-term growth, especially in transition economies. There has been a long history of public support of enterprise development, starting with centralized state agency initiatives, but moving more recently to decentralized instruments...

The author studies the determinants of the diffusion of mobile telecommunications in Africa in a fixed effects model. He uses data from 1987-2000 on 41 African countries that have adopted cellular telecommunications technologies. He finds that competition is the driving force behind the mobile...