Adopting a legal definition of informality, this article studies the causes of informality in general and with a particular application to Peru. It starts with a discussion on the definition and measures of informality, as well as on the reasons why widespread informality should be of great...

Adopting a legal definition of informality, this paper studies the causes of informality in general and with a particular application to Mexico. It starts with a discussion on the definition and measures of informality. It then argues and provides evidence that informality is not only a...

Recent research convincingly shows that crises beget reform. Although the consensus is that economic crises foster macroeconomic stabilization, it is silent on which types of crises cause which types of reform. Is it economic or political crises that are the most important drivers of structural...

Recent research convincingly shows that crises beget reform. Although the consensus is that economic crises foster macroeconomic stabilization, it is silent on which types of crises cause which types of reform. Is it economic or political crises that are the most important drivers of structural...

This paper reconsiders the effects of volatile growth rates on growth itself. I show that the underlying endogeneity of government size can hide the net growth effects from volatility. There exists a positive direct and a negative indirect channel, with the latter operating through the size of...

This paper argues that legally speaking, Turkish service recipients must be granted visa-free access to the EU. The freedom to provide services is covered by Article 41(1) Additional Protocol, and rights in this field should be extended as far as possible to Turkish nationals, as outlined in...

The US government has announced an initiative to promote the "rule of law" in the People’s Republic of China. However, though China has also endorsed building the "rule of law" as a goal, the American and Chinese views of what "rule of law" entails differ substantially. In the US government,...

Conventional wisdom depicts corruption as a tax on incumbent firms. This paper challenges this view in two ways. First, by arguing that corruption matters not so much because of the value of the bribe ("tax"), but because of another less studied feature of corruption, namely bribe...

The predictions that economic freedom is beneficial in reducing corruption have not been found to be universally robust in empirical studies. The present work reviews this relation- ship by using rms' data in a cross-country survey and argues that approaches using aggreg- ated macro data have...

The basic goal of Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) is to improve regulatory quality by ex ante selecting the best alternative using cost-benefit analysis and enabling ex post evaluation of the real impact. Both goals are achievable only when RIA is properly implemented for all potential...