Numerous analysts have linked volunteering and participation to positive economic and political outcomes. The author uses the 1994 Peru Living Standards Measurement Survey to analyze volunteering patterns in rural Peru. He finds that volunteers in rural Peru have a high opportunity cost of time....

Labor market integration is typically assumed to improve welfare in the absence of distortions, because it allows labor to move to where returns are highest. The author examines this result in a simple general equilibrium model in the presence of a common property resource: social capital....

World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (report no. 17300) argued that institutions-the rules of the game that govern production and exchange-shape a country's prospects for sustained market-led growth. The author provides an institutional framework for service delivery, an...

Public provision of education has often been perceived as universal and egalitarian, but in reality it is not. Political pressure typically results in incidence bias in favor of the rich. The author argues that the bias in political influence resulting from extreme income inequalities is...

The public sector's performance in the Caribbean varies, in reducing poverty and in creating an enabling environment for growth. Barbados and the Bahamas have been the high performers, Guyana and the Dominican Republic have been sluggish, and the other Caribbean countries fall in between. In the...

The impact of macroeconomic crises on parents'investments in the human capital of their children is a widely contested issue. The author analyzes the effects of the profound macroeconomic crisis in Peru in 1988-92 on the schooling and employment decisions made by urban school-age children. He...

There are three potential levels of government activity in the health sector: regulation, finance, and direct provision of services, with the government owning and managing hospitals and primary care clinics. Eid focuses on service provision. In recent years corporatization has been introduced...

Virtually all of the studies that quantify the adjustment costs of trade liberalization relative to the benefits point to the conclusion that adjustment costs are small in relation to the benefits of trade liberalization. The explanation for low adjustment costs is that: These costs are...

The author argues for a shift in the focus of economic analysis of projects. First, project analysts need to make full use of project information, especially identifying the source of the divergence between market prices and economic costs as well as the source of the divergence between economic...

The previous General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) negotiations produced little liberalization of the movement of individual service providers (mode 4), and the potentially large global gains from suchmovement remain unrealized. In the current negotiations, as part of the Doha...