Over the past decade, France has substantially eased the burden of anti-competitive regulations and effectively enforced competition law against anti-competitive practices. Various sectors have been opened up more widely to competition, and the powers of the Competition Authority have been...

Poland’s productivity has grown strongly over the past decade, and efforts to reduce the regulatory burden have been significant. Despite impressive progress, product market regulation remains more burdensome than in most OECD countries, partly due to the importance of red tape and the level...

This paper discusses the current state of product market competition in Iceland, including the legal and regulatory framework, and suggests directions for further improvement. Given the size of the economy, efficiency considerations dictate high concentration in many markets, and preventing...

The member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have placed industrial development at the core of the region's integrated development agenda. This paper seeks to assess the regional competitiveness and opportunities in the sugar to confectionery value chain in Zambia and...

This paper examines how import penetration affects firms' productivity growth taking into account the heterogeneity in firms' distance to the efficiency frontier and country differences in product market regulation. Using firm-level data for a large number of OECD countries, the analysis reveals...

The U.S. growth experience in the 1990s and the perceptions of a new economy contrast sharply with trends in bandwidth use and pricing across the 1990s. Dramatic increases in bandwidth use and dramatic reductions in bandwidth prices that were predicted to occur in the second half the 1990s did...

An acceleration in the growth of communications bandwidth in use and a rapid reduction in bandwidth prices have not accompanied the U.S. economy's strong performance in the second half of the 1990s. Overall U.S. bandwidth in use has grown robustly throughout the 1990s, but growth has not...

Using a time series of fifty years, the relationships between investment by telecommunications firms and Gross Domestic Product in the United States are examined. Granger-Sims causality tests are conducted, with proper allowance for both the non-stationarity of the data and lag length. These...

This study gauges the status of transition in the formerly centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, using a broad approach that compares countries with respect to their business environment, competition, and managerial practices; and assesses transition progress at the...