Many low-income countries contend with a governance syndrome characterized by a difficult combination of seeming openness, weak institutions, and strong inter-elite contestation for power and resources. In such countries, neither broad-based policy nor public management reforms are likely to be...

A frontier challenge for development strategy is to move beyond prescribing optimal economic policies, and instead – taking a broad view of the interactions between economic, political and social constraints and dynamics -- to identify entry points capable of breaking a low-growth logjam, and...

Drawing on the new institutional economics, the authors examine the impact on businesses of Brazil's relatively complex, nontransparent legal and regulatory institutions and compare their costs with those of Chile's institutions, which are relatively simple. They examine four basic areas where...

By the late 1990s, the technical and financial performance of the power sector in India had deteriorated to the point where the Government of India had to step in to bail out the state utilities, almost all of which were vertically integrated state electricity boards (SEBs). Considering that the...

This paper studies the effects of voluntary accounting information disclosure through auditing on firm access to finance, exposure to corruption, and sales growth. Relying on a data set of more than 70,000 firms in 121 countries, the analysis finds that disclosure can be a double-edged sword. On...

The explosion of informal entrepreneurial activity during Mongolia's transition to a market economy represents one of the most visible signs of change in this expansive but sparsely populated Asian country. To deepen our understanding of Mongolia's informal sector during the transition, the...

This paper was completed before the events of August 1991. But the analysis of recent modes of privatization in the Soviet Union is still important for understanding the evolving situation. The"present"All-Union regime, was the first regime to implement wide-scale privatization. The process may...

Policy recommendations to reduce the growth of public spending are haunted by the inevitability of two factors. First Wagner's law, the hypothesis that with economic development an increasing share of GDP is devoted to public spending, and secondly, Baumol's effect, that as economies develop,...

Governance is central to development outcomes in infrastructure, not least because corruption (a symptom of failed governance) can have significantly negative impact on returns to infrastructure investment. This conclusion holds whether infrastructure is in private or public hands. This paper...