The author estimates empirically the degree to which the tax systems of both home and host countries affect foreign direct investment (FDI). He presents evidence that tax rules significantly affect capital flow fromFDI. Home country taxes in particular appear to significantly affect the behavior...

With an increasing number of governments competing to attract multinational companies, fiscal incentives have become a global trend that has grown considerably in the 1990s. Poor African countries rely on tax holidays, and import duty exemptions, while industrial Western European countries allow...

The authors present new data on the regulation of the entry of start-up firms in 85 countries. The data cover the number if procedures, official time, and official costs that a start-up firm must bear before it can operate legally. The official costs of entry are extremely high in most...

Most analyses of property rights and economic development point to the negative influence of insecure property rights on private investment. The authors focus instead on the largely unexamined effects of insecure property rights on government policy choices. They identify one significant...

An understanding of corporate governance theory can promote the adoption of appropriate governance tools to limit agency problems in public pension fund management. The absence of a market for corporate control hinders the translation of lessons from the private sector corporate world to public...

How can one account for the puzzling behavior of insider-managers who, in stripping assets from the veryfirms they own, appear to be stealing from one pocket to fill the other? The authors suggest that such asset-stripping and failure to restructure are the consequences of interactions between...

The author studies the allocation-between a central government and a local authority--of responsibility for planning, financing, and operations for the delivery of health services, in the context of an incomplete contracts model. In this model, inputs are required of both the central government...

In 1980, China's government owned and controlled its state enterprises, which were managed (inefficiently) by bureaucrats. During the 1980s, the government experimented with decentralizing state enterprises to boost productivity. By decade's end, China's state enterprises had become more...

Fiscal adjustment is an illusion when it lowers the budget deficit or public debt but leaves the government's net worth unchanged, says the author. Conventional measures of the budget deficit largely measure the change in explicit public sector liabilities (debt). A more appropriate measure of...

Earmarking is the practice of assigning revenues from specific taxes or groups of taxes to specific government activities or to broader areas of government activity. As such, it contrasts with general fund financing where monies are pooled to be used for various government purposes. In practice,...