The aim of this paper is to shed new light on key challenges in governance arrangements for state owned enterprises in infrastructure sectors. The paper provides guidelines on how to classify the fuzzy and sometimes conflicting development goals of infrastructure and the governance arrangements...

In many developing and middle-income countries, decentralization reforms are promoting changes in governance structures that are reshaping the relationship between local governments and citizens. The success of these decentralization reforms depends on the existence of sound public financial...

Despite a dramatic shift away from subsidies in the early years of transition, the countries of Central Europe still show signs of unsuccessful fiscal adjustment, insufficient deficit reduction, and loose spending policy. High social transfers and low efficiency of government spending remain two...

This paper examines the importance of fiscal autonomy in the analysis of decentralization. Using new data published by the OECD (2001 and 2002), it reproduces several indicators and proposes new measures of decentralization that take into consideration su-bnational governments'autonomy over...

The authors review experiences with fiscal federalism in industrial countries and present a framework for a reform of fiscal systems in developing and transition economies. They indicate how the benefits of decentralized decisionmaking in a federal system can be achieved in a manner consistent...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model that isrich enough to capture some of the central features of the interaction between national tax systems in an integrated world but simple enough to yield sharp insights into some of the central questions which that interaction raises. The...

Over six decades, Chile experimented with three regulatory regimes and ownership patterns for its telecommunications sectors, each with radically different investment patterns. Until 1970, Chile relied on private ownership and rate-of-return regulation, but excess demand persisted. In the 1970s,...

When foreign aid undermines institutional development aid recipients can exhibit the symptoms of aid"dependence"- benefiting from aid in the short term but damaged by it in the long term. The authors find that one equilibrium outcome can be high aid and weak institutions, even when donors and...

The authors argue that traditional explanations of the fiscal crisis in reforming ex-socialist economies overlook crucial connections between key components of the deficit - particularly between reductions in spending and declines in revenues. Almost all studies of the fiscal aspects of the...

Despite massive oil rent incomes since the early 1970s, the economic performance of oil-exporting countries-with notable exceptions-is poor. While there is extensive literature on the management of oil resources, analysis of the underlying political determinants of this poor performance is more...