Chilean legislation is quite conservative, especially compared with international practice. However, its application has not been free of criticism, and it proved necessary to seek mechanisms that combine limitations set forth in the GATT/WTO regulations and others self-imposed by Chilean law....

The reform package in post-crisis Korea was one of the most comprehensively designed and decisively implemented. Though impressed by the quick recovery, many are now raising doubts about real changes in the economy, as the result of a cost-benefits analysis: While the business climate is more...

Traditional approaches to pollution control emphasize the government's role in providing incentives to alter the behavior of relevant economic agents. But to exploit cost advantages at different levels of government, pollution control policies typically involve assigning a variety of...

This paper explores the determinants of government environmental performance at the local level. Chinese township governments, the lowest level in the hierarchical government structure, were selected for this exercise. The performance indicators used in the analyses include the efforts of...

The author examines the political and institutional processes that produced fundamental pension reform in three post-communist countries: Hungary, Kazakhstan, and Poland. He tests various hypothesis about the relationship between deliberative process and outcomes through detailed case studies of...

This paper provides a review of the contradictions and conflicts in the literature on economic governance and sketches an approach to use some of the conceptual and empirical findings from that literature for development policy. The literature offers conflicting conclusions on big questions:...

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...

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,...

Significant changes in public investment patterns - in both the sectoral uses of funds, and their geographic distribution - emerged after Bolivia devolved substantial resources from central agencies, to municipalities in 1994. By far the most important determinant of these changes are objective...

Since its velvet revolution in late 1989, the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (CSFR) has moved steadily to create the conditions for developing a private market economy. Not only has the CSFR freed up the conditions for entry of new private firms, but it has also taken far-reaching steps to...