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...

Thirty years ago, in 1974, Chile launched the first large-scale privatization in a developing country. About 15 years later, Argentina provided a new model of global infrastructure management. Since then a variety of public-private partnerships in infrastructure have been adopted throughout the...

The author develops a theoretical framework to guide empirical analysis of how land registration affects financial development and economic growth. Most conceptual approaches investigate the effects of land registration on only one sector, nut land registration is commonly observed to affect not...

This paper points out that Governments are facing increasing fiscal risks and uncertainties. Two of the reasons for this situation are: first, the international integration of financial markets, which has meant greater volumes and volatility of cross-border flows of private capital; and, second,...

The debate on fiscal policy in Europe centers on how to let automatic stabilizers work while achieving fiscal consolidation. There is significant agreement on the importance of using fiscal policy as a counter-cyclical instrument, as monetary policy can no longer play this role. In contrast,...

Social security systems in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union devote most of their resources to earnings-related pensions and neglect"targeted"interventions to aid losers from the transition to a market economy. As social insurance systems, they have the characteristic weaknesses of the...

It is naive to believe that a market economy can be introduced by"shock therapy,"the author argues. In the several cases when it has been attempted, it has brought problems. A market economy requires adequate institutions and appropriate behavior, both of which can be introduced only gradually...

Latvia's experience over the past decade shows that economic growth and real convergence can no longer be assumedto be exogenously driven processes determined by given technological improvements and relatively higher factor returns. Instead, it is an endogenously driven process led by many...

In the globalizing economy, national policymakers are often forced to accept the challenge of financial integration. Faced with the potentially destabilizing effects of international financial markets, they have to strengthen financial regulation, importing international best practices and...