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...

The remarkable performance of the Irish economy in recent years has attracted much attention. Within a 10-year period the economy went from an 18 percent unemployment rate to nearly full employment, while the ratio of debt to GDP fell from 120 percent to less than 50 percent. Inevitably, this...

The concept of the informal sector (IS) has recently received widespread and growing attention. Indeed, it may be fair to talk about a re-emergence of the concept in the debate related to social protection and poverty reduction. We argue that with this new found prominence, it is even more...

The authors provide an economic framework to analyze investment in informal housing in developing countries. They consider a simple model of investment in the housing market where investors can choose between two sectors-the formal sector, where physical investment faces no risk of destruction,...

In Northeast Brazil, despite sustained efforts to reduce rural poverty and more than $3.2 billion in spending, the rural poor are little better off than they were two decades ago. Brazil's difficult macroeconomic environment has tended to restrict the amount of funds available for rural...

A foreign aid or foreign lending policy that focuses exclusively on project financing may have unintended consequences, report the authors. New research shows that aid intended for crucial social and economic sectors often merely substitutes for spending that recipient governments would have...

World Bank lending and advice to support institutional and policy reform of public expenditure management is of recent and limited, but rapidly expanding scope. The paper begins with a brief overview of the Bank's recent work on public expenditures. The analysis indicates the lack of a...

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 public sector's performance in the Caribbean varies, in reducing poverty and in creating an enabling environment for growth. Barbados and the Bahamas have been the high performers, Guyana and the Dominican Republic have been sluggish, and the other Caribbean countries fall in between. In the...

The purpose of this paper is to briefly develop the following points: (1) The argument that the size of the public sector needs to be drastically reduced has probably been taken too far, without really analyzing the full consequences of the shift. Often the dismantling of some functions implies...