Case studies and anecdotal evidence have suggested that uncertainty about policies, laws, and regulations has hampered development of the private sector in many developing countries. The authors present results from a new cross-country survey that provides comparable data on local...

Economic theory and case study evidence have long suggested that institutional factors, such as well-defined property and contract rights, may be crucial in explaining differences in economic performance across countries. Much of the recent discussion about"governance"has, for example, focused...

The author investigates the determinants and dynamics of poverty during the five-year growth period that followed the 1994 CFA franc devaluation in Burkina Faso. Results show that the nature and dynamics of poverty determinants are influenced by the spatial location of households and that the...

The authors describe trends in single parenthood in Russia, examining factors that affect living arrangements in single-mother families. Before economic reform, single mothers and their children were somewhat protected form poverty by government assistance (income support, subsidized child care,...

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...

Randomly sampled workfare participants in a welfare-dependent region of Argentina were given a voucher that entitled an employer to a sizable wage subsidy. A second sample also received the option of skill training, while a third sample formed the control group. The authors analyze the effects...

This paper presents a study of willingness-to-pay of the Armenian Diaspora in the United States to protect Armenia's Lake Sevan, a unique and precious symbol of the Armenian cultural heritage. Dichotomous choice contingent valuation questions were asked by mail surveys to elicit...

The author evaluates the strength of the effect that community pressure and pollution charges have on industrial pollution control in China, and estimates the marginal cost of pollution abatement. He examines a well-documented set of plant-level data, combined with community-level data, to...

Are the determinants of chronic and transient poverty different? Do policies that reduce transient poverty also reduce chronic poverty? The authors decompose measures of household poverty into chronic and transient components and use censored conditional quantile estimators to investigate the...

If the marginal gains from investment in physical capital depend positively on knowledge, but a household cannot hire skilled labor to compensate for low skills, then even if it has access to credit, the household will achieve lower returns than an educated household. If, as is common, the...