Most analyses of property rights and economic development point to the negative influence of insecure property rights on private investment. The authors focus instead on the largely unexamined effects of insecure property rights on government policy choices. They identify one significant...

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...

Foreign direct investment brings host countries capital, productive facilities, and technology transfers as well as employment, new job skills, and management expertise. It is important to the Russian Federation, where incentives for competition are limited and incentives to becoming efficient...

One of the apparent inconsistencies in the breakup of multinational states is that, while the republics justified their decision by claiming they wanted increased sovereignty, the new states'strong desire to join the European Union shows their intention to dissipate this sovereignty. How can the...

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...

The literature argues that the presence of multiple veto players (government decisionmakers) with polarized interests increases the credibility of sovereign commitments, but reduces the ability of governments to adjust policies in the event of exogenous shocks that jeopardize their ability to...

This paper builds on a previous series of papers (see Claessens, Glaessner, and Klingebiel, 2001, 2002) that identified electronic security as a key component to the delivery of electronic finance benefits. This paper and its technical annexes (available separately at...

Foreign direct investment is a key ingredient of successful economic growth and development in developing countries--partly because the very essence of economic development is the rapid and efficient transfer and cross-border adoption of"best practices."Foreign direct investment is especially...

The authors explore the relationship between financial structure - the degree to which a financial system is market- or bank-based - and economicdevelopment. They use three methodologies: 1) The cross-country approach uses cross-country data to assess whether economies grow faster with market-...

The authors study the effects of regulation on economic growth and the relative size of the informal sector in a large sample of industrial and developing countries. Along with firm dynamics, informality is an important channel through which regulation affects macroeconomic performance and...