The author focuses on how urban policies and the clustering of creative industries has influenced urban outcomes. The set of creative industries include those with output protectable under some form of intellectual property law. More specifically, this sub-sector encompasses software,...

The author explores the link between information flows and governance or institutional quality. Economic theory expounds on the importance of information on economic outcomes either through its direct effect on prices and quantities or through its effect on other factors such as institutions and...

Reinikka and Svensson demonstrate that, with appropriate survey methods and interview techniques, it is possible to collect quantitative micro-level data on corruption. Public expenditure tracking surveys, service provider surveys, and enterprise surveys are highlighted with several...

The authors examine competitiveness partnerships, which consist of structured dialogue between the public and private sector to improve the investment climate. The paper is designed to be used as a resource by donors, governments, or businesspeople who are interested in establishing,...

This paper contains abstracts of Policy Research Working Paper series, numbers 3080 - 3134.

One of the most contentious debates today is whether pollution-intensive industries from rich countries relocate to poor countries with weaker environmental standards, turning them into pollution havens. Empirical studies to date show little evidence to support the pollution haven hypothesis,...

Many development strategies assume (or desperately hope) that a country already has the capacity to plan and implement institutional reform or that such institutional reform can be pushed through with the external pressures of aid and conditionalities. In a decentralized reform strategy,...

The authors investigate whether resident enterprise managers have an informational advantage about the countries in which they work. They propose a method for extracting information available to resident managers but unknown to investors and forecasters. They rest their hypothesis of...

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 authors present new data on the regulation of the entry of start-up firms in 85 countries. The data cover the number if procedures, official time, and official costs that a start-up firm must bear before it can operate legally. The official costs of entry are extremely high in most...