Many developing countries are still heavily dependent on mineral extraction to generate fiscal revenue and to earn foreign exchange. When minerals form a significant proportion of the country's asset base it is particularly important to have a framework to evaluate the adequacy of compensation...

In the past decade, Latin America has taken the lead in structural pension reform which replaces a publicly managed pay-as-you-go defined-benefit system with a system of privately managed, fully funded defined-contribution accounts supplemented by a social safety net This arrangement is designed...

The author argues that public and private pillars are essential for a well-functioning pension system. Public pillars, funded or unfounded, offer basic benefits that are independent of the performance of financial markets. Since financial markets suffer from prolonged, persistent, and large...

In the 1970s, Chile underwent profound structural changes in market regulation, public sector policies, and foreign trade. These changes produced notable economic strain and high open unemployment. After the financial crisis of the 1980s the Chilean economy adjusted successfully and resumed...

This paper presents a basic assessment of the financial performance of infrastructure service operators in developing countries. It relies on a new database of 120 companies put together to track the evolution of the cost of capital, the cost of equity and the return to equity for electricity,...

This paper examines whether the degree of spillovers from foreign direct investment is affected by the foreign ownership share in investment projects. The analysis, based on an unbalanced panel of Romanian firms from 1998-2000, provides evidence consistent with positive intra-sectoral spillovers...

Some assert that when efficiency requires cooperation, effectiveness is increased by an egalitarian pay structure resulting from workers'participation in decisionmaking about pay. But it can also be argued that equalizing pay reduces the morale of highly productive workers, and thus more than...

Incidence studies of fiscal policy in developing countries typically examine either the distribution of tax burdens or the incidence of public expenditures. But the central issue for policymakers is the combined or net incidence of fiscal activities. One reason that combined incidence studies...

Implicit in standard macroeconomics of adjustment is the assumption of well-integrated labor markets that are responsive to relative prices. But segmentation of the labor market is usually said to be an important source of labor market rigidities. In particular, if segmentation involves...

Labor is the single most important factor in determining national income. As economies grow, agricultural labor declines as a share of total labor and converges to a level of 2 or 3 percent. Off-farm migration facilitates the development of nonagriculture, but historically the process spans...