This report analyzes the World Bank's experience with project analysis from a sample of 1,105 projects. The authors compare estimated rates of return at appraisal with re-estimated rates of return at the project completion. Their findings confirm a high degree of uncertainty in project analysis....

The neoclassical theory of project evaluation is based on models in which agents discount the future at a constant exponential rate. But there is strong empirical evidence that people discount the future hyperbolically, applying larger annual discount rates to near-term returns than to returns...

Credibility and transparency are at the core of the current debate about exchange rate regimes. The steady growth in the magnitude and variability of international capital flows has complicated the question of whether to use floating, fixed, or intermediate exchange rate regimes. Emerging market...

The authors explain how the output growth effect from liberalizing the service sectors differs from the effect from liberalizing trade in goods. They also suggest using a policy-based rather than outcome-based measure of the openness of a country's service regime. They construct such openness...

This study shows that in developing countries with no more than partly favorable policies toward manufactured exports, outside assistance to services that promote and support manufactured exports has had little discernible impact on exports and has rarely been effective in expanding them. The...

Foreign direct investment may promote economic development by helping to improve productivity growth and exports in the multinationals'host countries, the authors conclude, after reviewing the empirical evidence. But the exact relationship between foreign multinational corporations and their...

This paper discusses the theory that less politics makes better economics. It argues that this perspective on politics misrepresents the dynamics of policymaking in developing countries and is seriously limited in its ability to explain how policy changes come about or how policies are chosen...

This paper presumes the international discourse on the sustainability of development is concerned with: (a) the rights of future generations to the services of natural and produced assets; and (b) whether formal and informal institutions which affect the transfer of assets to future generations...

Until recently, trade in services was mostly ignored by iinternational economists, reflecting a perception that services were nontradable. This has never been true. Transportation and travel, for example, have always been important economic activities. In 1995, services trade climbed to a...

Worldwide privatization of the telecommunications industry, and the introduction of competition in the sector, together with the ever-increasing rate of technological advance in telecommunications, raise new and critical challenges for regulation. Fo matters of pricing, universal service...