For sustained growth, a developing economy must provide productive employment opportunities in nonagricultural sectors. As the economy grows, employment shifts from the agricultural sector to industrial and service sectors. The move away from agriculture happens because of the decline in the...

Significant changes in public investment patterns - in both the sectoral uses of funds, and their geographic distribution - emerged after Bolivia devolved substantial resources from central agencies, to municipalities in 1994. By far the most important determinant of these changes are objective...

The Russian Federation has one of the richest natural resource endowments in the world. Despite their importance in the Russian economy, natural resources do not contribute as much as they could to public revenues. Large resource rents (excess payments, or above-normal profits generated by...

As socialist countries move toward market systems, fiscal policy is an important part of their reform agenda. First, they need to reorient public spending to focus more on the provision of"public"goods. Second, they need to adopt more selective, predictable, and nondiscretionary means to finance...

Basing their report on repeat visits in late 1992 to 75 large state-owned manufacturing enterprises (which had been earlier surveyed in mid-1991), the authors present optimistic new evidence about the transformation of state-owned enterprises in Poland. This evidence shows state-owned...

Economists have stressed that the efficiency costs of taxation are not the obvious costs to taxpayers of handing over payments to the government. Instead, the efficiency costs stem from the efforts of taxpayers to avoid paying money to the government, whether it is consuming less of the taxed...

The authors describe the main changes in the Hungarian labor market since 1989. They focus especially on changes in behavior in state and privatized firms, since the shedding and restructuring of labor are at the heart of the transition. They describe five types of firms: 1) state firms (often...

The authors examine the process of economic transformation in Mongolia, a huge, isolated, sparsely populated country. After identifying factors that led to formulation of a radical adjustment program in such an isolated country, they focus on Mongolia's innovative voucher privatization scheme,...

In a number of middle-income developing countries, the severe inflationary crises of the 1980s coincided with political liberalization and an expansion of the arena of distributive politics. This wave of democratization raises questions that have recurred throughout the post-World War II period....

Survey results in Poland indicate that hard budgets and import comeption can spur state firms to adjust even when privatization lags behind. As they examine the underpinning of Polish reform, the authors address the key question of why managers instigated such adjustment. They examine how...