The institutional landscape of local dispute resolution in Bangladesh is rich: it includes the traditional process of shalish, longstanding and impressive civil society efforts to improve on shalish, and a somewhat less-explored provision for gram adalat or village courts. Based on a nationally...

A burgeoning literature finds that financial development exerts a first-order impact on long-run economic growth, which raises critical questions, such as why do some countries have well-developed growth-enhancing financial systems while others do not? The law and finance theory focuses on the...

A growing body of work suggests that cross-country differences in legal origin help explain differences in financial development. The authors assess two theories of why legal origin influences financial development. First, the"political"channel stresses that (1) legal traditions differ in the...

The authors assess three established theories about the historical determinants of financial development. They also propose an augmented version of one of these theories. The law and finance view, stresses that different legal traditions emphasize, to differing degrees, the rights of individual...

The authors examine how well several institutional and firm-level factors and their interactions explain firms'perceptions of property rights protection. Their sample includes private and public firms that vary in size from very small to large in 62 countries. Together, the institutional...

Over the past several years, World Bank member countries have increasingly sought Bank assistance in improving and reforming their legal systems. This paper catalogs the scope and breadth of such assistance and outlines some lessons the Bank has learned. Countries with long and established legal...

Since its velvet revolution in late 1989, the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (CSFR) has moved steadily to create the conditions for developing a private market economy. Not only has the CSFR freed up the conditions for entry of new private firms, but it has also taken far-reaching steps to...

The government of Slovenia is moving rapidly to promote the growth of an efficient market economy and the private sector. One of the major tasks it faces is the development of a legal framework that can act as a decentralized"invisible hand"to replace previous administrative controls and steer...

Enterprise reform in China since 1979 has been supported by accelerated reform of China's legal framework. In the transition to a"socialist market economy", state enterprises will operate independently of the government, may no longer be fully owned or controlled by the state, and will deal with...

Implementing decentralized legal frameworks requires reasonable laws, adequate institutions, and market-oriented incentives. All three must exist together. In transition economies, not only must new laws be drafted but they must be accompanied by the growth of supportive institutions. And they...