In 1980, China's government owned and controlled its state enterprises, which were managed (inefficiently) by bureaucrats. During the 1980s, the government experimented with decentralizing state enterprises to boost productivity. By decade's end, China's state enterprises had become more...

The question of the most effective order of reforming state-owned enterprises has been hotly debated over the years. In the early 1990s, many western advisers encouraged Eastern European countries, and the former Soviet Union, to privatize firms quickly under the assumption that market...

Central to the effectiveness of financial policies geared towards promoting real business investment is the interaction between corporations'financing and investment decisions. The objectives of this paper are twofold : 1) develop an integrated approach towards the problem of optimal corporate...

Inflation causes conventionally reported income to differ from real economic income because standard accounting procedures are based on the assumption of price stability. Because of this mismeasurement of economic income, a tax on reported income may distort economic decisions and generate...

Private business investment has expanded remarkably in Colombia's recent economic recovery. Sustained expansion of this investment is considered crucial to continued economic growth and increases in production. Having analyzed demand, the cost of capital, and the availability and allocation of...

The authors argue that emerging economies borrow short term due to the high risk premium charged by international capital markets on long-term debt. They first present a model where the debt maturity structure is the outcome of a risk-sharing problem between the government and bondholders. By...

The issue of the credit crunch in the aftermath of the Asian crisis has stimulated much debate. Indeed, some features of the East Asian economies, such as bank-based financial systems and high leverage, make them particularly vulnerable to monetary and financial shocks. Under such circumstances,...

The authors examine the relationship between foreign investment and the attributes of emerging market countries and firms in which investment is made. Their findings indicate that countries with higher levels of economic development and floating exchange rate regimes tend to have greater ability...

The authors compare the experiences of selected Asian countries in attracting different forms of external financing and examine how that financing has contributed to growth. They carry out the analysis for two subgroups - South Asian and ASEAN countries - with distinctly different dominant forms...

Many government programs want to provide more credit to the farm sector to increase agricultural productivity. If the marginal effect on productivity is small, those resources might be put to better use elsewhere. The authors conducted an econometric analysis of the effect of credit on output...