The issue of what to do with excess labor is critical to the success of any endeavour to improve the transport sector. Failure to reduce overstaffing leads to excessive wage bills. This exacerbates budget deficits and the losses of parastatal enterprises, which leads to cuts in investment or in...

The authors use an accelerator model to assess the determinants of private investment and to analyze how adjustment policies affect those determinants. Their model emphasizes the effect of resource constraints on private investment behavior, including that arising from foreign exchange...

The authors introduce a new measure, the Trade Restrictiveness Index, to measure the restrictiveness of a system of trade protection. They propose an alternative to the commonly used ad hoc indexes of trade restrictiveness, such as the trade-weighted average tariff. That measure has no...

Since it was first recognized in August 1982, the international debt crisis has dominated economic policy making in the developing countries. The prolonged debt crisis of those highly indebted countries whose debts are owed primarily to the commercial banks has resisted all the creative...

The author analyzes the fiscal policy of primary commodity exporters. After the initial boom in fiscal spending that accompanies a commodity boom, he asks, why do commodity-exporting countries tend to maintain higher spending levels despite a drop in commodity prices. He identifies three factors...

The importance of a country's"investment climate"for economic growth has recently received much attention. The authors address the general lack of appropriate data for measuring the investment climate and its effects. The authors use a new survey of 1,500 Chinese enterprises in five cities to...

The author constructs a model that captures the two-way nature of the relationship between financial and economic development - and allows societies at different levels of economic development and with different policies to choose different financial services. In this model, various types of...

What are the prospects for economic development in lagging sub-national regions? What are the roles of public infrastructure investments and fiscal incentives in influencing the location and performance of industrial activity? To examine these questions, the authors estimate a spatial profit...

Current issues in banking policy range from the need to construct basic institutions and incentive structures in transition economies, to the challenges posed by the increasingly complex interactions involved in contemporary banking. The authors of this report outline the basic regulatory...

The ultimate objective of economic reforms in Central and Eastern Europe is the creation of flexible and efficient market economies. Attaining this objective requires comprehensive action on at least four fronts: macro-economic stabilization, price and market reforms, privatization of state...