In Vietnam almost a quarter of adults worked in nonfarm household enterprises in 1998. Based on household panel data from the Vietnam Living Standards Surveys of 1993 and 1998, the authors find some evidence that operating an enterprise leads to greater affluence. The data show that nonfarm...

The author examines how the market structure is likely to evolve where there is multistage oligopolistic production - and what the implications of this are for antitrust policy. The author treats the decision to merge across or within stages of production as endogenous. He shows that when firms...

The authors use a firm-level panel data set from Romania to examine whether the nationality of foreign investors affects the degree of vertical spillovers from foreign direct investment. Investors'country of origin may matter for spillovers to domestic producers in upstream sectors (supplying...

Discussion of economic reform in the Russian Federation is colored by the conventional view of Russia's industrial structure. Both in Russia and in the West, Russian industry is characterized as very large enterprises operating in highly concentrated industries. The authors challenge the...

Banking systems in many countries have become increasingly unstable in recent years. At the same time, market forces have pushed banks to expand into a variety of universal banking activities without impairing the stability of the banking system. The basic bank holding company proposal contains...

Venture capital is a temporary-equity or quasi-equity investment in a growth-oriented, usually small or medium-size business managed by a highly motivated entrepreneur. Management assistance often comes with the investment. For the investment, the investor expects either a minority share in the...

The authors investigate how a country's financial institutions and the quality of its legal system explain the size attained by its largest industrial firms in a sample of 44 countries. Firm size is positively related to the size of the banking system and the efficiency of the legal system....

The authors assess Thailand's policy options for reducing large corporations'vulnerability to economic shocks and improving their corporate governance - and for providing smaller firms a more stable funding structure. Using data for firms listed on Thailand's stock exchange, they empirically...

This paper is a case study of what is recognized as one of the more successful projects in any country in the Europe and Central Asia region, not to mention in the poorest country of the region-Moldova. The ARIA project shows new ways to attack some of the most intractable problems of private...