Transferring ownership and control of enterprises from the public to the private sector has recently attracted great interest around the world. Several developed and developing countries have already divested varying portions of their public enterprise (PE) sectors, and many others are planning...

The authors are particularly interested in evaluating the concern that efficiency or policy-induced changes in the supply of exports of primary commodities, such as cocoa, coffee, and tea, may lead to such a large decline in the prices of those commodities that export revenues and incomes of the...

This paper examines Malawi's recent efforts to reform its tax system. Malawi embarked on a comprehensive tax reform with World Bank assistance in the latter half of the 1980s. This paper concentrates on the problems in the revenue system that provided the impetus to reform, the nature of the...

The author brings together two of government's primary challenges: environmental protection, and taxation to generate revenues. If negative externalities can be reduced not only by changes in consumption patterns, but also by making each activity cleaner (abatement efforts), how shall...

The authors explore the interaction between taxes on work-related traffic congestion and preexisting distortionary taxes in the labor market. A congestion tax raises the overall costs of commuting to work and discourages labor force participation at the margin when revenues are returned in...

Nearly a decade has passed since the Bank codified its position on cost recovery policies (OMS 2.25) for public sector projects. In a review of 13 sectors, the authors find that the Bank guidelines are followed fairly closely in seven sectors: coal, irrigation, oil/gas, power, roads,...

The present paper is the product of an effort to systematize some of the state owned enterprise (SOE) data that have become available recently. Part one of the paper begins by examining the role of SOEs on aggregate value added and investment, during the 1980-85 period in developing countries....

This paper develops a two equation model for measuring how public sector deficits - and the way that they are financed - affect the real exchange rate, the trade balance, the current account and the level of external indebtedness. One equation relates the real exchange rate to the trade surplus...

The authors bring new empirical evidence on the impact of the choice of ownership and regulatory regime on firms'productivity and prices paid by consumers. They collect the evidence from a sample of electricity distribution companies in Latin America. The authors rely on estimations of labor and...

A major purpose of this essay is to provide an outline of the scope and nature of unemployment insurance (UI) programs in industrialized economies. This includes: (a) laying out their potential goals, including an analysis of the rationales for these goals; (b) summarizing the characteristics of...