The author examines the financing of U.S. direct investment abroad. Using a theoretical model, he first examines how home country investors can use debt finance to reduce their host country tax liability and to reduce the capital investment distortion attributable to foreign taxes. Empirically,...

The authors analyze the effects of building height restrictions, providing a concrete welfare cost estimate for the city of Bangalore, India. Relying on several theoretical results, their analysis shows that the welfare cost imposed on its residents by Bangalore's building height restriction...

Survey results in Poland indicate that hard budgets and import comeption can spur state firms to adjust even when privatization lags behind. As they examine the underpinning of Polish reform, the authors address the key question of why managers instigated such adjustment. They examine how...

The World Bank's tax reform project is an attempt to document and analyze the experience with tax reform in ten developing countries. The purpose of this project has been to try and obtain a better appreciation of how developing countries may improve the performance of their tax systems. Towards...

The authors look at the depth of the financial sector in Bogota in terms of the"financial exclusion"of those, particularly poorer citizens, who operate without accounts in formal financial institutions-the unbanked. They begin with a review of the overall decline in financial intermediation from...

The authors assess the macroeconomic and distributional effects of the privatization that Argentina began in 1989 in gas, electricity, telecommunications, and water and sanitation. Using a computable general equilibrium model, they track the effects of the changes observed between 1993, the...

Developing countries are well advised to adopt appropriate tariff and tax policies. An ideal scheme of such policies would include the following : 1) export taxes should be set on the basis of the long run elasticity of foreign demand in the case of commodities in which the country has market...

Earmarking is the practice of assigning revenues from specific taxes or groups of taxes to specific government activities or to broader areas of government activity. As such, it contrasts with general fund financing where monies are pooled to be used for various government purposes. In practice,...

Privatization has been a popular strategy for improving efficiency in both market and transition economies. The literature on privatization includes broad discussions of pricing techniques but overlooks tax issues. In reality, a state-owned company loses its privilege of paying no taxes once it...

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...