There is widespread concern across Latin America that the provision of infrastructure services has suffered as a consequence of the retrenchment of the public sector and the insufficient response of the private sector to the opening up of infrastructure industries to private participation in...

The author uses cross-country data from Latin America and OECD countries to test the predictions of a simple efficiency wage model (Krebs and Maloney 1998) about the share of the workforce in self-employment and the rate of labor turnover across the process of development and demographic...

In recent years, various Latin American governments have resorted to taxes on bank debits and financial transactions as alternative ways of raising revenue. Considerable interest has developed in understanding the consequences of such reforms. The author constructs a dynamic general equilibrium...

The author develops a theoretical framework to guide empirical analysis of how land registration affects financial development and economic growth. Most conceptual approaches investigate the effects of land registration on only one sector, nut land registration is commonly observed to affect not...

Stories on the positive and negative effects of globalization on workers in developing countries abound. But a comprehensive picture is missing and many of the stories are ideologically charged. This paper reviews the academic literature on the subject, including several studies currently under...

The authors make the case for the return of regulation in the organization of urban bus services in developing countries. During the past three decades urban public transport policy has gone through several phases. The 1980s and 1990s were characterized by liberalization of the sector from...

To predict how Algeria's unemployment crisis will evolve, the author evaluates the Algerian unemployment insurance system's ability to finance itself, to affect employment decisions, and promote enterprise restructuring. The main conclusion is that industrial restructuring has serious and...

The most striking fact about the economic geography of the world is the uneven spatial distribution of economic activity, including the coexistence of economic development and underdevelopment. High-income regions are almost entirely concentrated in a few temperate zones, half of the world's GDP...

The authors review about 80 studies on electricity and gas, water and sanitation, and rail and ports (with a footnote on telecommunications) in developing countries. The main policy lesson is that there is a difference in the relevance of ownership for efficiency between utilities and transport...

The relationships among competition in the financial sector, access of firms to external financing, and associated economic growth are ambiguous in theory. Moreover, measuring competition in the financial sector can be complex. In this paper the authors first estimate for 16 countries a measure...