Most analyses of property rights and economic development point to the negative influence of insecure property rights on private investment. The authors focus instead on the largely unexamined effects of insecure property rights on government policy choices. They identify one significant...

Much foreign direct investment is between high-income countries, but investment in some developing and transition regions, while still modest, grew rapidly in the 1990s. Adjusting for market size, much investment stays close to home; adjusting for distance, much heads toward the countries with...

Foreign direct investment is a key ingredient of successful economic growth and development in developing countries--partly because the very essence of economic development is the rapid and efficient transfer and cross-border adoption of"best practices."Foreign direct investment is especially...

An understanding of corporate governance theory can promote the adoption of appropriate governance tools to limit agency problems in public pension fund management. The absence of a market for corporate control hinders the translation of lessons from the private sector corporate world to public...

How can one account for the puzzling behavior of insider-managers who, in stripping assets from the veryfirms they own, appear to be stealing from one pocket to fill the other? The authors suggest that such asset-stripping and failure to restructure are the consequences of interactions between...

The author studies the allocation-between a central government and a local authority--of responsibility for planning, financing, and operations for the delivery of health services, in the context of an incomplete contracts model. In this model, inputs are required of both the central government...

In 1980, China's government owned and controlled its state enterprises, which were managed (inefficiently) by bureaucrats. During the 1980s, the government experimented with decentralizing state enterprises to boost productivity. By decade's end, China's state enterprises had become more...

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...

One of the best documented empirical facts in economic research has been the positive relationship between internal finance and cash flows and capital expenditures and investment. But disputes about the analytical basis for the cash flow theory have been largely unresolved. There are two...

China's World Trade Organization (WTO) accession will have major implications for China and present both opportunities and challenges for East Asia. Ianchovichina and Walmsley assess the possible channels through which China's accession to the WTO could affect East Asia and quantify these...