With containerized shipping, maritime transport has changed profoundly. Among other things, it has shifted from labor-intensive to more capital-intensive activities, including larger specialized ships that require substantial investments in port infrastructure and equipment. Integrated transport...

Municipal development funds have the basic purposes of channelling more investments in urban infrastructure through municipal governments and of strengthening the capacity of these institutions in the process. They have attracted the support of the international aid donors because they offer a...

The report examines both statistically and analytically various aspects of commercial bank provisioning. In the first phase, the report defines the differences existing between countries and explains the implications of provisioning for banks'balance sheets. Secondly, it looks at the various...

The evolution of transport public-private partnerships (PPPs) in developing and developed countries since the early 1990s seems to be following a similar path: private initiatives work for a while but after a shock to the sector takes place the public sector returns as regulator, owner or...

The author analyzes the causes of the collapse of profitability in 1991 of the Polish enterprise sector. He explores how it affected the government budget and assesses the forecasts of enterprise sector performance used to prepare the government's 1990 and 1991 budgets. About half of the drop in...

The task of urban managers is to ensure the provision of basic urban services, such as water, waste removal, security, transport, and an environment conducive to economic activity, while maintaining fiscal sustainability of city operations. City managers in developing countries face increasing...

The most effective regulators in developing countriesare following remarkably similar approaches. The main common element across"best practice"countries is the use of relatively simple quantitative models of operators'behavior and constraints to measure the impact of regulatory decisions on some...

Build, operate and transfer (BOT) projects are exceedingly complex from both a financial and a legal point of view. They require an extended period of time to develop and negotiate. If a country is not able to finance all of its needed infrastructure on the basis of budgetary resources or...

To what extent do rich or poor lose or gain from different tax reform packages ? The authors compare the consequences of different options by analyzing actual patterns of consumption and production. Pakistan, which relies on a narrow tax base has difficulty ensuring that the tax system keeps...

This paper contains a numerical listing of working papers prepared by the Poilicy, Research Complex. Each citation contains a brief abstract, and the contact point for the paper.