The typical financial sector reform package involves policy changes to increase the power of centralized decision making in some areas and to reduce it in others. For regulation and supervision, reforms seek strengthened information systems, stronger and more detailed regulations, and closer...

This paper contains abstracts of Policy Research Working Paper series, Numbers 1575-1589.

The World Bank has increasingly focused on firm-level surveys to build the data foundation needed for accurate policy analysis in developing and transition economies. The authors take stock of some recent Bank surveys, and discuss how to improve their results. Lessons on data issues, and...

The authors review the historical relationship between the work of applied economists, and policymakers, and the institutions that came to characterize the commodity, and risk markets of the 1980s. These institutions were a response to the harmful consequences of commodity market volatility, and...

Subsidized formal credit to the agricultural sector has been advocated as more efficient, equitable, and easier to implement than, say, land reform. But the record on subsidized credit to farmers is dismal. It shows a significant failure either to achieve an increase of agricultural output...

This paper undertakes a statistical analysis of the effect of minimum wages (MWs) on different population groups. The underlying question for this analysis relates to the probability bias exerted by certain protective government regulations in terms of the unemployment prospects of specific...

The authors use data from Nicaragua to examine the impact of the award of registered and nonregistered title on land values and on investments attached to land. They find that receipt of registered title increases land values by 30 percent and greatly increases the propensity to invest, bringing...

This study uses time-series of household data from eleven developing countries to test several hypotheses about saving behavior. Besides just widening the scope of information being used to test the hypotheses, the data set in this study has the advantage of a consistent definition across...

India's manufacturing growth from 1989 to 2010 displays two intriguing properties: 1) a substantial fraction of absolute and net employment growth is concentrated in informal tradable industries, and 2) much of this growth is connected to the development of one-person establishments. This paper...

Is it the institutions or firm characteristics at birth that shape startups and their early growth in developing countries? Using comprehensive data from the Indian Annual Survey of Industries this paper addresses this question by studying the early lifecycle of firms across diverse...