The ease of starting a foreign investment in various sectors is a relevant consideration for investors seeking to establish an investment project abroad. Two thematic areas will be analyzed in this paper to answer the following questions: Which economies impose equity ownership restrictions on...

The ease of starting a foreign investment in various sectors is a relevant consideration for investors seeking to establish an investment project abroad. Two thematic areas will be analyzed in this paper to answer the following questions: Which economies impose equity ownership restrictions on...

The ease of starting a foreign investment in various sectors is a relevant consideration for investors seeking to establish an investment project abroad. Two thematic areas will be analyzed in this paper to answer the following questions: Which economies impose equity ownership restrictions on...

China's "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI) includes major infrastructure investment projects - roads, ports, railways - that aim to improve connectivity along a number of transport corridors spanning 71 countries. In this paper we find that notwithstanding the large scale of the initiative,...

Economies that are suffering from fragility, conflict and violence (three distinct yet interconnected elements of FCS) confront intractable poverty, and faltering growth - missing out on development objectives by significant margins. As the poverty rate in FCS has increased, the number of poor...

Interventions to incentivize business formalization over the past decades have shown mixed results (Bruhn and McKenzie, 2013; Bruhn and McKenzie, 2018; Floridi et al., 2019) and brought limited knowledge on how to address informality in a systematic way. Adding to the challenge is determining whether...

China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) includes major infrastructure investment projects – roads, ports, railways – that aim to improve connectivity along a number of transport corridors spanning 71 countries. In this paper we find that notwithstanding the large scale of the...

The quality of the public procurement system of an economy can have far-reaching effects on the private sector. This paper empirically explores several of these effects using two rich data sets. An overall indicator of public procurement quality is created from the World Bank’s Benchmarking...

Public procurement regulation is an important instrument for using public resources efficiently and ensuring quality services to citizens. On average, the public procurement sector accounts for 14.5 percent of the gross domestic product globally. Using new data, this study documents public...

Interventions over the past decades to encourage increased business formalization have shown mixed results and produced limited knowledge on how to address informality systematically. The scale of the informal sector in emerging and developing economies, which accounts for 25 to 40 percent of...