Hospitals dominate health care in most parts of the world and for a variety of reasons are likely to continue being a key factor in the overall performance of the health care system. Any efforts to improve this performance must therefore give greater hospital efficiency the highest priority....

Capitalizing on recent improvements in the availability of cross-country financial sector data, this paper proposes a standard methodology for benchmarking the policy component of financial development. Systematic controls are introduced to isolate main structural country characteristics and a...

By documenting the evolution of Tobin's q before, during, and after firms internationalize, the authors provide evidence on the bonding, segmentation, and market timing theories of internationalization. Using new data on 9,096 firms across 74 countries over the period 1989-2000, they find that...

The authors examine the degree to which international cotton prices are linked and test whether such links have improved over the past decade. They conclude that the degree of linkage has improved over the past decade, in the short run largely as the result of short-run price transmission -- and...

The salient characteristics of emerging market economies coupled with the increasing adoption of inflation targeting in these countries has stimulated much debate about the role of the exchange rate in inflation targeting regimes. The authors aim at shedding more light on this issue by...

The author presents an analysis of the finances of Egyptian listed companies evaluating recent trends in growth and profitability during the 1995-2001 period. The data from financial statements reveal the effect of the economic slowing of the past few years, especially in the construction and...

This paper uses firm-level data from the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Surveys to study the process of convergence of transition countries with developed market economies. The study focuses on competition and market structure, finance and the structure of lending to firms, and...

How to address the link between environmental regulation and trade was an important part of discussions at the World Trade Organization Ministerial in Doha, Qatar in November 2001. Trade ministers agreed to launch negotiations on trade and the environment, specifically clarification of WTO...

It is difficult and time-consuming to get adequate information about influence groups in a society. Dinar, Balakrishnan, and Wambia develop an approach to estimating the political risk associated with implementing a set of institutional reforms in the water sector. Their approach endogenizes the...

German banks are often criticized, or praised, depending on a person's viewpoint, for owning German industry and for playing an active part in corporate control. The author argues that this misrepresents German banking. First, the number of German firms a bank can own or control, although...