The European Structural Funds have stood, as early as their very establishment back 1957, for a tool of economic and social harmonization of the Member States of the European Union. The comprehensive process of restructuring and reorganizing the process have led, in time, to emergence of new...

This paper extends and applies principal-agent theory to the performance of donor projects. There is variation in the degree of divergence between the interests of the donor (the principal) and the recipient government (the agent). Further, the effort expended on observation of the agent is a...

Success factors have been extensively studied in the field of project management. The PIP (Project Implementation Profile), designed by Pinto & Slevin, is often used as an assessment method enabling project managers to identify critical success factors either at the beginning or at the end of...

The international debt crisis of the 1980s forced countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to reform economic policies. Because the primary purpose of these reforms was to enable the region’s economies to service the debts owed to banks in industrialized nations, there was concern that...

The increasing competition between governments to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) can be attributed to their prominent role in promoting knowledge-sharing, innovation and growth. The fact that Italy has always been a laggard in such initiatives has further blemished the country’s...

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the foremost international body responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security. Members vote on issues of global importance and consequently receive perks – election to the UNSC predicts, for instance, World Bank and IMF loans....

Investigating how lending programs of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) affect poverty and inequality, we explicitly address model uncertainty. We control for endogenous selection into IMF programs using data on 86 low- and middle income countries for the 1982-2009 period and analyze program...

Contract enforcement is probabilistic, but the probability depends on rules and processes. A stimulus to trade may induce traders to alter rules or processes to improve enforcement. In the model of this paper, such a positive knock-on effect occurs when the elasticity of supply of traders is...

The Adjustment-related Social Funds (SFs) have been introduced in more than 70 countries. They conted in limites resources. The SFs did not have a effect on the total social expenditure/GDP ratio, as in most cases the rise of the latter during the years of execution of the SFs was less than the...

If South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are to become constructively engaged in the next attempt by World Trade Organization (WTO) members to liberalize trade multilaterally, they need to be convinced that there will be sufficient gains from trade reform to warrant the inevitable costs of...