One of the most remarkable developments in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has been the region's opening to foreign direct investment. CEE states saw foreign investment climb from minuscule amounts in 1989 to more than $7 billion in 1992. All CEE states have enacted new laws on foreign...

In a cross-section of more than 150 countries, the authors provide new empirical evidence of a strong causal relationship from better governance to better development outcomes. They base their analysis on a new database containing more than 300 governance indicators compiled from a variety of...

The public sector's performance in the Caribbean varies, in reducing poverty and in creating an enabling environment for growth. Barbados and the Bahamas have been the high performers, Guyana and the Dominican Republic have been sluggish, and the other Caribbean countries fall in between. In the...

An understanding of corporate governance theory can promote the adoption of appropriate governance tools to limit agency problems in public pension fund management. The absence of a market for corporate control hinders the translation of lessons from the private sector corporate world to public...

This paper examines different models of governing structure found in metropolitan areas around the world. It evaluates how well these models achieve the coordination of service delivery over the entire metropolitan area as well as the extent to which they result in the equitable sharing of costs...

With an increasing number of governments competing to attract multinational companies, fiscal incentives have become a global trend that has grown considerably in the 1990s. Poor African countries rely on tax holidays, and import duty exemptions, while industrial Western European countries allow...

Brazil is a three-tiered federation of 24 states, two federal territories, a federal district, and 4,300 municipalities. In 1989 less than half of all government spending was controlled by the federal government. Brazil's new constitution gave autonomous broad powers to states and municipalities...

There is constant demand for an estimate of the likely fiscal costs of future banking crises, but little precision can be expected in such an estimate. The author shows how information that is typically available to authorities could be used to get a general sense of the order of magnitude of...

In practice, conventional measures of the fiscal deficit exclude the activities of public financial institutions. As a result, fiscal policies may be applied inappropriately when these institutions - especially the central bank - run large losses (the quasi-fiscal deficit). The macroeconomic...

Minimizing costs is often cited as essential for optimizing service delivery. Roads are the oldest, most important infrastructure services provided by governments. They require construction, rehabilitation, maintenance, and administration. Various institutional arrangements affect the degree to...