After Central and Eastern European and Central Asian economies abandoned central planning, nearly 195 million workers had to adjust to new rules of work and life. Most transition economies have not yet fully committed themselves to the rules of the market place. A few that have are already...

Economic analyses of development projects and policies often involve assigning an economic value to changes in the risk of loss of human life. A typical term used in the economic analyses is the value of statistical life, which reflects the aggregation of individuals'willingness to pay for fatal...

The city-state of Singapore has achieved rapid economic development in the past by its positioning as an efficient business hub in Asia. To remain competitive in the global knowledge economy, however, Singapore needs to move beyond efficiency by developing a strong"innovative"edge as well. This...

The remarkable performance of the Irish economy in recent years has attracted much attention. Within a 10-year period the economy went from an 18 percent unemployment rate to nearly full employment, while the ratio of debt to GDP fell from 120 percent to less than 50 percent. Inevitably, this...

Public enterprises (PEs) earn an average 10 percent of GDP in developing countries. Many governments are reexamining the role of the state, so questions about whether to divest PEs or make them more efficient are likely to intensify. The Bank will increasingly be called upon for advice and...

Despite tremendous macroeconomic instability in Brazil, the country's distributions of urban income in 1976 and 1996 appear, at first glance, deceptively similar. Mean household income per capita was stagnant, with minute accumulated growth (4.3 percent) over the two decades. The Gini...

This paper examines how the reform of the trade regime in Turkey during the 1980s has affected the performance and competitiveness of the Turkish industrial sector. It was found that trade liberalization and more exposure to international competition generally benefited Turkish industry in the...

Before 1973, the labor market in Europe was tight and immigration from the South (chiefly North Africa and Southern Europe) was encouraged. But with the slowdown in growth in the mid-1970s, the rise in unemployment, and increased economic uncertainty, immigration came to be viewed as a burden by...

It is widely assumed that pervasive credit market failures mean that a person's current wealth is critical to whether or not that person can take up opportunities to start a new business. The authors show that inequality in wealth can be either good or bad for the level of entrepreneurship in an...

Total factor productivity has been low in most Sub-Saharan Africa. It is often said that the binding constraint on African industrial development is the inadequate supply of technologically capable workers. And many cross-country studies imply that the low level of human capital in Africa is an...