This paper examines historically the World Bank's twin features: lending to developing economies to achieve tangible results and advocating specific development policies. Section 1 provides some conceptual underpinnings for the view that an effective state is essential for development. It asks...

The paper examines the capital structure of regulated infrastructure firms. The authors develop a model showing that leverage, the ratio of liabilities to assets, is lower under high-powered regulation and that firms operating under high-powered regulation make proportionally larger reductions...

The economic recession, the end of stimulus funding and central government cutbacks, rising social costs and aging, and the need for infrastructure upgrading for urbanization are putting enormous fiscal stress on cities. The financing capacity of municipalities is greatly affected because of the...

The authors survey the recent literature which examines the impact of the business climate on productivity and growth in developing countries using enterprise surveys. Comparable enterprise surveys today cover more than 100,000 firms in 123 countries. The literature that has analyzed this data...

Many developing countries are unable to provide their industrial sectors with reliable electric power, with the result that many enterprises must contend with an insufficient and unreliable supply of electricity. Because of these constraints, enterprises often opt for self-generation of...

Academic literature in public finance has focused on horizontal externalities coming from interjurisdictional tax competition—namely among similar types of local governments—but has neglected vertical externalities arising from interactions between two overlapping governments sharing the...

Depuis le début des années 1980, plusieurs pays européens ont renforcé le pouvoir des collectivités locales. Tel est le cas en France avec la mise en application successive des actes 1 et 2 de la décentralisation, en Espagne et en Italie où l’autonomie locale a été considérablement...