V AN DER MEER A. and V AN WINDEN W. (2003) E-governance in cities: a comparison of urban information and communication technology policies, Reg. Studies 37 , 407-419. Throughout Europe, urban information and communication technology (ICT) policies are becoming more significant. Using examples...

The point of parallel imports of pharmaceuticals is arbitrage between countries with different prices. For several years, an important issue in the European Union (EU) has been the evident conflict between differing price regulations in the member states, on the one hand, and the consequences of...

In many empirical applications involving combined time-series and cross-sectional data, the residuals from different cross-sectional units are likely to be correlated with one another. This is the case in applications in macroeconomics and international economics where the cross-sectional units...

Bolivia's bold program of pension reform involved the immediate closing down of the old pay-as-you-go system and its replacement by a defined-contribution system based on individual capitalization accounts and managed by the private sector. The pensions of the old system will be covered by the...

The authors study how contagion affects bank lending spreads and fluctuations in output in Argentina. They analyze what determines bank lending spreads when verification and enforcement costs for loan contracts are high. They present estimates of a vector auto-regression model that relates bank...

In a road infrastructure concession, a public authority grants specific rights to a private, or semi-public company to construct, overhaul, maintain, and operate infrastructure for a given period. By contract, the public authority charges that company with making the investments needed to create...

Using panel data from a unique survey of public primary schools in Uganda, The authors assess the degree of leakage of public funds in education. The survey data reveal that on average during 1991-95 schools received only 13 percent of the central government's allocation for the schools'nonwage...

This brief is based on Information and Communication Technologies for Development and Poverty Reduction: The Potential of Telecommunications, ed. Maximo Torero and Joachim von Braun (Johns Hopkins University Press and IFPRI, 2006) "The variety of views about ICTs reveals that their role in...

There has been a large spurt in the offshore outsourcing of Information Technology (IT) recently. India has been a major recipient of such work. There have been loud protests against the "loss" of jobs in the US as work was shifted to India. The large inflow of IT related work has also had major...

This is the third chapter of a forthcoming monograph entitled "On Implementing Full-Fledged Inflation-Targeting Regimes: Saying What You Do and Doing What You Say." It examines a number of elements in the design of an inflation-targeting framework. These include the definition of the target...