More efficient use of school classrooms in Bulgaria's sparsely populated rural areas could free up funds to spend on other educational essentialsIn Eastern European countries in large social sectors such as education, inefficiency and technical deficiencies are the legacy of the old command...

This paper relies on the recently developed Maquette for Millennium Development Goals Simulations (MAMS) model to assess the consistency of alternative scaling-up and policy packages for growth and achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in Ghana. In the baseline scenario, Ghana's strong...

This paper explores competitiveness of Cote d'Ivoire's economy over a long period of 1960-2003 and its link with cocoa prices. The main conclusions are as follows.First, using four measures of real effective exchange rate (REER) for the 1960-2002 period, we track the evolution of REER and...

Key economic variables in Cote d'Ivoire vary widely from their long-run trends, moving in multi-year cyclical patterns. Cocoa prices move with cycles in growth rates, capital stock, real exchange rates, terms of trade, cocoa production, and coffee production and output. These patterns have...

Real GDP per capita and capital stock in Cote d'Ivoire grew strongly from 1960 to 1979, but have declined ever since, for twenty-five years. As a result, the country has traveled a full circle from economic success to failure in little more than a generation. What are the long-term factors...

One of the contentious issues in electricity reform is whether there are significant gains from restructuring systems that are moderately well run. South Africa's electricity system is a case in point. The sector's state-owned utility, Eskom, has been generating some of the lowest-priced...

Empirical explorations of the growth and productivity impacts of infrastructure have been characterized by ambiguous (countervailing signs) results with little robustness. A number of explanations of the contradictory findings have been proposed. These range from the crowd-out of private by...

The paper provides a first systematic, comprehensive benchmarking of South Africa's infrastructure performance in four major sectors - electricity, water and sanitation, information and communication technology, and transportation - against the relevant group of comparator countries using a new...

The authors use a panel-data set for the period 1980-2002 to estimate demand for electricity and telecommunications services and project investment needs in South Africa through 2010 for two growth scenarios. Projections of average annual investment needs in electricity and telecommunications...

The paper provides a first, systematic benchmarking of infrastructure performance in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) countries (South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland) in four major sectors-electricity, water and sanitation, information and communication technology,...