Land markets that allow access to land-and to buildings-through secure property rights, at transparent prices, and with efficient permitting processes and land tax systems are essential to a good business environment. Creating such markets, however, can be a long, complex, politically charged...

By some estimates more than 30 percent of the developing world's GDP and 70 percent of its workers are outside the official economy. The implications: Most small firms are trapped in low-productivity operations with little access to finance, key government services, and formal customers. Workers...

Drawing on the World Bank's Private Participation in Infrastructure Project Database, this Note reviews developments in the water and sewerage sector of developing countries in 2004 and changes in private participation in the sector since 2001. Data for 2004 show that total investment in water...

The market for aid is changing. These days donors use a far greater array of instruments than in the past, and operate in a context of far larger private financial flows. Poor countries are growing richer, but there are legitimate doubts about whether the aid industry deserves credit....

Countries with fully liberalized telecommunications markets have adopted different mixes of antitrust and sector-specific regulatory instruments. Does the balance between the two approaches matter for competitiveness? Drawing on the experiences of Australia, Chile, New Zealand, the United...

Drawing on the World Bank's private participation in infrastructure project database, this note reviews developments in the telecommunications sector in 2003. Data for the year show that investment in projects with private participation was back to 1996 levels. Two regions -the Middle East and...

This note considers the future of aid from the perspective of the 2005-2030 time frame. It offers a possible scenario for the future, with responses of the aid industry to falling numbers of people in absolute poverty and to the growing ability of poor countries to borrow from the market. A...

Critics of the aid industry have accused it of acting like a cartel (Easterly 2002). The accusation has some bite-globally the industry remains somewhat concentrated, and for the typical recipient country, highly concentrated. Yet the most striking fact about the industry is how relentlessly...

The fall in foreign direct investment (FDI) since 1999 and China's growing share, worry most developing countries. But an in-depth look reveals new and promising trends. The decline is largely a one-time adjustment following the privatization boom of the 1990s. FDI is coming from more countries...

Activists are often unhappy with the laws governing business behavior and with their enforcement. One strategy they use to alter the behavior of corporations is to target not the laws but the corporations, hoping that they will change without being legally obliged to. Sometimes firms do, because...