This book argues for the urgent need for countries to move forward aggressively on adopting and upgrading quality and standards. The focus is on developing countries, many of which are lagging in the race for standards adoption, and within that category, on middle-income countries. The book...

This paper examines two sources of global knowledge spillovers: foreign direct investments and trade. Empirical evidence demonstrates that foreign direct investment and trade can contribute to overall domestic productivity growth only when the technology gap between domestic and foreign firms is...

Increasingly, entrepreneurship is being discussed and considered as a source of high economic growth and competitiveness. A conceptual process of creative construction that characterizes the dynamics between entrants and incumbents can prove quite useful to analyze the impact of countries'...

Investment climate Surveys are valuable instruments that improve our understanding of the economic, social, political, and institutional factors determining economic growth, particularly in emerging and transition economies. However, at the same time, they have to overcome some difficult issues...

This article examines two sources of global knowledge spillovers: foreign direct investments (FDI) and trade. Empirical evidence demonstrates that FDI and trade can contribute to overall domestic productivity growth only when the technology gap between domestic and foreign firms is not too large...

In most developing and industrial countries, infrastructure services have traditionally been provided by government enterprises, but in developing countries at least, these enterprises have often proven to be inefficient, unable to provide much-needed investments, and manipulated to achieve...

This article evaluates the effect of the overdraft facility (or line of credit) policy by comparing a large sample of overdraft facilitated firms and matched non-overdraft facilitated firms from Eastern Europe at the sector level. The sample firms are compared with respect to rates of different...

Developing countries are increasingly concerned about improving country competitiveness and productivity as they face the increasing pressures of globalization and attempt to improve economic growth and reduce poverty. Among such countries, investment climate assessments (ICA) have become a...

The authors complement the existing knowledge in the renegotiation literature on infrastructure concessions by analyzing government-led renegotiations. They first propose a multiple-period theoretical framework in which both Pareto-improving and rent-shifting renegotiations at the initiative of...

Multidimensional auctions are a natural and practical solution when auctioneers pursue more than one objective in their public-private-partnership transactions. However, it is difficult to achieve auction efficiency with multiple award criteria. Using auction data from road and railway...