Provision of modern energy services for cooking (gaseous fuels) and lighting (electricity) is an essential component of any policy aiming to address health, education or welfare issues; yet it gets little attention from policymakers. Secure, adequate, low-cost energy of quality and convenience...

Using Bayesian updating to deterministic priors persistence of fundamentalist belief like those in the mind of a terrorist is explained. Under such belief system if conditional evidence is diametrically opposite and also deterministic then a process of change will set in and in the present war...

In a recent paper, Mishra and Subramanian (2006) propose a measure to explain group-differential which is sensitive to levels in the sense that a given hiatus at lower levels of failure (or higher levels of attainment) is considered worse off. This paper critically evaluates their method -...

Does financial health shore up firm productivity? This paper empirically investigates this question and presents productivity as another driving factor in translating financial development into real economic progress. Our empirical framework employs Levinsohn and Petrin’s (2003)...

This study analyzes the effects of financial liberalization on the lending behavior of banks and non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs) before and after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, using panel regressions on Republic of Korea firm-level and industry-level data of the period...

The spread of regional trade agreements (RTAs) in Southeast Asia has ignited a debate about their impact on business, and ways to avoid raising the business costs from the Asian ‘noodle bowl’ effect. This paper undertakes a comparative and firm-level analysis of the impact of RTAs...

This paper studies factors associated with firm participation in export markets, focusing primarily on firm size and access to credit, based on a survey sample comprising observations of 8,080 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) (with fewer than 100 employees) and non-SME firms in developing...

Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) in collaboration with the World Economic Forum (WEF) has been assessing business competitiveness environment of Bangladesh since 2001. This is the eighth in the series.

Centre for Policy Dialogue ( CPD), in collaboration with the World Economic Forum ( WEF), has been assessing the business competitiveness environment in Bangladesh since 2001. This is the ninth in the series.

The Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) in collaboration with the World Economic Forum (WEF) has been carrying out the Executive Opinion Survey (EOS) since 2001