Drawing on recently completed firm-level surveys in Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Honduras, India, Nicaragua, Pakistan, and Peru, this paper investigates the relationship between investment climate and international integration. These standardized surveys of large, random samples of firms in common...

This paper concerns the institutional origins of economic development, emphasizing the cases of nineteenth-century India and Africa. Colonial institutions-the law, western style property rights, newspapers and statistical analysis-played an important part in the emergence of Indian public and...

What drives growth at the microeconomic level? The authors divide the factors that determine a location's growth performance into two groups, "1st advantage" and "2nd advantage." The term 1st advantage refers to the conditions that provide the environment in which new activities can be...

One of the key environmental problems facing India is that of particle pollution from the combustion of fossil fuels. This has serious health consequences and with the rapid growth in the economy these impacts are increasing. At the same time, economic growth is an imperative and policy makers...

The transformation of India's unorganized sector is important to its modernization, growth, and attainment of regional economic equality. This paper documents several key facts about India's unorganized sector in manufacturing and services. First, the unorganized sector is large, accounting for...

This paper provides an overview of recent work on quality measurement of medical care and its correlates in four low and middle-income countries-India, Indonesia, Tanzania, and Paraguay. The authors describe two methods-testing doctors and watching doctors-that are relatively easy to implement...

Economic theory suggests that countries should ignore uncertainty for public investment and behave as if indifferent to risk because they can pool risks to a much greater extent than private investors can. This paper discusses the general economic theory in the case of developing countries. The...

In response to the Great Recession of 2008, many national governments implemented fiscal stimuli packages in 2009 and 2010 to prevent further declines in aggregate demand and to jump start their economic recovery. Where subnational governments responded with fiscal contraction, as in the United...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the association between electronic filing (e-filing) and the total tax compliance costs incurred by small and medium size businesses in developing countries, based on survey data from South Africa, Ukraine, and Nepal. A priori, most observers expect...