Case studies and anecdotal evidence have suggested that uncertainty about policies, laws, and regulations has hampered development of the private sector in many developing countries. The authors present results from a new cross-country survey that provides comparable data on local...

Economic theory and case study evidence have long suggested that institutional factors, such as well-defined property and contract rights, may be crucial in explaining differences in economic performance across countries. Much of the recent discussion about"governance"has, for example, focused...

The paper investigates determinants of civic participation in local budget processes in rural areas in the Kyrgyz Republic by using data from the Life in Kyrgyzstan survey, conducted in 2012. The analysis of the data suggests that although civic awareness and interest in local budget processes...

Two data sets are used to study how country and firm characteristics affected firms'financial constraints and their likelihood of survival during the early phase of the recent global financial crisis in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a region that was especially hard hit. The first data source...

The paper uses the latest 2011 round of the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey for the Russian Federation, which for the first time was designed to be representative of Russian regions. The paper takes a closer look at regional-level factors influencing the business...

Building on the pioneering work of Barro (1991) and Mauro (1995) to include the most recent years for which data are available (for Bangladesh in the 1990s), the authors investigate the relationships between corruption, and growth, and, between corruption and investment, both domestic and...

This paper analyzes land transactions between municipalities and private businesses based on official data and business surveys in 15 regions of the Russian Federation. Since the Russian Federation passed the new Land Code in 2001, land privatization has been officially encouraged by the federal...

The authors use firm-level survey data on 998 small and medium enterprises registered for tax in South Africa regarding tax compliance costs to investigate the use of outsourcing to complete tax compliance tasks. Overall, about 43 percent of the enterprises do all their tax compliance work...

The debate on whether natural disasters cause significant macroeconomic impacts and indeed hinder development is ongoing. Most analyses along these lines have focused on impacts on gross domestic product. This paper looks beyond this standard national accounting aggregate, and examines whether...

East Asia has experienced a dramatic decrease in output growth volatility over the past 20 years. This is good news, as output growth volatility affects poor households because of coping strategies that have long-term, harmful consequences, and the overall economy through its negative impact on...