This paper describes the serious fiscal crisis faced by cities around the world following the Great Recession of 2008. Five years later, the after-effects of this major crisis continue to be felt and limit economic opportunities in cities. Section 1 summarizes how the crisis was triggered and...

This paper reviews the conceptual challenges as well as lessons from worldwide experiences in implementing public services and expenditure need compensation in fiscal equalization transfers with a view to developing guidance for practitioners. The paper concludes that while in theory a strong...

The economic recession, the end of stimulus funding and central government cutbacks, rising social costs and aging, and the need for infrastructure upgrading for urbanization are putting enormous fiscal stress on cities. The financing capacity of municipalities is greatly affected because of the...

Mass media and social marketing programs are cheap, scalable, and potentially effective means of influencing consumers'financial behavior and decisions. In light of this potential, and in order to provide clear policy direction, this paper provides an overview of the existing and ongoing...

This paper provides a review of the literature on the development impact of migration and remittances on origin countries and on destination countries in the South. International migration is an ever-growing phenomenon that has important development implications for both sending and receiving...

Industrial parks are as popular as they are controversial, in India and globally. At their best they align infrastructure provision and agglomeration economies to jolt industrial growth. More often, they generate negative spill-overs, provide handouts, sit empty, or simply do not get built. This...

The aim of this paper is to provide an updated survey of the"state of the art"in entrepreneurial studies with a particular focus on developing countries (DCs). In particular, the concept of"entrepreneurship"is critically discussed, followed by a discussion of the institutional, macroeconomic,...

The aim of this study is to provide a microeconomic investigation of the concept of entrepreneurship; in particular, it discusses the following issues: 1) the alternative ways of looking at entrepreneurship, distinguishing"creative destruction"from simple"turbulence"; 2) the different...

Combining multi-year, firm-level surveys with country-level panel data for 53 countries, the authors explore the impact of bank competition on firms'access to finance. They find that low competition, as measured by high values of the Lerner index, diminishes firms'access to finance, while...

Firms in developing countries face numerous and serious constraints on their growth, ranging from corruption to lack of infrastructure to inability to access finance. Countries lack the resources to remove all the constraints at once and so would be better off removing the most binding one...