Worldwide privatization of the telecommunications industry, and the introduction of competition in the sector, together with the ever-increasing rate of technological advance in telecommunications, raise new and critical challenges for regulation. Fo matters of pricing, universal service...

In the United States, gross business fixed investments constitute about 10 percent of the Gross National Product (GNP). Such investments may represent GNP's most important component because: a) plant and equipment have a long-term effect on the economy's productive capacity, b) changes in...

The author focuses on how urban policies and the clustering of creative industries has influenced urban outcomes. The set of creative industries include those with output protectable under some form of intellectual property law. More specifically, this sub-sector encompasses software,...

The author explores the link between information flows and governance or institutional quality. Economic theory expounds on the importance of information on economic outcomes either through its direct effect on prices and quantities or through its effect on other factors such as institutions and...

In a cross-section of more than 150 countries, the authors provide new empirical evidence of a strong causal relationship from better governance to better development outcomes. They base their analysis on a new database containing more than 300 governance indicators compiled from a variety of...

In recent years the growing interest of academics and policymakers in governance has been reflected in the proliferation of cross-country indices measuring various aspects of governance. The authors explain how a simple variant of an unobserved components model can be used to combine the...

The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources...

The World Bank has increasingly focused on firm-level surveys to build the data foundation needed for accurate policy analysis in developing and transition economies. The authors take stock of some recent Bank surveys, and discuss how to improve their results. Lessons on data issues, and...

Roughly 16,000 buses serve the 16 million inhabitants of the Sao Paulo Metropolitan Region; 12,000 of them serve the Sao Paulo municipality itself, where 8.5 million people live. Congestion is heavy at peak travel times, and traffic signal timing logic favors the flow of automobiles. Bus...