One of the key determinants of China's ability to continue its economic growth into the 21stcentury and to distribute the benefits of that growth to a broad spectrum of the population will be the further development of its railroad system. This paper examines the possibilities for improving the...

Using the joint World Bank and EBRD Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS), compiled in 1999, this paper explores the relationship between firm performance and ownership in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Former Soviet Union (FSU). The literature on privatization...

Transition from planned to a market economy is an evolutionary process. Evolutions do not have finite beginning and ending points. We may look to the beginning of transition in 1991 when the Soviet Union broke up, or we may see it as beginning earlier, when the Soviet Union began to allow its...

This paper develops a theory of endogenous growth cycles focusing on the interaction between consumers' desire to satisfy an indefinite range of wants and firms' incentive to utilize knowledge from past production experiences. We show that firms endogenously form a number of distinguishable...

The progress of scientific and technological knowledge is a cumulative process, one that depends in the long?run on the rapid and widespread disclosure of new findings, so that they may be rapidly discarded if unreliable, or confirmed and brought into fruitful conjunction with other bodies of...

This paper explores the causes of deforestation and biodiversity loss in Guatemala and is organized into 4 parts. First, an overview about deforestation in Guatemala from 1950-2000 is provided, and the relationship between deforestation and biodiversity loss is explored. Secondly, some...

In this paper, we argue that the condition of education and the economy of the low performing sub-Saharan African countries can be characterized as a stagnant steady state -- a "trap". We present a simple heterogeneous-agent model in which high costs of education relative to income and the skill...

A fundamental question in economics since the 1930s has been whether an administrative price system could simulate the results of perfect competition even without a true market for the means of production. The theoretical possibility of such a system has been known since the introduction of...

The privatization of agriculture in Azerbaijan started in the mid 1990s, while the pace of privatization in the country differs. Some Rayons have privatized almost all of the former state-owned agricultural land while others hold a wait and see strategy. The agricultural administration observes...

In this paper, we examine net investment during the early stages of transition using micro data on the population of medium and large industrial firms in the Czech Republic during the 1992-95 period. We examine the relevance of alternative models of investment and test if investment behavior...