The major premise of this paper is that potential recruiters do not possess much information on the extent and type of workers'on-the-job-training. Workers taken for trained might turn out to possess no, or very little, general training. Also, a worker recruited for a given job may possess the...

The issue of what to do with excess labor is critical to the success of any endeavour to improve the transport sector. Failure to reduce overstaffing leads to excessive wage bills. This exacerbates budget deficits and the losses of parastatal enterprises, which leads to cuts in investment or in...

The authors use an accelerator model to assess the determinants of private investment and to analyze how adjustment policies affect those determinants. Their model emphasizes the effect of resource constraints on private investment behavior, including that arising from foreign exchange...

The authors introduce a new measure, the Trade Restrictiveness Index, to measure the restrictiveness of a system of trade protection. They propose an alternative to the commonly used ad hoc indexes of trade restrictiveness, such as the trade-weighted average tariff. That measure has no...

The authors jointly analyze the static, selection, and dynamic effects of domestic, foreign, and state ownership on bank performance. They argue that it is important to include indicators of all the relevant governance effects in the same model."Nonrobustness"checks (which purposely exclude some...

Since it was first recognized in August 1982, the international debt crisis has dominated economic policy making in the developing countries. The prolonged debt crisis of those highly indebted countries whose debts are owed primarily to the commercial banks has resisted all the creative...

In January 2006 the price of natural gas supplied to Moldova increased from $80 to $110 per thousand cubic meters (mcm). Prices may increase further in the near future, putting additional pressure on the economy and leading to adverse effects on the poorest households. This study examines the...

Empowerment of local governments and citizens is a primary object of decentralization. Using the analytic lens of empowerment, the author explores the nature of decentralized governance and how this type of structure is likely to be more or less empowering. His primary concern is fiscal...

The author analyzes the fiscal policy of primary commodity exporters. After the initial boom in fiscal spending that accompanies a commodity boom, he asks, why do commodity-exporting countries tend to maintain higher spending levels despite a drop in commodity prices. He identifies three factors...

The importance of a country's"investment climate"for economic growth has recently received much attention. The authors address the general lack of appropriate data for measuring the investment climate and its effects. The authors use a new survey of 1,500 Chinese enterprises in five cities to...