Revenues in countries that rely heavily on one or two primary commodities tend to fluctuate widely with prices in international markets. This fluctuation is especially wide when export taxes are a large part of the total tax base but also when the private sector reaps most of the gains from...

This paper focuses on the corporate governance arrangements of institutions offering Islamic financial services (IIFS) aimed at protecting stakeholders'financial interests. Many IIFS corporate governance issues are common with those of their conventional counterparts. Others are distinctive. In...

The authors construct a regulation model in which renegotiation occurs due to the imperfect enforcement of concession contracts. This enables the authors to provide theoretical predictions for the impact on the probability of renegotiation of a concession, regulatory institutions, institutional...

OECD barriers did not play a significant role in sub-Saharan Africa's declining position in world trade over the last three decades. The detrimental effects of the African countries'own policies, such as those that influence international transport costs, were considerably more important....

The authors aim at contributing to understand the dispersion of returns from policy reforms using cross-country regressions. The authors compare the"before reform"with"after reform"GDP growth outcome of countries that undertook import-liberalization and fiscal policy reforms. They survey a large...

The combination of distance, poor infrastructure, and being landlocked by neighbors with poor infrastructure, can make transport costs many times higher for some developing countries than for most others. Drawing on two traditions of economic modeling --Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory and von...

This paper explores the role of export costs in the process of poverty reduction in rural Africa. The authors claim that the marketing costs that emerge when the commercialization of export crops requires intermediaries can lead to lower participation into export cropping and, thus, to higher...

Manufacturing firms in developing countries have traditionally been relatively protected. They have also been subject to heavy regulation, much of it biased in favor of large enterprises. Accordingly, it is often argued that manufacturers in these countries perform poorly in several respects: a)...

Distances involved in accessing basic services can constitute a major barrier to development. This paper analyzes the relationship between the distance separating households from microfinance institutions'offices in Niger, and the low levels of development and performance of the microfinance...

The authors develop and apply a macroeconomic general equilibrium model for Zimbabwe. The model integrates a behavioral estimated model structure, taken from a companion paper, with the relevant budget constraints for a six-sector disaggregation into a comprehensive framework. Starting with 1988...