The basic economic challenge in the transition from socialism to capitalism is creating incentive structures and institutions that promote enterprise change and restructuring. This is the motivation for most of the reforms debated during the transition - whether privatization, demonopolization,...

The Poverty Reduction Strategy of the Government of Rwanda seeks to unlock the growth and poverty reduction potential of the tea sector through the privatization of tea estates. This paper uses the logic of causal inference and data from the 2004 Quantitative Baseline Survey of the tea sector to...

To study the adjustment to the debt crisis, this paper compares the experience of seven"crisis"debtor countries with those of five"noncrisis"debtor countries. In response to a sharp reduction in external capital flows, the crisis countries rescheduled their debt during 1982-87. The noncrisis...

States can do much to tap community-level energies, and resources for development, if they seek to interact more synergistically with local communities. The broader spin-off is creating a developmental society, and polity. Using case studies from Asia and Latin America, the authors show how: 1)...

This paper studies the effect of business registration regulation on economic activity using micro-level data. The identification strategy exploits the fact that a recent business registration reform in Mexico was introduced in different municipalities at different points in time. Using panel...

The author provides evidence of a causal and economically important effect of financial development on volatility. In contrast to the existing literature, the identification strategy is based on the differences in sensitivities to financial conditions across industries. The results show that...

This paper seeks to shed some light on the extent to which infrastructure sub-sectors - energy, telecommunications, water supply, sanitation, and transport - contributed to growth in East Asia during 1985-2004. It also attempts to provide additional insights on whether the relationship between...

Countries with small financial systems are generally small economies with a reduced dimension of institutional relationships, a greater concentration of wealth, and a relatively less independent civil service. These characteristics facilitate concentration of functions and, more generally, weak...

Vulnerability is an important aspect of households'experience of poverty. Many households, while not currently in poverty, recognize that they are vulnerable to events - a bad harvest, a lost job, an illness, and unexpected expense, an economic downturn - that could easily push them into...

This paper uses a new, nationally-representative household survey from Ghana to analyze within a rigorous econometric framework how the receipt of internal remittances (from within Ghana) and international remittances (from African or other countries) affects the marginal spending behavior of...