June 2000 - The success of Abidjan's water sector is attributable to the government's consistent support for private sector participation in the sector and to the institutions that have guaranteed the private operator's property rights. Strong institutions with adequate human capital allow the...

June 2000 - In several ways, the reform introduced to the water sector in Conakry, Guinea, in 1989 under a World Bank-led project was remarkable. It showed that even in a weak institutional environment, where contracts are hard to enforce and political interference is common, private sector...

June 2000 - Private sector participation in Guinea's urban water sector has benefited consumers, the government, and, to a lesser extent, the new foreign owners. Performance will improve further when the government starts paying its own water bill on time and when the legislature authorizes the...

February 2000 - Some say that democracy is more likely to survive under parliamentary governments. That result is not robust to the use of different variables from the Database of Political Institutions, a large new cross-country database that may illuminate many other issues affecting and...

Based on a comprehensive worldwide firm survey, this paper looks at how the business environment and economic agglomeration affect job creation, holding constant conventional determinants of firm growth, such as firm ownership, size, and age. The analysis finds that economic agglomeration is...

Two data sets are used to study how country and firm characteristics affected firms' financial constraints and their likelihood of survival during the early phase of the recent global financial crisis in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a region that was especially hard hit. The first data...

Previous empirical analyses have found that bank privatizations are more successful when the government fully relinquishes control, when the bank is privatized to a strategic investor, and when foreign-owned banks are allowed to participate in the bidding. The privatization of Uganda Commercial...

This paper uses firm-level data to assess whether telecommunication services are general-purpose technologies (technologies that benefit a large segment of the economy and have long-lasting effect). It finds that only Internet services are so: firm growth and productivity are much higher when...