This paper reviews the relationship between the rule of law, good governance, and sustainable development as those terms are used by the relevant development organizations; describes the efforts made by various organizations to promote the rule of law and good governance; and addresses the need to strengthen compliance and enforcement for sustainable development. A recent movement, which has re...

financial literacy of investors reduces uncertainty on future decisions and increases predictability of investment policies in financial markets. thus, the lack of clear information on financial markets is a determining factor in the arrival of domestic and foreign capitals and their quick exit in case of crisis. the lack of transparency and basic knowledge on decisions and failure to provide r...

This paper investigates the characteristics of firms that adopt persistent conservative financial policies. We are mainly interested in the determinants of the likelihood of firms adopting the persistent policies of low-leverage and high-cash holdings simultaneously. In this paper, we classify firms as financially conservative if they adopt both low-leverage and high-cash policies at the same t...

1 The study employs the Deininger and Squire (1996) set of Gini coefficients for 49 developed and developing countries from 1947-94. It uses five-year averages of these and all explanatory variable data. Previous chapters of this report have emphasized the role of factor prices, and particularly the wages of unskilled workers, as a key determinant of income inequality. Through their impact on f...

We propose an extension of the standard general equilibrium model with production and incomplete markets to situations in which (i) private investors have limited information on the returns of specific assets, (ii) managers of firms have limited information on the preferences of individual shareholders. The extension is obtained by the assumption that firms are not traded directly but grouped i...

The paper compares British and US government policy initiatives to combat financial exclusion and promote community reinvestment. Financial exclusion, a general term for those who lack financial products, is concentrated in a small number of deprived urban areas in larger cities that are also starved of private sector investment. British policies, though they have drawn on US experience, predom...

When journalists from other countries would ask me in the 1980s how the United States could suffer such embarrassingly large losses in its savings and loan, and later its banking, industry, I would be somewhat embarrassed myself, as an American citizen, trying to explain how things could go so wrong in such a developed country. A decade later, the tables seemed to have turned. Many countries ha...