Gartner recommends that all of your applications than can assist with compliance be brought together in a common architecture. According to Gartner, public companies that don't have this common compliance architecture by 2006 will have to spend 50 percent more annually to achieve compliance. Gartner analysts recommend that 50 percent...
Financial intermediation and financial services industries have undergone many changes in the past two decades due to deregulation, technological advances and globalization. The framework for regulating finance has seen many changes as well, with approaches adapting to new issues arising in specific groups of countries or globally. The objectives of...
Vietnam's telecommunications sector has continued to expand rapidly, primarily due to mobile growth, and appears poised to continue expanding in the future. With a population of just over 80 million comparable to Germany, Vietnam is one of the major emerging markets of the Association of South East Asian Nations ASEAN...
This paper outlines various available and emerging Information and Communication Technologies ICTs and provides a framework to assess how these technologies may be used to improve the efficiency of the delivery of safety net programs. These technologies include: mobile computing, biometrics, satellite communications, simple and smart cards, global positioning systems,...
The paper argues, however, that there are particular opportunities to bypass or cheat on the tender rules for large and complex contracts. Based on a recent study of the experiences of Scandinavian firms in international markets, the paper finds that the larger the firms, the better opportunity they have to...
More than ten countries in Latin America have enacted reforms that have some things in common with what is being contemplated for the US - the partial privatization of social security. But these countries are very different from the US, and it is not easy to draw meaningful lessons for...
Regulatory Impact Analysis RIA is a tool now used in most developed countries to improve the understanding of economic and social welfare impacts of regulation. It is widely recognized as an important mechanism which can contribute to improving the business environment, and to promote regulatory efficiency and effectiveness. This paper...
The U.S.-Mexico case (2002-04) was the first and so far only case of World Trade Organization WTO dispute resolution on telecommunications services and the first on services only. The findings of the Panel charged with settling the dispute contain interpretations of the General Agreement on Trade in Services GATS, especially...
This paper considers approaches towards improving the predictability of aid to low income countries, with a special focus on budget support. In order to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, the donor community is increasing aid flows while pushing for more coordination and tighter performance-based selectivity. Budget support reduces...
The objective of this study is to help identify ways in which the Doha Development Agenda might contribute to further poverty reduction in Indonesia. To provide a good technical basis for answering this question, the authors use an approach that combines a computable general equilibrium CGE model with a microsimulation...
This paper reports on the findings from a major international research project investigating the poverty impacts of a potential Doha Development Agenda DDA. It combines in a novel way the results from several strands of research. Intensive analysis of the DDA Framework Agreement pays particularly close attention to potential reforms...
The paper analyzes general equilibrium relationships between trade policy and the household distribution of income, decomposing social welfare into real income level and variance components and emphasizing Gini and Atkinson indexes. They embed these inequality-adjusted social welfare functions in a general equilibrium structure mapping from tariff protection to household inequality....
The paper analyzes the determinants and implications for financial stability of the mix of international banks' claims countries receive. Using data on U.S., Spanish, and Italian banks' foreign claims across countries, the paper finds that the share of local foreign claims is primarily driven by the degree of "freedom" in...
The paper provides estimates of the impact that removing all merchandise trade distortions would have on food and agricultural production, trade, and incomes. Using the latest versions of the Global Trade Analysis Project GTAP database and the World Bank's LINKAGE model of the global economy (projected to 2015), their results...
This paper is the introduction and summary chapter of the 43 chapter volume entitled Handbook of Trade Policy and WTO Accession for Development in Russia and the CIS. The key policy conclusions of each of the chapters are highlighted in this paper. This paper first explains the potential importance of...
Because of concern that OECD tariff reductions will translate into worsening export performance for the least developed countries, trade preferences have proven a stumbling block to developing country support for multilateral liberalization. The paper examines the actual scope for preference erosion, including an econometric assessment of the actual utilization and...
Electronic government (e-government) initiatives pose challenges typical of institutional reforms in public administration. Staff incentive challenges can confront project managers even after software design and hardware purchase issues have been resolved. This note draws lessons from staff issues that impeded implementation of five e-government projects, and suggests how changes in...
A rapidly growing empirical literature is studying the causes and consequences of bank fragility in contemporary economies. The paper reviews the two basic methodologies adopted in cross-country empirical studies-the signals approach and the multivariate probability model-and their application to study the determinants of banking crises. The use of these models...
This paper studies the effect of financial crises on trade credit in a sample of 890 firms in six emerging economies. It finds that although provision of trade credit increases right after the crisis, it consequently collapses in the following months and years. It observes that firms with weaker financial...
