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“A tender story about the variety of people that make children feel loved and supported.” —Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books Stella’s class is having a Mother’s Day celebration, but what’s a girl with two daddies to do? It’s not that she doesn’t have someone who helps her with her homework, or tucks her in at night. Stella has her Papa and Daddy who take care of her, and a whole gaggle of other loved ones who make her feel special and supported every day. She just doesn’t have a mom to invite to the party. Fortunately, Stella finds a unique solution to her party problem in this sweet story about love, acceptance, and the true meaning of family. “Told with both a light touch and an astute eye toward a child’s perspective and heartfelt concerns.” —School Library Journal “A raucous happy ending.” —The New York Times
The development of the small and medium enterprise sector is deemed crucial for economic growth and poverty alleviation. Such firms are often though to be at a disadvantage when compared with larger enterprises, but the reverse can apply, for example in the more flexible approach of the smaller firm. This paper draws on a private sector survey in 80 countries examining whether business obstacles are related to firm size. It finds a bias against small firms, which experience significantly greater problems than large firms with financing, taxes and regulations, inflation, corruption and street crime. These problems should be the prime targets of policies aimed at reducing inequity.
How private firms contribute to economic mobility and poverty reduction and what governments can do to enhance their contributions is the theme of this book. The positive role (often underemphasized) the private sector plays in economic development is looked at. Also the labour market and how various mechanisms in the economy interact to affect conditions for people as workers and as consumers. The links among the business environment, private sector development, economic growth, poverty reduction and economic mobility are also examined.
Identifies the ways in which private firms and farms contribute to economic mobility and poverty reduction and what governments can do to enhance this contribution.
China, India and Beyond challenges the widespread belief that China and India will be the driving forces of the global economy in the 21st century. Scholars of these two countries offer scenarios ranging from buoyant to subdued to negative, depending on h
This paper reports for uncovered interest parity (UIP) using daily data for 23 developing and developed countries during the crisis-strewn 1990s. UIP is a classic topic of international finance, a critical building block of most theoretical models, and a dismal empirical failure. UIP states that the interest differential is, on average, equal to the ex post exchange rate change. UIP may work differently for countries in crisis, whose exchange and interest rates both display considerably more volatility. This volatility raises the stakes for financial markets and central banks; it also may provide a more statistically powerful test for the UIP hypothesis. Policy-exploitable deviations from UIP are, therefore, a necessary condition for an interest rate defense. There is a considerable amount of heterogeneity in the results, which differ wildly by country.
The financial crisis that began in 2008 and its lingering aftermath have caused many intellectuals and politicians to question the virtues of capitalist systems. The 19 original essays in this Handbook, written by leading scholars from Asia, North America, and Europe, analyze both the strengths and weaknesses of capitalist systems. The volume opens with essays on the historical and legal origins of capitalism. These are followed by chapters describing the nature, institutions, and advantages of capitalism: entrepreneurship, innovation, property rights, contracts, capital markets, and the modern corporation. The next set of chapters discusses the problems that can arise in capitalist systems ...
Beck, Demirgüç-Kunt, and Levine explore the relationship between the relative size of the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector, economic growth, and poverty using a new database on the share of SME labor in the total manufacturing labor force. Using a sample of 76 countries, they find a strong association between the importance of SMEs and GDP per capita growth. This relationship, however, is not robust to controlling for simultaneity bias. So, while a large SME sector is characteristic of successful economies, the data fail to support the hypothesis that SMEs exert a causal impact on growth. Furthermore, the authors find no evidence that SMEs reduce poverty. Finally, they find qualified evidence that the overall business environment facing both large and small firms--as measured by the ease of firm entry and exit, sound property rights, and contract enforcement--influences economic growth. This paper--a product of Finance, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to understand the role of SMEs.
The authors investigate how a country's financial institutions and the quality of its legal system explain the size attained by its largest industrial firms in a sample of 44 countries. Firm size is positively related to the size of the banking system and the efficiency of the legal system. Thus, the authors find no evidence that firms are larger in order to internalize the functions of the banking system or to compensate for the general inefficiency of the legal system. But they do find evidence that externally financed firms are smaller in countries that have strong creditor rights and efficient legal systems. This suggests that firms in countries with weak creditor protections are larger in order to internalize the protection of capital investment.