This book describes the recent activities of the Foreign Investment Advisory Service (a joint facility of the IFC and the World Bank) to help governments in developing and transition economies to identify and remove administrative barriers to investment. Lessons learned include the critical need for political will to implement reforms, leadership from center of government, and capacity to ensure sound implementation of legislative and regulatory reform over an extended period of time, including regular monitoring and evaluation.

Red tape is burdensome to companies, inhibits entrepreneurship, and reduces competitiveness. This book examines country strategies and tools for reducing red tape and the institutional frameworks set up to reduce red tape, and finds what the trends ...

Seventeen in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 190 economies, Doing Business 2020 measures aspects of regulation affecting 10 areas of everyday business activity.

Private firms are at the forefront of the development process, providing more than 90 percent of jobs, supplying goods and services, and representing a significant source of tax revenues. Their ability to grow, create jobs, and reduce poverty depends critically on a well-functioning investment climate--defined as the policy, legal, and institutional arrangements underpinning the functioning of markets and the level of transaction costs and risks associated with starting, operating, and closing a business. The World Bank Group has provided extensive support to investment climate reforms. This evaluation by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) assesses the relevance, effectiveness, and social value of World Bank Group support to investment climate reforms as it relates to concerns for inclusion and shared prosperity. IEG finds that the World Bank Group has supported a comprehensive menu of investment climate reforms and has improved investment climate in countries, as measured by number of laws enacted, streamlining of processes and time, or simple cost savings for private firms. However, the impact on investment, jobs, business formation, and growth is not straightforward. Regulatory reforms need to be designed and implemented with both economic and social costs and benefits in mind; IEG found that, in practice, World Bank Group support focuses predominantly on reducing costs to businesses. In supporting investment climate reforms, the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation use two distinct but complementary business models. Despite the fact that investment climate is the most integrated business unit in the World Bank Group, coordination is mostly informal, relying mainly on personal contacts. IEG recommends that the World Bank Group expand its range of diagnostic tools and integrate them in the areas of the business environment not yet covered by existing tools; develop an approach to identify the social effects of regulatory reforms on all groups expected to be affected by them beyond the business community; and exploit synergies by ensuring that World Bank and IFC staff improve their understanding of each other's work and business models.

This 2005 OECD Economic Survey of the Dutch economy (published as the second issue in the 2006 volume) examines key economic challenges including putting public finances on a sustainable path, increasing resiliency in labour markets, strengthening ...

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) provide both a fundamental risk to and an opportunity for climate change mitigation. The climate ambitions of MNEs will affect the environmental performance of countries around the world. As a leading actor, proactive MNEs can impose sustainability standards or encourage green technology transfers that, in some cases, could affect millions of producers and accelerate the climate transition. However, obstructive MNEs may equally hold back any progress to reduce a country's emissions via inaction or by actively resisting, obstructing, or lobbying against change. The objective of this report is to study the effect of MNEs on climate change. Toward this goal, the report reviews the latest available data, conducts new empirical analysis, and summarizes pioneering literature. The report answers four key questions related to the relationship between MNEs and climate change: 1) What effect do MNEs currently have on climate change, both through their own activities and through the emissions of their broader supply chains?; 2) How do MNEs shape the potential transfer of green technologies to domestic firms, and how do different types of interactions with MNEs stimulate such technology transfers?; 3) How committed are leading MNEs currently to transitioning their supply chains to net-zero emissions by 2050, and do they have long-, medium-, and short-range strategies to realize this?; 4) What types of policies can influence MNEs' effects on climate change?

This book presents the outcomes of the annual “Engineering Economics Week – 2020,” organized by the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the Institute of Management and the Institute of Market Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), the South-Russian State Polytechnic University and Samara State University of Economics, and held in online format in May 2020. Focusing on the following topics: - the globalized economy and Russian industrial enterprises: development specifics and international co-operation; - state support for the real sector of the economy; - decisions in production and project management in the context of the digital economy; - big data and big challenges in production networks and systems ; and - economic and social aspects of the innovation management: decision-making and control this book will appeal to scientists, teachers and students (bachelor’s, master’s and postgraduate) at higher education institutions, economists, specialists at research centers, managers of industrial enterprises, business professionals, and those at media centers, and development fund and consulting organizations.