Accelerating Municipal Bond Market Development in Emerging Economies: An Assessment of Strategies and Progress
The advantages of using municipal bonds to finance urban infrastructure are increasingly evident to policymakers in emerging economies, some of whom are undertaking efforts to accelerate the development of municipal bond markets in their countries. Many of these efforts use the strengths of the U.S. municipal market as a guide to suggest the kinds of market characteristics necessary to attract issuers as well as investors to the marketplace. Features of the U.S. market are often difficult to recreate in these countries in the short run, but policymakers are using a variety of innovative techniques to approximate essential market characteristics. This article reviews these efforts in four emerging economies: Indonesia, the Philippines, Poland, and South Africa.
International Finance and the Developing World : The Next Twenty Years
In August 1986, the year after UNU-WIDER began its work, the Institute hosted a conference to honour the memory of Carlos Diaz-Alejandro. Nearly 20 years on it is instructive to look over the resulting conference volume, Debt, Stabilization and Development (Calvo et al. 1989) to see how the world has, and has not, moved on. The book contains much discussion of whether a truly global market in capital has emerged, as well as the real effects of capital flows on developing countries — both areas of major debate today. Latin America’s deepening debt crisis and the effects of the ‘first generation’ of reform programmes then underway across the developing world also featured. The terminology of ‘emerging economies’ was not yet common coin (the first retail fund for emerging markets did not list on the New York Stock Exchange until 1987), and the major global macroeconomic imbalance was between the USA and Japan (not China). Moreover, the acceleration in financial globalization via the new information technologies was only just beginning; Raj Kumar and Joseph Stiglitz (1989: 442) in their paper on sources of technological divergence between developed and developing economies write of ‘greater talk about computers in Silicon Valley’.
"If I See a Murderous Fellow Sharpening a Knife Cleverly...": The Wilsonian Dichotomy and the Public Authority Tradition
"The field of administration is a field of business," argued Woodrow Wilson in his classic 1887 essay. "It is removed from the hurry and strife of politics.... 99 Echoing these sentiments seven decades later, Austin Tobin explained that the role of the public authority is to bring "the best techniques of private management to the operation of self-supporting or revenue-producing public enterprise. . . ." The administrative standards of a "well-managed private corporation' must be applied to these specialized agencies, concluded one of its preeminent spokesmen; its officials "cannot allow political influence to play any part in its management or internal affairs. ''2 Many government agencies and their officials have aspired to these twin goals of political insulation and