BACKGROUND A study of the helminth infection status of primary-school children and the hygiene condition of schools in Ikenne Local Government Area of Ogun State, Nigeria was undertaken between November 2004 and February 2005 to help guide the development of a school-based health programme. METHODS AND FINDINGS THREE PRIMARY SCHOOLS WERE RANDOMLY SELECTED: two government-owned schools (one ur...

The latest round of share reform in China, which began in 2005, sets two related processes in motion: it increases the tradable share proportion and signals the start of a decline in the government-owned share proportion. This paper considers the effect these processes might have on firm performance in the future by analysing the impact the above share proportions had on firm performance immedi...

This paper deals with the interplay between foreign direct investment (FDI) and the industrial and innovation policies of host developing economies. It aims to redefine the nexus between these different, though yet strongly interconnected policy areas, by bringing the affiliates of multinational corporations already established in a host economy to the first level of analysis. It argues that ho...

Theory makes ambiguous predictions about the effects of bank market structure on access to external finance. Using a unique database for 74 countries and for firms of small, medium and large size we assess the effect of banking market structure on the access of firms to bank finance. We find that bank concentration increases financing obstacles, but only in countries with low levels of economic...

Although the risk of expropriation for foreign direct investment (FDI) has fallen substantially since the 1970s, political risk continues to be of concern to MNCs in many countries. I ask whether domestic political checks and balances and international legal instruments that aim to protect FDI enable governments to commit credibly to avoid future policies that diminish the value of sunk FDI. Ut...

This paper investigates the relationship between firm heterogeneity and a firm’s decision to export, using the annual survey of Thai manufacturing firms from 2001 to 2004. A significant contribution of this paper is that we are, for the first time, able to break down FDI by country of origin to observe whether the behavior of MNEs differs by region of origin. We find that entry sunk costs and f...