This article critiques the idea that the private sector can take the lead in addressing the capital needs of underserved communities, focusing specifically on the emerging domestic markets approach advocated by Milken Institute researchers. This approach has three limitations. First, it treats all underserved communities as interchangeable, ignoring that they differ in important ways in the nat...

This paper addresses the hotly-debated question: do Chinese firms overinvest? A firm-level dataset of 100,000 firms over the period of 2000-07 is employed for this purpose. We initially calculate measures of investment efficiency, which is typically negatively associated with overinvestment. Despite wide disparities across various ownership groups, industries and regions, we find that corporate...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the long-run effects of government policy changes on the private sector development in a transitional economy. The policy changes include (i) increases in the nominal interest rate on deposits in the state banking system, (ii) increases in the tax rates on labor income and corporate income, and (iii) implementation of further enterprise reforms in the...

Prompted in part by constrained national budgets, European governments are increasingly partnering with the private sector to underwrite the costs of constructing and operating public hospitals and other health care facilities and delivering services. Through such public-private partnerships, governments hope to avoid up-front capital expenditure and to harness private-sector efficiencies, whil...

This paper examines the combined effect of asymmetric information and private entrepreneurial risk aversion on investment decisions. The standard optimal debt contract becomes modified by the introduction of insurance and a risk premium that entrepreneurs demand due to the uncertainty of their investment returns: the private equity premium. In general equilibrium, the private equity premium may...

The past three years have seen major changes in India's economic policies marking a new phase in India's development strategy. The broad thrust of the new policies is not very different from the changes being implemented in other developing countries and also all over the erstwhile socialist world. They aim at reducing the extent of Government controls over various aspects of the domestic econo...