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I am deeply indebted to many people who have offered tremendous help during my doctoral years. I cannot imagine how lonely this long journey would be without their support, both professionally and personally.

During a period where Japanese banks operated under a less restrictive regulatory environment, 1986-88, we find positive relationships between bank risk and ownership concentration. This empirical evidence reveals shareholder activism by the largest shareholders. During the periods immediately

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innovation for the poor

Economic & Th is paper explores the relationship of the informal economy to the formal economy and the formal regulatory environment. It begins with a discussion of the concept of the informal economy and its size, composition, and segmentation. It then discusses the linkages between

of indices to test their explanatory power for information distribution for a panel of 90 countries. In a second step, the relationship of information distribution and bank lending is analyzed. It can be stated that an open business reporting environment facilitates information distribution, which positively

The mobile cellular market is one of the fastest-growing service segments in the history of telecommunications. Many countries are witnessing a veritable explosion in cellular mobile services (see figure 1) (1). Expressed in terms of "calling opportunities " (2), nearly half of all potential This paper is based on a research project carried out at ITU on fixed-mobile interconnection under the auspices of the New Initiatives programme. For more information, including the texts

African States (ECOWAS) signaled their commitment to the United Nations ’ Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger and poverty by 2015 (MDG1). To achieve that goal, agriculture in the region needed to grow by 6.8 percent annually (Johnson et al. 2008). From 2000 to 2009, however, West African agriculture grew at half the desired rate—3.7 percent—due to many biophysical and socioeconomic constraints, including heavy reliance on rainfed production systems, traditional practices of soil fertility maintenance, and limited access to markets. Consequently, crop yields in West Africa are significantly lower than global averages, and their rate of increase has barely kept up with population growth. Cereal production in West Africa increased by 4.4 percent per annum from 1980 to 2009, an annual growth rate only marginally above the population growth rate. About two-thirds of this growth was accounted for by expanding cultivated area; one-third represented yield growth. This trend will have to change, as land becomes scarcer while demand for cereals and other agricultural products continues to grow, as a result of population and income growth as well as urbanization. Future agricultural growth will have to rely more on productivity gains through the adoption of improved technologies based on fertilizers, improved seeds, water harvesting, and better agronomic practices. Yields for most crops have the potential to almost double, with greater intensification in these inputs (Nin-Pratt et al. 2011), especially given their current low levels of adoption. The average fertilizer use in the region in 2008 was only 8 kilograms of nutrients per hectare, while the area planted under improved seed amounted to less than 25 percent. Figure 1—Performance of the fertilizer supply chain in Ghana