ILD-INSPIRED INITIATIVES

ILD inspired initiatives include the Assets Capitalization Bureau in Thailand, the Formalization commision of Property in Peru and the India Centre for Civil Society

Doing Business - World Bank

• Intro [1] “ The Doing Business database provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement. The Doing Business indicators are comparable across 155 economies. They indicate the regulatory costs of business and can be used to analyze specific regulations that enhance or constrain investment, productivity and growth. ”
• Starting a Business [2]"Doing Business records all generic procedures that are officially required for an entrepreneur to start up and operate an industrial or commercial business. These include obtaining all necessary licenses and permits and completing any required notifications, verifications or inscriptions with relevant authorities. After a study of laws, regulations and publicly available information on business entry, a detailed list of procedures, time, cost and paid-in minimum capital requirements is developed. Subsequently, local incorporation lawyers and government officials complete and verify the data on applicable procedures, the time and cost of complying with each procedure under normal circumstances and the paid-in minimum capital. On average 4 law firms participate in each country. Information is also collected on the sequence in which procedures are to be completed and whether procedures may be carried out simultaneously. It is assumed that any required information is readily available and that all government and nongovernment agencies involved in the start-up process function efficiently and without corruption. If answers by local experts differ, inquiries continue until the data are reconciled.
• Getting Credit [3] This topic explores two sets of issues—credit information registries and the effectiveness of collateral and bankruptcy laws in facilitating lending. The table below shows the main indicators, which include:
  • a Legal Rights Index, which measures the degree to which collateral and bankruptcy laws facilitate lending,
  • a Credit Information Index, which measures rules affecting the scope, access and quality of credit information,
  • public credit registry coverage, and
  • private credit bureau coverage.
• Contract Enforcement [4] Indicators on enforcing contracts measure the efficiency of the judicial (or administrative) system in the collection of overdue debt. The data are built by following the step-by-step evolution of a payment dispute either before local courts or through an administrative process, if such a process is available and preferred by creditors. The data are collected through study of the codes of civil procedures and other court regulations as well as surveys of local litigation lawyers. At least 2 lawyers participate in each country, and in a quarter of the countries judges also complete the survey. To ensure comparability, survey respondents are provided with significant detail, including the amount of the claim, the location and main characteristics of the litigants, the presence of city regulations, the nature of the remedy requested by the plaintiff, the merit of the plaintiff ’s and the defendant’s claims and the social implications of the judicial outcomes.
• Labor Regulation [5] Every economy has established a complex system of laws and institutions intended to protect the interests of workers and to guarantee a minimum standard of living for its population. The OECD Job Study and the International Encyclopedia for Labour Law and Industrial Relations identify 4 areas subject to statutory regulation in all countries: employment, social security, industrial relations and occupational health and safety. Doing Business focuses on the regulation of employment, specifically the hiring and firing of workers and the rigidity of working hours. This year data on social security payments by the employer and pension benefits, including the mandatory retirement age, have been added.
  The data on employing workers are based on a detailed survey of employment and social security regulations. The survey is completed by local law firms. The employment laws of most countries are available online in the NATLEX database, published by the International Labour Organization. In all cases both actual laws and secondary sources are used to ensure accuracy. Conflicting answers are further checked against 2 additional sources, including a local legal treatise on employment regulation.
• Closing a Business [6] This topic identifies weaknesses in existing bankruptcy law and the main procedural and administrative bottlenecks in the bankruptcy process.

Philippines UARPMO

Philippines Urban Asset Reform Program [7]. As the Philippine Headline News [8] online puts it, "Among the functions of the UARPMO under EO 371 is 'to develop the proven ideas' of Peruvian economist Dr. Hernando de Soto on empowering the urban poor by making them the legal owners of the land they are occupying."

A Short History of the Washington Consensus

John Williamson
Senior Fellow, Institute for International Economics

Paper commissioned by Fundación CIDOB for a conference “From the Washington
Consensus towards a new Global Governance,” Barcelona, September 24–25, 2004.

The term “Washington Consensus” was coined in 1989. The first written usage was in my background paper for a conference that the Institute for International Economics convened in order to examine the extent to which the old ideas of development economics that had governed Latin American economic policy since the 1950s were being swept aside by the set of ideas that had long been accepted as appropriate within the OECD. In order to try and ensure that the background papers for that conference dealt with a common set of issues, I made a list of ten policies that I thought more or less everyone in Washington would agree were needed more or less everywhere in Latin America, and labeled this the “Washington Consensus.”

Little did it occur to me that fifteen years later I would be asked to write about the history of a term that had become the center of fierce ideological controversy. The first section of this paper describes what I recollect about the background to my background paper for the 1989 conference. The second section retraces much more familiar ground, summarizing the ten points that I included in the Washington Consensus. This is followed by an account of the reception given to the term, and the analysis. The next section tries to account for the fact that the term became used in such different ways in different quarters and thus to be at the center of ideological controversies. The last substantive section is forward-looking and describes what I believe needs to be added to my original list in order to formulate a policy agenda for Latin America today.

Link to download the paper at the end of this page