Business Regulation and Economic Performance

The objective of this volume is to document the patterns of business regulation across the world and review their impact on aggregate economic performance. The volume adopts a comparative cross-regional perspective, with particular attention to Latin America. The research reported here focuses on establishing the analytical and empirical links between microeconomic regulatory policies on the one hand, and aggregate productivity, growth, and volatility on the other. Thus, the volume adds to a novel but increasingly influential line of policy-relevant research that seeks to understand macroeconomic phenomena from a microeconomic perspective. Such literature is still fairly scarce in the case of industrial countries, and virtually in its infancy for developing countries. To achieve this end, the volume combines a variety of methodological approaches-analytical and empirical, micro and macroeconomic, single- and cross-country-to an extent limited mainly by the availability of suitable data. Following this overview, the volume comprises six chapters that address the subject from different but complementary perspectives, providing a comprehensive exploration of the various channels through which business regulation affects growth, stability, and other key macroeconomic dimensions.