Corporate governance reform is a global phenomenon sweeping through the US, Europe, China, Korea, India, Latin America and many other places. These reforms have been accompanied by a surge in corporate governance scholarship focused on emerging markets. This research suggests, although not uniformly, that "better" corporate law and governance tend to be correlated with better stock market development, more dispersed ownership structures, and higher firm profitability, amongst other things. These findings have sparked debate and thought on why these correlations exist and whether there are particular features of corporate law and governance that matter more than others to these economic measures. Indeed, recent research in developed markets has begun to focus on enforcement of corporate and securities laws.

This paper summarizes and extends my earlier critique (Bhattacharjea, 2006) of the empirical literature on labour regulation and industrial performance in India. I now focus only on the impact of legal restrictions on temporary layoff, permanent retrenchment and plant closures. After summarizing my earlier paper, I describe in detail the variability of employment protection regimes across Indian states attributable to court judgments, a key factor which other authors have ignored.

I hypothesize that firms may adapt to restrictions on labour flexibility thru fragmentation and outsourcing, a phenomenon that has not been recognized in the literature. I then draw attention to features of the official industrial statistics which undermine many of the conclusions of earlier studies, and propose an alternative methodology to test the new hypotheses while avoiding these pitfalls. The results of this empirical exercise are inconclusive, but reinforce my skepticism about the literature that tries to relate legal restrictions on labour flexibility to industrial outcomes.

Using People's Security data from three countries, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, the article examines which objective and subjective work place factors increase work satisfaction. The link between work satisfaction and various exogenous work-related factors is explored within a theoretical framework that integrates the academic work satisfaction literature, especially insights from the human potential movement and newer findings from the hedonic psychology and economics literature, with the more social policy oriented seven dimensions of socioeconomic security codified by the United Nations´ International Labour Organization. Employing ordered probit models, this article argues that aspects such as attending to occupational health and safety hazards, voice representation and confidence in continued employment are key predictors of work satisfaction across countries and occupations.

Why did limited government and 'constitutionalism' (the rule of law, constitutional rules, and political representation) evolve in some societies but not others? Guided by history, this paper examines why this evolution reflects dependence on administrators to implement policy choices including those affecting them. Limited government and constitutionalism are manifestations of equilibria in which the administrators have the power to influence choices. The thesis that constitutionalism reflects an equilibrium among the powerful differs from the prevailing one, which asserts that it reflects gains to the weak from constraining the powerful. Analyzing the determinants and implications of administrative power reveals its impact on trajectories of economic development. Distinct administrative-power equilibria have different impacts on the security of the non-elite's property rights; intra-state and inter-state violence (e.g. civil wars and wars, respectively); policies; entry barriers to new technologies and economic sectors; the nature of political conflicts; and the means to resolve conflicts concerning political rights.

Over the past 25 years, the United States has made support for the spread of democracy to other nations an increasingly important element of its national security policy. Many other multilateral agencies, countries, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also are involved in providing democracy assistance. These efforts have created a growing demand to find the most effective means to assist in building and strengthening democratic governance under varied conditions.

Within the U.S. government the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has principal responsibility for providing democracy assistance. Since 1990, USAID has supported democracy and governance (DG) programs in approximately 120 countries and territories, spending an estimated total of $8.47 billion (in constant 2000 U.S. dollars) between 1990 and 2005. The request for DG programs for fiscal year 2008 was $1.45 billion, which includes some small programs in the U.S. Department of State.

Despite these substantial expenditures, our understanding of the actual impacts of USAID DG assistance on progress toward democracy remains limited—and is the subject of much current debate in the policy and scholarly communities. Admittedly, the realities of democracy programming are complicated, given the emphasis on timely responses in politically sensitive environments and flexibility in implementation to account for fluid political circumstances. These realities pose particular challenges for the evaluation of democracy assistance programs. Nonetheless, USAID seeks to find ways to attempt to determine which programs, in which countries, are having the greatest impact in supporting democratic institutions and behaviors and how those effects unfold. To do otherwise would risk making poor use of scarce funds and to remain uncertain about the effectiveness of an important national policy.