Both FY2007 and the ongoing FY2008 will go down as exceptional years in the history of Bangladesh. Fiscal year 2008 started its journey in the backdrop of the moderately high growth rate of 6.51 per cent achieved in FY2007. Experience of FY2007 was unique in the sense that it saw three...

Both FY2007 and the ongoing FY2008 will go down as exceptional years in the history of Bangladesh. Fiscal year 2008 started its journey in the backdrop of the moderately high growth rate of 6.51 per cent achieved in FY2007. Experience of FY2007 was unique in the sense that it saw three...

Numerous studies have tried to explain the poor growth performance of the Philippines. This paper critically reviews related literature on constraints to long-run growth, as it applies to the Philippines. We evaluate several factors, namely : culture; corruption; and institutions. The last offers...

This paper studies the effect of financial repression and contract enforcement on en-trepreneurship and economic development. We construct and solve a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents, occupational choice and two financial frictions : intermediation costs and financial...

Beyond years of schooling, educational content can play an important role in the process of economic development. Individuals’ choices of educational content are often shaped by the political economy of government policies that determine the incentives to acquire various skills. We first...

Africa has been hard hit by the international crisis. Initially exogenous and above all financial, it has exacerbated various internal crises already present in the region. Like the DRC, which is a test case in many respects, Africa could experience severe setbacks that could cancel out the...

We explore the relationships between subjective well-being and income, as seen across individuals within a given country, between countries in a given year, and as a country grows through time. We show that richer individuals in a given country are more satisfied with their lives than are poorer...

This paper investigates the impact of complementarity reforms on growth and how it depends on GDP per capita. Based on reform data for six policy areas compiled from various sources during the period 1994-2006 for over 100 countries, we compute composite indicators of reform level and...

In many poor countries, the problem is not that governments do not invest, but that these investments do not create productive capital. So, the cost of public investments does not correspond to the value of the capital stocks. In this paper, we propose an original non parametric approach to...