Previous empirical work on the effect of government intervention on economic performance has used government spending as a proxy for intervention. This proxy is imperfect as many East Asian economies have low levels of government spending but high levels of government intervention. This paper...

Previous work has investigated whether political instability has a negative effect on economic growth, with mixed results, largely because political instability can take various forms. Using synthetic control methodology, which constructs a counterfactual in the absence of political instability,...

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the relationships between income inequality and growth, trade policy and growth, and growth and poverty. We contribute to this literature by exploring the relationships between inequality, trade liberalisation, growth and poverty in a sample of...

This paper takes a fresh look at three issues in the aid effectiveness debate. First, we assess the theoretical case for foreign aid. Using an endogenous growth version of the standard overlapping generations model, we show that aid can be an effective policy tool in spurring growth in poor...

What happens if HIPC debt relief resources are not additional? We seek to answer this question by quantifying the impact of debt service payments and aid flows in cross- country growth and investment regressions . Based on the regressions we assess the likely impact of debt relief with and...

Theoretical predictions and empirical evidence on the impact of foreign aid and fiscal policy on growth are mixed. This paper examines the effect of fiscal variables (government expenditure and revenue) and aid on growth using annual time series data for Kenya over the period 1964 - 2002....

This paper assesses the current state of evidence on the widely debated issue of the impact of trade policy reform on poverty in developing countries. There is relatively little empirical evidence addressing this question directly, but a lot of related evidence concerning specific aspects. This...