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...

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...

A great deal of the foreign aid-growth literature finds that the net effect of aggregate aid on total growth appears to be insignificant. This study argues that this aid-growth nexus can be better explained by testing the variation responses for each of growth sectors to their corresponding...

In this paper, we study the growth effects of the 2004 Eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) using the synthetic control method. We estimate that this EU enlargement had an immediate but modest positive impact on the economic growth of the EU-8 countries in the first few years following...

"Financial crisis" is sometimes regarded as synonymous with "economic crisis", but this is an oversimplification and risks missing the feedback loops between the financial and real economies. In this paper, the role of money is revisited in the context of distinguishing the real economy from the...

US states have implemented lockdown measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. We assess the impact of state policy responses on local economic and health conditions, with the goal to shed light on marginal health benefits and economic costs associated with social distancing. We find that...