Motivated by a set of stylised facts based on provincial data for India, this paper investigates the incidence of urban poverty by modelling the impact of technological progress in the formal sectors of the economy on the urban informal wage in a four-sector general equilibrium framework with...

Recent research on exchange rate regimes has stressed the similarity amongst intermediate regimes (managed floats and "soft" pegs) rather than the traditional peg/float dichotomy. We investigate the choice of regime amongst hard pegs, soft pegs, managed floats and independent floats for a panel...

This paper on Trade Agreements within SSA, is an assessment of the ex post bilateral trade effect of the European Union-African Caribbean Pacific Preferential Trade Agreement (EU-ACP PTA) and sub-regional regional trade agreements (RTAs) on bilateral trade involving SSA countries. The main...

We examine the case for donors providing financial incentives to NGOs to increase community participation. We show that, when such incentives are provided, there need not exist any meaningful relationship between beneficiary welfare and the extent of community participation implemented by an...

The link between foreign aid and economic growth remains a controversial issue in the literature, and a large share of the disagreement could be explained by differences in the data employed. Using GDP data from three different versions of the Penn World Table and the World Development...

This paper re-examines the causal impact of military expenditure on growth in the presence of internal and external threats for the period 1990-2013 using data from 70 developing countries. We find that differences in methods, model specifications, and the underlying estimation sample partly...

Overall, protection in goods and services now appears modest in developed and developing countries, but there are a number of products where protection remains high and liberalization could bring important benefits to developing countries. In absolute terms the greatest gains for developing...

This paper considers how the conditionality inherent in HIPC debt relief should be constituted to promote pro-poor policies. There are two dimensions to this. First, the extent to which the policies proposed are pro-poor. Second, the potential for releasing resources for pro-poor expenditures....

This paper provides a critical analysis of the growth regressions in Burnside and Dollar (2000). First, we analyze the relation between aid and government expenditure in a modified neoclassical growth model. We find that while good policies spur growth they may at the same time lead to...

The literature on the stylised facts of structural change in LDCs has been bedevilled by three problems: (i) drawing time-series inferences from cross-section results; (ii) endogeneity of the variables involved; and (iii) an inability to separate short-run from long-run effects. This paper uses...