[Introduction] The fundamental development challenge in the Arab region is one of economic transformation or, more pertinent, a lack thereof. Heavy sectoral weights of extractive industries lead to dependence on global oil prices, even in oil-producing countries. The structure of production...

[Introduction] We live in a time of transformational change, with society, economy, ecology and politics in a state of flux the world over. Of particular focus in this Working Paper are the implications for mineral-dependent economies of living in an increasingly resource-constrained world. Both...

Since the mid-1980s a substantial body of research has taken shape on trade in services. Much of this is inspired by the WTO or regional trade agreements, especially the EU. However, an increasing number of papers focus on the impacts of unilateral services sector liberalization. The literature...

Latin America`s enormous endowment of natural resources impacts many countries of the region. Economic liberalization in several countries was followed by rapid growth of foreign investment and exports of natural resource-intensive products. Growth of labor-intensive manufacturing industries was...

Schooling is a major factor in economic development. There is extensive empirical literature on what determines schooling attainment. But most of this literature uses micro data to explore connections between schooling attainment and family background and experiences, local markets, local...

This research explores the geographical origins of the coevolution of cultural and linguistic traits in the course of human history, relating the geographical roots of long-term orientation to the structure of the future tense, the agricultural determinants of gender bias to the presence of...

While the direct impact of geographic endowments on prosperity is present in all countries, in former colonies, geography has also affected colonization policies and, therefore, institutional outcomes. Using non-colonized countries as a control group, I develop an empirical strategy that...

A vision of universalised human freedom, equality, security and democracy emerged in the wake of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the British Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. This vision, not even approximately practicable at the time, is now well within reach. A...

This paper reports the results of experiments designed to examine whether a taste for fairness affects people’s preferred tax structure. Building on the Fehr and Schmidt (1999) model, we devise a simple test for the presence of social preferences in voting for alternative tax structures. The...