What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...

Social welfare functions that assign weights to individuals based on their income levels can be used to document the relative importance of growth and inequality changes for changes in social welfare. In a large panel of industrial and developing countries over the past 40 years, most of the...

When average incomes rise, the average incomes of the poorest fifth of society rise proportionately. This holds across regions, periods, income levels, and growth rates. But relatively little is known about the broad forces that account for the variations across countries and across time in the...

November 1999 - It is difficult to choose the best model for forecasting real per capita GDP for a particular country or group of countries. This study suggests potential gains from combining time series and growth-regression-based approaches to forecasting. Kraay and Monokroussos consider two...

Small states, no different from large states in income and growth, should receive the same policy advice large states do. Because of their greater openness, they may be more vulnerable to volatility in terms-of-trade shocks--but their openness pays off in growth