Three billion people live in rural areas in developing countries. Conditions for them are worse than for their urban counterparts when measured by almost any development indicator, from extreme poverty, to child mortality and access to electricity and sanitation. And the gulf is widening,...

1. Introduction -- 2. Creating Opportunities: The Growth Story -- 3. Fighting Deprivations: Poverty and Inequality -- 4. Building Capabilities: Human and Social Development -- 5. Resetting Priorities: Catching Up Strategies -- 6. Creating Jobs and Adjusting The Labour Market -- 7. Managing...

Infrastructure contributed 1.8 percentage points to Côte d'Ivoire's annual per capita GDP growth over the mid-2000s before conflict began to erase the country's infrastructure and its growth contributions. Raising the country's infrastructure endowment to the level of the region's middle-income...

The authors study firm dynamics using a novel database of all formally registered firms in Cote d'Ivoire from 1977 to 1997, which account for about 60 percent of gross domestic product. First, they examine entry and exit patterns and the role of new and exiting firms versus incumbents in job...

This study analyzes opportunities for children in Cote d'Ivoire, where opportunities refer to access to basic services and goods that improve the likelihood of a child maximizing his or her human potential. The principle that guides this analysis is one of equality of opportunity, which is that...

Existing evidence forms a body of "conventional wisdom" on the redistributive impact of fiscal policies that has been recently questioned by more disaggregated analyses. This paper proposes an additional extension to the traditional benefit incidence analysis to explore further the extent to...

Regression discontinuity designs applied to a set of household surveys from the 1980-90s allow to examine whether Côte d'Ivoire's aggregate wealth was translated at the borders of neighboring countries. At the border of Ghana and at the end of the 1980s, large discontinuities are detected for...