China has seen a huge reduction in the incidence of extreme poverty since the economic reforms that started in the late 1970s. Yet, the growth process has been highly uneven across sectors and regions. The paper tests whether the pattern of China´s growth mattered to poverty reduction using a...

The authors analyze the relationship between ethnic polarization and the duration of civil wars. Several recent papers have argued that the uncertainty about the relative power of the contenders in a war will tend to increase its duration. In these models, uncertainty is directly related to the...

Are cultural differences good or bad for economic development? Can cultural differences generate conflicts and, therefore, retard economic development? Or can cultural diversity spur creativity and improve economic welfare? These are the type of questions that this chapter addresses. There are...

The existing research on foreign aid offers inconclusive evidence on the factors that make aid effective. In this paper, we study the supply of aid money in 112 developing countries over the period 1960-1999 and find that the presence of multiple donors in a given country renders aid less...

The World Health Organization estimates that 300 million clinical cases of malaria occur annually and observed that during the 80s and part of the 90s its incidence increased. In this paper, we explore the influence of refugees from civil wars on the incidence of malaria in the refugee-receiving...