Are broad reforms the children of high inflation? Do growth recoveries follow? We find that countries that had external debt crises with high inflation both reformed more and recovered better than countries that had external debt crises with low inflation. Countries with extremely high inflation...

Recent literature suggests that long-run averages of growth and inflation are only weakly correlated and such correlation is not robust to exclusion of extreme inflation observations; inclusion of time series panel data has improved matters, but an aggregate parametric approach remains...

The authors systematically document remarkably high degrees of concentration in manufacturing exports for a sample of 151 countries over a range of 3,000 products. For every country manufacturing exports are dominated by a few "big hits" which account for most of the export value and where the...

Fiscal adjustment becomes like walking up the down escalator when growth-promoting spending is cut so much as to lower growth and thus the present value of future tax revenues to a degree that more than offsets the improvement in the cash deficit. Although short-term cash flows matter, a...

May 2000 - A higher share of income for the middle class and lower ethnic polarization are empirically associated with higher income, higher growth, more education, better health, better infrastructure, better economic policies, less political instability, less civil war (putting ethnic...

May 2000 - The poor suffer more from inflation than the rich do, reveals this survey of poor people in 38 countries. Using polling data for 31,869 households in 38 countries and allowing for country effects, Easterly and Fischer show that the poor are more likely than the rich to mention...

November 1999 - Theoretical models predict that countries with unchanged long-run savings preferences will respond to debt relief by running up new debts or by running down assets. And there are some signs that incremental debt relief over the past two decades has fulfilled those predictions....