The 1980s have seen the beginnings of a change of heart among developing country policymakers, as the import-substitution consensus of the previous decade has all but evaporated. It is paradoxical that the 1980s should have become the decade of trade liberalization in LDCs, since this has also...

Empirical evidence suggests that money in the hands of mothers (as opposed to their husbands) benefits children. Does this observation imply that targeting transfers to women is good economic policy? We develop a series of noncooperative family bargaining models to understand what kind of...

Women’s empowerment and economic development are closely related: in one direction, development alone can play a major role in driving down inequality between men and women; in the other direction, empowering women may benefit development. Does this imply that pushing just one of these two...

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

China’s economic reforms have resulted in spectacular growth and poverty reduction. However, China’s institutions look ill-suited to achieve such a result, and they indeed suffer from serious shortcomings. To solve "China puzzle" this paper analyses China’s institution - a regionally...

This paper investigates how telecommunications infrastructure affects economic growth. This issue is important and has received considerable attention in the popular press concerning the creation of the 'information superhighway' and its potential impacts on the economy. We use evidence from 21...

Drawing on the recent literature on economic institutions and the origins of economic development, we offer a political economy explanation of why institution building has varied so much across transition economies. We identify dependence on natural resources and the historical experience of...

In this paper we develop a new empirical approach to uncovering the impact of social attitudes on economic development. We first show that trust of second-generation Americans is significantly influenced by the country of origin of their forebears. In the spirit of the epidemiology literature,...

Throughout the post-war period Greece has faced a unique, and unfavourable, situation consisting of: (i) a perimetric location away from major European markets; and (ii) distorted economic relations as its northern borders were designed to be real barriers to communication and trade with...

There is controversy about whether geography matters mainly because of its contemporaneous impact on economic outcomes or because of its interaction with historical events. Looking at terrain ruggedness, we are able to estimate the importance of these two channels. Because rugged terrain hinders...