What is the impact of modern transportation technology on long-run economic change in poor countries with high trade costs? Rail construction in colonial Sub-Saharan Africa provides a natural experiment: 90% of African railroad lines were built before independence, in a context where headloading...

Panel data on 54 developing countries between 1960 and 2000 are used to investigate how the impact of opening to trade on economic growth is affected by wealth inequality. The results suggest (a) that opening to trade tends to accelerate growth but (b) that the addition to growth depends...

We report the short-term results from a randomized evaluation of a mobile phone literacy and numeracy program (Project ABC) in Niger, in which adult literacy students learned how to use mobile phones as part of a literacy and numeracy class. Students in ABC villages showed substantial gains in...

Global climate change mitigation will require the development and diffusion of a large number and variety of new technologies. How will patent protection affect this process? In this paper we first review the evidence on the role of patents for innovation and international technology transfer in...

The paper extends existing work on inequality and economic development by estimating a cross-country structural model that identifies bi-directional relationships between income inequality and other indicators of social and economic development. Overall, lower inequality is associated with...

We theoretically and empirically examine the relationship between natural resource revenues and financial development. In the theoretical part, we present a politico-economic model in which contract enforcement is low and decreasing in resource revenues when political institutions are poor, but...

As poor countries deplete their natural resources, for increased consumption to be sustainable some of the revenues should be invested in other public assets. Further, since such countries typically have acute shortages of public capital, the finance from resource depletion is an opportunity for...

It has long been hypothesised that public works programmes, in addition to the welfare effect on those directly employed, can influence equilibrium wage rates. In this paper we test the impact of the Indian government’s major public works programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee...

Expansion in mobile phone coverage has improved access to information throughout the developing world, particularly within sub-Saharan Africa. The existing evidence suggests that information technology has improved market efficiency and reduced consumer prices for certain commodities. There are...