In many developing countries, the beneficiaries of transfer programmes are determined by community-based processes, based on some general targeting rules related to needs.  This opens the door for local social and political processes to impact on who gets access.  Despite increasingly large...

The Cross-country growth literature commonly uses aggregate economy datasets such as the Penn World Table (PWT) to estimate homogeneous production function or convergence regression models.  Against the background of a dual economy framework this paper investigates the potential bias arising...

Since the seminal contribution of Gregory Mankiw, David Romer and David Weil (1992), the growth empirics literature has used increasingly sophisticated methods to select relevant growth determinants in estimating cross-section regressions.  The vast majority of empirical approaches however...

The study presents recent global evidence on the transformation of economic growth to poverty reduction in developing countries, with emphasis on the role of income inequality.  The focus is on the period since the early-mid-1990s when growth in these countries as a group has been relatively...

This paper analyses stability in real multilateral exchange rates in six leading Latin-American economies during the XXth century using a new data set.  A univariate approach is complemented by an error-correction model including key fundamentals.  Unit-root testing shows a very slow process...

This paper makes a contribution to the study of economic growth in developing countries by analysing the six largest Latin American Economies over 105 years within a two-equation framework. Confirming previous findings, physical and human capital prove to be key determinants of GDP per capita...

This paper examines the structural determinants of output volatility in developing countries, and especially the roles of geography and institutions. We investigate the volatility effects of market access, climate variability, the geographic predisposition to trade, and various measures of...

It has been argued that the institutions of the CFA Franc zone may have reduced inflation but that they also induced misalignment of the real exchange rate and that this is the explanation for their dismal revenue performance. This paper uses a panel of 22 countries in sub-Saharan Africa to...

In this paper we modify the method of Blanchard and Quah (1989) in order to estimate a structural VAR model appropriate for a small open economy. In this way we identify shocks to output and prices in the members of the two monetary unions that make up the African CFA Franc Zone. The costs of...

This paper uses the pooled mean group estimator and an extended annual dataset to examine the effectiveness of aid on growth. The results indicate a significant long-run impact of aid on growth, but conditioning aid on `good` policy reduces the long-run growth rate.