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 rail-road lines were built before independence, in a context where...

Productivity is high in cities partly because the urban environment acts as a self-selection mechanism.  If workers have imperfect information about the quality of workers with whom they match and matches take place within cities, then high-ability workers will choose to live and work in...

It is widely believed that regional labour markets in the USA are highly flexible, so that employment shocks have only transitory effects on joblessness since induced migration quickly offsets much of the initial impact. However time-series analysis of the response to shocks is very sensitive to...

We analyse a cointegrated VAR comprising UK data on consumer prices, unit labour costs, import prices and real consumption growth. The nominal variables, treated as I(2) here, form a linearly homogeneous relation, suggesting a transformation of the system to one comprising inflation and relative...

This article explains the part that Meade played in the creation of Keynes`s General Theory, describes his work with Keynes during the Second World War in the creation of the IMF and the GATT, and summarizes the ideas in The Theory of International Economic Policy for which Meade was awarded the...

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...

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...

Agriculture is the largest sector in most sub-Saharan economies in terms of employment, and it plays an important role in supplying food and export earnings.  Rural poverty rates remain high, and labor productivity is strikingly low.  This paper asks how these factors shape the role of...

Analysis of new comparable series on output and employment between 1900 and 2000 for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela indicates that productivity growth was significantly higher and less volatile during the middle decades of the century than in the opening and closing...

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,...