The 2008-09 global economic crises have shown that no country is immune to external challenges. When policy controls are missing or not used efficiently, crises can reverse progress even in advanced economies. This unexpected outcome has increased concerns about the ability of governments in...

This note analyzes levels and trends of health expenditures by country, income group, and region in the context of overall government revenue, expenditure, and GDP trends between 1995 and 2010. The study uses available data from the World Health Organization's (WHO) National Health Accounts, the...

In recent years, the number of studies looking at the effect of politics on economic outcomes has flourished. For developing economies, these studies are useful to better understand why long overdue reforms are not implemented. The studies analyze the overall context within which reforms are...

Why do politicians distort public investments? And given that public investments are poor because presumably that is what is politically rational, what types of reforms are likely to be both efficiency improving and compatible with the interests of politicians? This paper explores these two...

Heterogeneity of public utility services is common in developing countries. In a"high-level"equilibrium, the quality of utility services is high, consumer willingness to pay for services is high, the utility is well funded and staff well paid in order to induce high quality of performance. In...

This paper takes advantage of unique intra-country variation in the Philippines power sector to examine under what conditions politicians have an incentive to"capture"an electric utility and use it for the purposes of rent-seeking. The authors hypothesize that the level of capture is determined...

The need to construct an effective strategy for industrial development in low-income countries has been largely ignored by development economists because industrial policies have failed in many developing countries. This does not imply, however, that industrial development cannot be promoted....

This paper investigates whether the agglomeration of economic activity in regional clusters affects long-run manufacturing total factor productivity growth in an emerging market context. It explores a large firm-level panel dataset for Chile during a period characterized by high growth rates and...

The authors propose a theory of task trade between countries that have similar relative factor endowments and technological capabilities but may differ in size. Firms produce differentiated goods by performing a continuum of tasks, each of which generates local spillovers. Tasks can be performed...

Little cross-cutting conclusions emerge from comparative studies on the impact of structural adjustment on Sub-Saharan African agricultural performance. This paper aims to illuminate this long-standing debate by adopting a novel quantitative, sectoral and long-term approach controlling for...