Sub-Saharan Africa has been characterised by low-income levels for decades. This paper analyses the impact of economic globalisation and democracy on income in sub-Saharan Africa using panel cointegration techniques. The paper considers a composite indicator for economic globalisation and...

Economic institutions determine prospects for growth and development. This paper examines necessary conditions for an economy to support institutions that implement markets. Agents differ in land holdings, skill, and power. A competitive market assigns land to the skilled, not necessarily to the...

This paper contributes towards the growing debate concerning the world distribution of income and its evolution over that past three to four decades. Our methodological approach is twofold. First, we formally test for the number of modes in a cross-sectional analysis where each country is...

The focus of this paper is on the rural poor of south Asia and their struggle to cope with the seasonal risk of unemployment and the ensuing income risks. In the absence of formal credit or insurance markets the rural poor typically resort to, among other options, the following informal...

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...

This paper uses district-level data from India for the Census period 1991-2001 to investigate the nexus between agricultural sector development and service delivery in education, health, transportation, and communication. It asks whether local differences in public service provision cause some...

This article evaluates the impact of a land certification program on credit market outcomes in rural Vietnam. We hypothesize that the representation of property increases households' participation in formal credit markets. We compare credit market outcomes for certified and non-certified...

We study the relationship between height stature and child mortality in West Africa. This is motivated by two things: understanding the determinants of height, widely used health indicator, and explaining the « double African paradox ». This paradox comes from the fact that Africans are...

This paper presents a new Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for 104 developing countries. It is the first time multidimensional poverty is estimated using micro datasets (household surveys) for such a large number of countries which cover about 78 percent of the world's population. The MPI...

Are responses to a simple survey item sufficiently reliable in eliciting risk attitudes? Our angle in examining reliability is to conduct comparative research across Thailand and Vietnam. We find, first, that the survey item is informative about individual risk attitude because it is plausibly...