The global economy and especially its poorest members, face a perfect storm. The crisis has been created by a Global LIE: leverage this is unfathomable, institutions that are discredited, and, experts who are uncertain about the uncertainty. The poorest countries have been the hardest hit by the...

Successful public sector reform is rare in Africa. Over twelve years, Ethiopia transformed its public financial management (PFM) to international standards and now has the third best system in Africa that is managing the largest aid flows to the continent. This article presents a framework for...

The principal recommendation to developing countries for automating their financial systems is to adopt off-the-shelf integrated financial information systems (IFMISs). The recommendation to adopt an IFMIS goes beyond a strategy of automation. IFMISs are often viewed as the driver of financial...

The pollution haven hypothesis suggests that unilateral domestic emission mitigation policies could cause adverse "competitiveness" impacts on domestic manufacturers as they lose market share to foreign competitors and relocate production activity--and emissions--to unregulated economies. We...

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included more than $90 billion in strategic clean energy investments intended to promote job creation and promote deployment of low-carbon technologies. In terms of spending, the clean energy package has been described as the nation's "biggest energy...

Left- and right-handed individuals have different brain structures, particularly in relation to language processing. Using five data sets from the US and UK, I show that poor infant health increases the likelihood of a child being left-handed. I argue that handedness can thus be used to explore...

How accurate are people when predicting whether they will vote? These self-predictions are used by political scientists to proxy for political motivation, and by public opinion researcher to predict election outcomes. Phone surveys from three elections, including one survey experiment, are...

Fiscal and monetary policy each has a role to play in mitigating the volatility that stems from the large trade shocks hitting commodity-exporting countries. All too often macroeconomic policy is procyclical, that is, destabilizing, rather than countercyclical. This paper suggests two...

We examine several hypotheses regarding the determinants and implications of political protest, motivated by the wave of popular uprisings in Arab countries starting in late 2010. While the popular narrative has emphasized the role of a youthful demography and political repression, we draw...

American fiscal policy has been procyclical: Washington wasted the expansion period 2001-2007 by running budget deficits, but by 2011 had come to feel constrained by inherited debt to withdraw fiscal stimulus. Chile has achieved countercyclical fiscal policy - saving in booms and easing in...