"Paci, Sasin, and Verbeek attempt to analyze the linkages between macroeconomic policies and economic growth variables, their movement over time, and their impact on poverty in the case of Poland. Poland, a middle-income country, is of particular interest because its data sources allow for a...

"The benefits of financial development and globalization have come with continuing fragility in financial sectors. Periodic crises have had real but heterogeneous welfare impacts and not just for poor people; indeed, some of the conditions that foster deep and persistent poverty, such as lack of...

"This paper provides a review of the contradictions and conflicts in the literature on economic governance and sketches an approach to use some of the conceptual and empirical findings from that literature for development policy. The literature offers conflicting conclusions on big questions:...

"Hoekman and Javorcik focus on policies facilitating firm adjustment to globalization. They briefly review the effects of trade and investment liberalization on firms, focusing on within-industry effects. They postulate that governments' role in supporting the process is to (1) ensure that firms...

"Model uncertainty hampers consensus on the key determinants of economic growth. Some recent cross-country, cross-sectional analyses have employed Bayesian Model Averaging to address the issue of model uncertainty. This paper extends that approach to panel data models with country-specific fixed...

"This paper surveys the recent literature which examines the impact of business climate variables on productivity and growth in developing countries using enterprise surveys. Comparable enterprise surveys today cover some 70,000 firms in over 100 countries around the world. The literature that...

"The authors describe the main trends of Brazil's fiscal policy during the past decade and analyze (1) the ability to raise the primary surplus in response to external shocks, (2) the pro-cyclical nature of fiscal policy, and (3) the long-run impact of government expenditure composition and...

"This paper explores the linkage between income growth rates and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. So far the evidence is rather mixed, as no robust relationship between FDI and income growth has been established. The authors argue that countries need a sound business environment in the...