Economists often identify a reduction in the share of agricultural employment as a quantitative indication of the economic growth of nations. But this process did not occur in earnest in the People's Republic of China until the 1980s and to some extent in Japan until well into the mid-20th...

This paper seeks to add to the current debate about financial development and growth in the emerging world by looking at how different financial systems evolve: how and why financial structures change during various stages of development, how best to measure them, and seeing what practical...

This paper seeks to add to the current debate about financial development and growth in the emerging world by looking at how different financial systems evolve: how and why financial structures change during various stages of development, how best to measure them, and seeing what practical...

Economists often identify a reduction in the share of agricultural employment as a quantitative indication of the economic growth of nations. But this process did not occur in earnest in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) until the 1980s and to some extent in Japan until well into the...

People's trust in state and political institutions is a key foundation of a well-functioning economy. We estimate the impact of direct elections on people's trust in state and political institutions, using a major political reform in Indonesia as the source of exogenous variation. Prior to 2005,...

This paper reviews the growing body of literature on vulnerability. We first provide a survey of existing studies on the concepts and measurements of vulnerability to poverty by classifying them into welfarist, expected poverty, and axiomatic approaches. We then review a number of empirical...

Scientists estimate that anthropogenic climate change leads to increased surface temperature, sea-level rise, more frequent and significant extreme weather and climate events, among others. In this study, we investigate how climate change can potentially change the vulnerability to poverty using...

In this paper, we analyze the link between nutrition and poverty in two Asian countries where monetary-based poverty reduction was especially successful. Thailand and Viet Nam are two emerging market economies where poverty rates are now below 10% and are declining further. Despite this success,...

This paper presents an overview of the trade and policy issues in the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It assesses the dramatic changes in the political, economic, and business background from the early 2000s (shaping the MDGs) to...

Using household data for rural northern Viet Nam between 1993 and 2014, we find that the ethnic minority group continued to lag behind the majority group in various development indicators despite the overall improvement in living standards. Our regression and decomposition analyses show that the...