We believe that India has a chance for a tremendous breakthrough in economic development during the current decade. India’s political system is more than ever in consensus about the basic direction of reforms. The current government enjoys a strong electoral mandate. A decade of opening of the...

Gross domestic savings in Africa averaged only 8 percent of GDP in the 1980s, compared to 23 percent for Southeast Asia and 35 percent in the Newly Industrialized Economies. Aside from being generally low, saving rates in most of Africa have shown consistent decline over the last thirty years....

Subsidized loans have a history of being diverted to the rich. Yet recently microcredit programs, such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, have become popular among donors and governments as a way to channel funds to the poor. This paper uses a unique panel dataset from two Bangladeshi villages...

This paper presents a model in which a high growth economy becomes susceptible to a sudden financial crisis. In the model firms are motivated to over-invest because of government subsidies and then bear the burden of the inefficiencies caused by the government distortion. We assume that the...

Ethnicity plays an ambiguous role in the great transformation. On the one hand, ethnicity creates: by providing incentives that organize the flow of resources across generations, it provides the capital for urban migration and the acquisition of skills for industrial employment. On the other...

This paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of legal change in the protection of shareholder and creditor rights in transition economies and its impact on the propensity of firms to raise external finance. Following La Porta et al. (1998), the paper constructs an expanded set of legal...

The Grameen Bank’s lending has two distinctive features: villagers are held jointly liable for repayments and are asked to make reports about each other. We consider a model where villagers have an information advantage over the bank and can collude. We derive an efficient Grameen type...

Malaria and poverty are intimately connected. Controlling for factors such as tropical location, colonial history, and geographical isolation, countries with intensive malaria had income levels in 1995 only 33% of countries without malaria, whether or not the countries were in Africa. <p>The high...</p>

Will the world be able to sustain economic growth indefinitely without running into resource constraints or despoiling the environment beyond repair? What is the relationship between steadily increasing incomes and environmental quality? This paper builds on the author's earlier work (1993), in...

Civil wars impose substantial costs on the domestic economy. We empirically measure the economic impact of such internal wars. The paper contributes to the existing literature both theoretically and methodologically. First, it explores the economic channels through which civil war affects...