During the 1990s, the World Bank and several donor partners provided a “surge” in external aid to support Pakistan's social sectors. Despite the millions of donor dollars spent, the program failed. Poverty was higher in Pakistan in 2004 than it was a decade earlier when the antipoverty...

The global community faces a number of critical challenges ranging from climate change to crossborder health risks to natural-resource scarcities. Many of these so-called global commons problems carry grave risks to economic growth in the developing world and to the livelihoods and welfare of...

In this paper we analyze the Washington Consensus, which at its original formulation reflected views not only from Washington but also from Latin America. We trace the life of the Consensus from a Latin American perspective in terms of evolving economic development paradigms. We document the...

Latin America is known to have income inequality among the highest in the world. That inequality has been invoked to explain low growth, poor education, macroeconomic volatility, and political instability. But new research shows that inequality in the region is falling. In this paper, we...

The politics, rules, and institutions of cooperation among nations have not kept up with the demands from global citizens for changes in the global political order. Whether norms and policies can make the global politics of managing the global economy more effective, more legitimate, and more...

After a decade of economic reforms that dramatically altered the structure of economies in Latin America, making them more open and more competitive, and a decade of substantial increases in public spending on education, health and other social programs in virtually all countries, poverty and...

Increasing integration has made the great challenge of reducing poverty and advancing human development more achievable than ever, and more dependent than ever on good global economic governance. In this paper I set out the economic logic for why good global economic governance matters for...

After a decade of economic and political reforms that dramatically altered the structure of economies in Latin America, poverty and high inequality remain deeply entrenched. Integration into the global economy in the 1990s brought increased prosperity only to a small minority of households in...

I review the literature on the effects of inequality on growth and development in the developing world. Two stylized facts emerge from empirical studies: inequality is more likely to harm growth in countries at low levels of income (below about $3200 per capita in 2000 dollars); and it is at...

Education is among the most prominent of the great challenges of development. This paper outlines thelikely effects of the AIDS pandemic in Africa on the continent's ability to produce education and use iteffectively for growth and poverty reduction. Four channels are explored. First, a supply...