Argentina is the only country in the world that was "developed" in 1900 and "developing" in 2000. The various competing explanations highlight, mainly, the roles of trade openness, political institutions, financial integration, financial development, and macroeconomic instability. Yet no study...

We explore the determinants of state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa. Controlling for a wide range of economic, demographic, geographic and istitutional regressors, we find that institutions, and in particular the civil liberties index and the number of revolutions, are the main determinants of...

The literature on poverty convergence is sparse and much of the empirical evidence relies on Ravallion (2012) who found a lack of poverty convergence across some ninety Less Developed Countries (LDCs) during 1977-2007. This paper revisits cross-country poverty convergence using data from the...

Empirical evidence in the sparse literature on poverty convergence currently relies on cross-sectional analysis, where Less Developed Countries (LDCs) starting out poorer are found to have enjoyed no faster subsequent poverty reduction during the past three decades than those starting out...

Ghana has managed to consistently keep its poverty rate lower than the regional average over the past 25 years, but this positive trend slowed down recently. We investigate the dynamics of overall, moderate, and extreme poverty in Ghana during 2005/06-2016/17, addressing the lack of actual panel...

The last decade has seen a resurgence of parastatal crop marketing institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, many of which cite improving food security and incomes as key goals. However, there is limited empirical evidence on the welfare effects of these programs. This article considers one such...

In 2005 China provided duty-free access to 190 items from 25 least developed sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Three years later duty-free access was extended to 454 items from 31 SSA LDCs. We find no evidence that China's preferential market access program for the least developed sub-Saharan...

Cognitive performance in late adulthood is critical for better welfare and understanding the causes of human capital depreciation in old age is increasingly crucial in aging societies. Using data from South Africa, we study how early life education affects cognition, a component of human capital...

There is hardly any study on learning inequalities during the COVID-19 pandemic in a low-income, multi-country context. Analyzing 34 longitudinal household and phone survey rounds from Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, we find that while countries exhibit...