We test the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth in a cross-country regression framework, utilizing data on FDI flows from industrial countries to 69 developing countries over the last two decades. Our results suggest that FDI is an important vehicle for the transfer of...

How large are the welfare gains from trade? Would such gains be significantly amplified in the long run when productivity is endogenously enhanced? To address these questions, we focus on the dynamic effect of trade, in particular, how trade affects the incentives for technological advancement....

This paper uses annual variation in temperature and precipitation over the past 50 years to examine the impact of climatic changes on economic activity throughout the world. We find three primary results. First, higher temperatures substantially reduce economic growth in poor countries but have...

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of education in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on...

People in poor countries live shorter lives than people in rich countries so that, if we scale income by some index of health, there is more inequality in the world than if we consider income alone. Such international inequalities in life expectancy decreased for many years after 1945, and the...

This paper revisits the association between investment and growth. The empirical findings highlight substantial heterogeneity for the effect of investment on growth and suggest a possible negative association. Results based on a battery of cross-sectional and time-series regressions show that...

The question addressed in this paper is whether the gap in performance between the developed and developing worlds can continue, and in particular, whether developing nations can sustain the rapid growth they have experienced of late. The good news is that growth in the developing world should...

We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometers. We first document that nearly half of the variation can be explained by a parsimonious set of physical geography attributes. A full set of country...

This paper is motivated by a set of cross-country observations on growth, structural transformation, and investment rates in a large sample of countries. We observe a hump-shaped relationship between a country's investment rate and its level of development, both within countries over time and...