After a decade of rapid growth, industrialization has lost ground with shrinking manufacturing sector and high informality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This paper explores how land market and labor regulations affect factor allocative efficiency and firm performance in SSA. Using pooled data on...

This paper shows that donors that maximize relative aid impact spread their budgets across many recipient countries in a unique Nash equilibrium, explaining aid fragmentation. This equilibrium may be inefficient even without fixed costs, and the inefficiency increases in the equality of donors'...

We analyze factors driving persistently higher financial intermediation costs in low-income countries (LICs) relative to emerging market (EMs) country comparators. Using the net interest margin as a proxy for financial intermediation costs at the bank level, we find that within LICs a...

This paper studies tariff-tax reforms in a calibrated two-region global New Keynesian model composed of a developing and an advanced region. In our baseline calibration, a revenue-neutral reform that lowers tariffs in developing countries can reduce domestic welfare. The reason is that the...

This paper studies the effects of government spending under limited international capital mobility, as featured by most developing countries. While external financing of government debt mitigates the crowding-out effect, it generates real appreciation, which contracts traded output and lowers...

We examine determinants of, and interactions between, capital inflows, financial development, and domestic investment in developing countries during 2001-07, a period of surging global liquidity and low interest rates. Reductions in the global price of risk and in domestic borrowing costs were...

This paper uses a set of routinely collected high-frequency data in low-income countries (LICs) to construct an aggregate and a comprehensive index of economic activity which could serve (i) as a measure of the direction of economic activity; and (ii) as a useful input in analyzing...

We develop a DSGE model with a banking sector to analyze the impact of the financial crisis on Zambia and the role of the monetary policy response. We view the crisis as a combination of three related shocks: a worsening in the terms of the trade, an increase in the country's risk premium, and a...

Flows of development financing from the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) to low income countries (LICs) have surged in recent years. Unlike aid from traditional donors, BRICs (excluding Russia) view their financing as primarily based on the principles of South-South cooperation, focusing...

I propose a new approach to identifying exogenous monetary policy shocks in low-income countries with capital account restrictions. In the case of Mauritania, a domestic repatriation requirement is the key institutional characteristic that allows me to establish exogeneity. Unlike in advanced...