Social cohesion - that is, the inclusiveness of a country's communities - is essential for generating the trust needed to implement reforms. Citizens have to trust that the short-term losses that inevitably arise from reform, will be more than offset by long-term gains. However, in countries...

Modern political economy stresses"society's polarization"as a determinant of development outcomes. Among the most common dorms of social conflict are class polarization, and ethnic polarization. A middle class consensus is defined as a high share of income for the middle class and a low degree...

The economic debate on existence and definition of the middle class has become particularly lively in many developing countries. Despite this growing interest, the identification of the middle class group in these countries remains quite challenging. Building on a recently developed framework to...

The authorexamines a range of cross-sectional variation in performance and policies for evidence on what distinguishes successes from failures. At about 6 percent, the growth rate of the Four Tigers - Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China) - are among the largest...

Are natural resources a blessing or a curse? The authors present a model in which natural resources have a positive effect on the level of income and a negative effect on its growth rate. The positive and permanent effect on income implies a welfare gain. There is a growth effect stemming from a...

The author, using a neoclassical Solow model, estimates an economy's rate of convergence to its own steady state. Using panel date for a sample of 98 countries, the author applies Chamberlain's (1984) estimation procedures to account for the presence of country-specific effects resulting from...

The author surveys recent growth models that try to explain the diversity among countries in rates of economic growth. The author finds that these models can generate differences in growth rates only in the absence of international capital markets. Under these models, if there were free...

The authors develop a simple analytical framework that shows how the composition of public spending affects economic growth. Distinguishing between productive and unproductive government spending (that which complements private sector productivity and that which does not), they show that...

The debate over the curse of natural resources has haunted developing countries for decades if not centuries. A review of existing empirical evidencesuggests that the curse remains elusive. The fragile negative effect of natural resources on economic growth might be due to international...

The paper proposes an approach to understand the relationship between inequality and economic growth obtained by shifting the analysis from the space of final achievements to the space of opportunities. To this end, it introduces a formal framework based on the concept of the Opportunity Growth...