This essay offers an economic-history perspective of the long struggle towards macroeconomic stability. The paper is a broad analytical overview of major exogenous shocks and shifts in macroeconomic policy and institutions in Israel since the 1977-1985 great inflation through the global...

The paper stresses the evolutionary and adaptive experience of Latin American growth between 1950 and 1980, and provides a synthetic view by considering the sources of growth within a simple production framework. Regressions use quinquennial panel data for 18 Latin American countries.They...

In this paper we explore the popular but controversial idea that developing countries benefit from abandoning policy neutrality vis-a-vis trade, FDI and resource allocation across industries. Are developing countries justified in imposing tariffs, subsidies, and tax breaks that imply distortions...

In this paper I analyze the evolution of economic and social conditions in Latin America from the 1950s through the 1980s, when deep external crises erupted in country after country. The point of departure of our story is the political awakening of the region in the late 1950s and early 1960s...

In the new millennium, the Western aid effort towards Africa has surged due to writings by well-known economists, a celebrity mass advocacy campaign, and decisions by Western leaders to make Africa a major foreign policy priority. This survey contrasts the predominant "transformational" approach...

Recent work in the sociology of economic development has emphasized the establishment of a professional government bureaucracy in place of political appointees as an important component of the institutional environment in which private enterprise can flourish. I focus on the role that internal...

If education increases human capital, subsidizing education can generate economic growth and combat poverty. Estimates of its return suggest that education is a good social investment. In sorting models, the return reflects in part the information about productivity revealed by the worker's...

Ideological debates on the role of government in development have focused on two contrasting prescriptions: one calling for large scale government interventions to solve problems of massive market failures, the other for the unfettering of markets, with the dynamic forces of capitalism naturally...

The Inca Empire was the last of a long series of highly developed cultures in pre-colonial South America. It stretched across parts of the current territories of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and the whole of Peru. The Inca Road was its 30,000-kilometer-long transportation system....