Are the well-known facts about urbanization in the United States also true for the developing world? We compare American metropolitan areas with comparable geographic units in Brazil, China and India. Both Gibrat's Law and Zipf's Law seem to hold as well in Brazil as in the U.S., but China and...

Conventional trade theory, which combines the Heckscher-Ohlin theory and the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, implies that expanded trade between developed and developing countries will increase wage inequality in the developed countries. This theory is widely applied. It serves as the basis for...

It is often argued that the globalization of production places workers in industrialized countries in competition with their counterparts in low wage countries. We examine a firm-level panel of foreign manufacturing affiliates owned by U.S. multinationals between 1983 and 1992 and find evidence...

The major theme of this paper is that the commercial banks have weathered the debt crisis, while many debtor countries remain in economic paralysis or worse. There is a growing consensus that much of the LDC debt will not be fully serviced in the future, and that consensus is reflected in at...

This paper examines changes since the early 1960s in the export shares of the United States and its major competitors in the markets of the developing countries of the Asian Pacific Rim (APR), defined to include Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia,...

Poverty is strongly associated with worse health across countries and within countries across individuals. However, not all poor individuals suffer from poor health: the effects of poverty on health vary across place and time. In this review, we discuss the evidence documenting these patterns,...

Expansionary fiscal policies have increased significantly following the subprime crisis in 2007 and the COVID-19 crisis, leading to fiscal dominance concerns, where a growing share of monetary authorities may be forced to deviate from policy targets to accommodate fiscal policies. Meanwhile,...

This paper studies the welfare effects of encouraging rural-urban migration in the developing world. To do so, we build a dynamic incomplete-markets model of migration in which heterogenous agents face seasonal income fluctuations, stochastic income shocks, and disutility of migration that...

Antipoverty policies assume that targeting poor households suffices in reaching poor individuals. We question this assumption. Our comprehensive assessment for sub-Saharan Africa reveals that undernourished women and children are spread widely across the household wealth and consumption...

In most developing countries, there is a large gap in average consumption per capita between urban and rural areas. One appealing interpretation of this gap is that it reflects a spatial equilibrium, in which the higher consumption levels of urban areas are offset by lower non-monetary...