"Informality" is a term used to describe the collection of firms, workers, and activities that operate outside the legal and regulatory systems. It is widespread in the majority of developing countries--in a typical developing economy, the informal sector produces about 35 percent of gross...

This paper examines the role of changes in sectoral productivity gaps over time in accounting for growth realized by countries over the past few decades. To quantify the productivity impact of the sectoral gaps, a simple model of resource allocation is developed in which the gaps arise due to...

This paper builds on recent research examining the impact of finance on growth, looking at the effect of the financial system on volatility in gross domestic product per capita and consumption per capita growth. It also examines the impact of credit on the composition of growth. The findings...

In the 1990s the mainstream consensus was that trade causes growth. Subsequent research shed doubt on the consensus view, as evidence suggested that the identification of the effect of trade on growth was problematic in the existing literature. This paper contributes to this debate by focusing...

This paper shows new empirical regularities indicating that the structure of trade connections affects the trade-growth nexus. System generalized method of moments estimations indicate that key structural features associated with the composition of traded products and partners matter for growth....

Different episodes of economic growth display widely varying distributional characteristics, both across countries and over time. Growth is sometimes accompanied by rising and sometimes by falling inequality. Applied economists have come to rely on the Growth Incidence Curve, which gives the...

This paper studies the growth effects of externalities associated with intergenerational health transmission, health persistence, and women's occupational constraints-- with particular emphasis on the role of access to infrastructure. The first part provides a review of the evidence on these...

The paper provides an up-to date and selective review of the literature on how social safety nets contribute to growth. The evidence is carefully chosen to show how safety nets have the potential to overcome constraints on growth linked to market failures, and is organized into 4 distinct...

Empirical evidence indicates that in many developing regions, the extreme poor in more marginal land areas form a "residual" pool of rural labor. Structural transformation in such developing economies depends crucially on labor and land use decisions of these most-vulnerable populations located...

Economic development should be conceived of as the degree to which an economy has implemented an efficient and just distribution of economic resources. The ubiquitous measure of GDP per capita reflects a utilitarian conception of justice, where individual utility is defined as personal income,...