The paper presents a major overhaul to the World Bank's past estimates of global poverty, incorporating new and better data. Extreme poverty-as judged by what "poverty" means in the world's poorest countries-is found to be more pervasive than we thought. Yet the data also provide robust evidence...

Devarajan, Go, Page, Robinson, and Thierfelder argued that if aid is about the future and recipients are able to plan consumption and investment decisions optimally over time, then the potential problem of an aid-induced appreciation of the real exchange rate (Dutch disease) does not occur. In...

The author examines empirically the link between real exchange rate uncertainty and private investment in developing countries using a large cross country-time series data set. He builds a GARCH-based measure of real exchange rate volatility and finds that it has a strong negative impact on...

This paper studies the issue of real exchange rate misalignment and the difficulties in settling international real exchange rate disputes. The authors show theoretically that determining when a country should be sanctioned for real exchange rate "manipulations" is difficult: in some situations...

In 2005, China participated for the first time in the International Comparison Program (ICP), which collects primary data across countries on the prices for an internationally comparable list of goods and services. This paper examines the implications of the new Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)...

The view that policies directed at the real exchange rate can have an important effect on economic growth has been gaining adherents in recent years. Unlike the traditional "misalignment" view that temporary departures of the real exchange rate from its equilibrium level harm growth by...

Post-conflict countries receive substantial aid flows after the start of peace. While post-conflict countries' capacity to absorb aid (that is, the quality of their policies and institutions) is built up only gradually after the onset of peace, the evidence suggests that aid tends to peak...

Existing empirical evidence indicates that remittances have a positive impact on a good number of development indicators of recipient countries. Yet when flows are too large relative to the size of the recipient economies, as those observed in a number of Latin American countries, they may also...

Using the most recent purchasing power parity data for 44 sub-Saharan African countries, this paper examines the characteristics of long run growth in Africa between 1975 and 2005. The authors investigate the following issues: cross-country income structure, income convergence, the country level...

This paper explores competitiveness of Cote d'Ivoire's economy over a long period of 1960-2003 and its link with cocoa prices. The main conclusions are as follows. First, using four measures of real effective exchange rate (REER) for the 1960-2002 period, we track the evolution of REER and...