This paper discusses and illustrates the analytical foundations of international comparisons (or benchmarking) for assessing a country's potential for improvement along various dimensions of social and economic development. By providing a methodology for international benchmarking, discussing...

There is a growing body of literature exploring the skill content of jobs. This paper contributes to this research by using data on the task content of occupations in developing countries, instead of U.S. data, as most existing studies do. The paper finds that indexes based on U.S. data do not...

This paper investigates, both theoretically and empirically, the role of factional competition and local accountability in explaining the enormous but puzzling county-level variations in development performance in Fujian province of China. When the Communist armies took over Fujian from the...