Countries that strike it rich when exploring for oil and gas often fail to see growth materialize. This paper shows that one way things can get messy is via squandering new wealth, based on future resource revenues, on arms imports. In the five years following a giant oil or gas discovery, arms...

Foreign direct investment may play an important role in transferring technologies from high-income to emerging economies, which can lead to uneven effects on the wages of skilled and unskilled workers. This paper combines project-level data on greenfield foreign direct investment with household...

Unilateral tariff liberalization accounts for the lion's share of trade liberalization since the 1980s and has accompanied the most successful trade-led development model of the past 50 years, “Factory Asia”. Understanding what drove this liberalization is therefore crucial to our grasp of...