Macroeconomic instability has been increasingly considered as a factor lowering average income growth and, in this way, is a factor slowing down poverty reduction. But it can also result in slower poverty reduction for a given average rate of growth, due to poverty traps, often examined at the...

In a recent article, Nowak-Lehmann, Dreher, Herzer, Klasen, and Martínez-Zarzoso (2012) (henceforth NDHKM) conclude that foreign aid has not had a significant effect on income, based on evidence from panel data potentially covering 131 countries over the period 1960-2006. The present study...

The effects of social transfers on growth are still unclear. The limitations of aggregated data at sub-national levels have confined the analysis to the use of simulation models and household surveys. As an alternative, this paper contributes to the empirical literature by assessing the effects...