The following essay has three parts. The first is a story about fluctuations in the balance of the relationship between impersonal and personal principles of social organization. This draws heavily on Max Weber’s interpretation of western history. The second part reviews the concept of an...

This paper addresses informal cross-border trade in the Horn of Africa, with an emphasis on the Somalia borderlands. It will be shown that despite the collapse of a government in 1991, Somalia’s unofficial exports of cattle to Kenya have grown considerably during the past 13 years. It will be...

This paper explores the relationship of the informal economy to the formal economy and to the formal regulatory environment. It begins with a comparison of the earlier concept of the ‘informal sector’ with the new expanded concept of the ‘informal economy’ which includes...

The objective of the paper is to understand the transforming relationship between the formal and informal sector in a liberalizing open developing economy. There are various facets in this relationship, and we focus on three essential aspects. First, we look at the impact of deregulatory...

The main purpose of this paper is to look at the incorporation of gender and the informal sector within a general equilibrium framework for India. Moreover, we clarify some important links between a gender aware informal sector based social accounting matrix (SAM) and general equilibrium models...

This study documents four key facts about informal economic activities: (1) the size of the informal sector varies greatly across nations; (2) this size is strongly correlated with economic development, the tax burden, and the rule of law; (3) the informal sector emphasizes small-scale,...

What is the role of entrepreneurship in economic development? At a minimum the answer should be able to explain the role of entrepreneurs in the structural transformation of countries from low income, primary-sector based societies into high-income service and technology based societies. More...

In this paper, we empirically investigate the effect of entrepreneurship on economic growth at the country level. We use data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which provides comparative data on entrepreneurship from a wide range of countries. An important element of this paper is that...

The literature on aid has come a long way in recent years, and as a result we now know much more about aid effectiveness than possibly ever before. But significant gaps in knowledge remain. One such gap is the effectiveness of aid in the so-called ‘fragile states’, countries with critically...

This paper is a survey of some key variables with an international dimension and implications for growth and development policies in selected Pacific island countries. Results from a simple growth accounting exercise show that factor accumulation is the most dominant growth factor and that the...