This paper uses recently published top 1% income share series in studying the inequality-development association. The top income shares data are of high quality and cover about a century for some countries and thus provide an interesting opportunity to study slow development processes. The...

Using panel datasets from Mexico and Chile for the 2000s, we examine the determinants of middle-class intra-generational mobility. We define the middle class by means of a latent index of economic wellbeing that is less sensitive to short-term fluctuation and measurement error than standard...

We investigate the marginal productivity of investment across countries. The aim is to estimate the return on investments financed by foreign aid and by domestic resource mobilization, using aggregate data. Both returns are expected to vary across countries and time. Consequently we develop a...

This study addresses the macroeconomic effect of foreign aid on the factors of growth. Specifically, we examine the effects of foreign aid on capital investment (human capital, physical capital) in sub-Saharan Africa. Our methodological approach evaluates the effect of disaggregate aid (aid for...

The foreign aid landscape has undergone a paradigm shift in the last few decades, with changes in the behaviour of 'traditional' donors and a new focus on selectivity in aid disbursement, as well as 'new' donors and South-South co-operation playing an increasingly important role. Amidst these...

The paper investigates whether multi-party coalition government is better for the protection of socially backward classes, i.e. Scheduled Castes, in India. We have looked at the impact of types of government on the reduction of the gap between Scheduled Castes and Upper Castes in terms of...

The main argument of this paper is that there is considerable heterogeneity in the way aid can shape tax performance in developing countries: through behavioural effects, donor conditionality, recipient policy reform and technical assistance; and these effects are country-specific. We investigate...

The focus of this paper is the role played in rural contexts by contract farming agreements between smallholders and private investors. These contracts can take different forms, but in general are agreements under which producers commit to supply produce to a buyer firm. They are - at least on...

This paper analyses the implication of contract farming on gender inequalities in rural Mozambique. Contract farming is often considered one of the major tools of agribusiness development: it broadly includes those arrangements under which producers commit to provide a pre-defined quantity of...

Improvements in productivity are necessary to effectively increase economic growth in the long term. The literature emphasizes a positive correlation between firm-level innovation and productivity gains. It is unsurprising, then, that policy makers and researchers widely acknowledge that...