European official development assistance to Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries increased sharply after 2011, ostensibly in support of the social, economic, and above all political changes demanded by the Arab uprisings. The subsequent turn to development policies driven by...

We examine whether frontier rule, which disallows frontier residents from recourse to formal institutions of conflict management and disproportionately empowers tribal elites, provides a more fragile basis for maintaining social order in the face of shocks. Combining a historical border that...

We examine whether frontier rule, which disallows frontier residents from a recourse to formal institutions of conflict management and disproportionately empowers tribal elites, provides a more fragile basis for maintaining social order in the face of shocks. Combining a historical border...

How does international trade affect structural transformation in developing countries? We use data on sectoral allocation of labour and value-added in 46 developing economies over the period 1995-2017 and exploit for identification plausibly exogenous variation in manufacturing imports from...

Two well established stylized facts of economic development are a strong correlation between investment and income, and large differences in investment rates across countries. Construction is the largest component of investment. This paper examines the implications of heterogeneity in...

Although the provision of security to all their citizens is a state's fundamental duty, over 50 countries experienced armed conflict in 2021. The international development community has identified armed conflict as an impediment to development and provides considerable resources to reduce armed...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the supply and demand side of structural transformation in Turkey. Using the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database, we find that labour productivity improvements explain more than half of economic growth in the period 1980-2021. This is...

This paper establishes how accountability quality might mediate the effect of tax revenue on sustainable development in 41 sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1990-2019. The empirical evidence is based on three empirical strategies: generalized method of moments, instrumental variable...

This paper analyses the role of tertiary education on rural development. Using census data on villages in India for 2011, we find that skilled workers have had an important impact on rural prosperity. A 1 percentage point rise in the share of the village population with tertiary education raises...

This paper investigates the evolution of the productive structure around the world and the role it plays in the difference in inequality levels, using panel data for the period from 1995 to 2018. We approximate a country's productive structure through the Economic Complexity Index. Our results...