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...

Capital markets facilitate capital growth by mobilizing savings and converting them into investments, and they are therefore a stimulant of economic growth. There is evidence that countries with high savings rates tend to grow faster. Although most sub-Saharan Africa countries recognize the...

The World Bank's Doing Business reports have evoked an intense policy debate about whether countries should simplify regulatory rules in order to stimulate investment and growth, or make them more stringent in order to achieve public policy objectives. Both sides of this debate, however, assume...

Using the South African Revenue Service and National Treasury firm-level panel data for 2009-17, this paper investigates how global value chain-related trade affects the export performance of manufacturing firms in South Africa. In particular, the paper uses extant classifications of...

Interventions in remote, rural settings face high transaction costs. We develop a model of household decision-making to evaluate how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) address these implementation-related challenges and influence intervention effectiveness. To test our model's predictions, we...

This paper reviews both the literature on aid volatility and also adds to that literature. In general, the focus of this literature has been on the volatility of overall aid, while we focus more on the volatility of the individual aid sectors, e.g., education aid. In doing this, detailed use is...

This paper investigates the role of non-traditional aid in meeting global challenges in improving gender equality and gender-related socioeconomic needs in the twenty-first century. We define non-traditional aid as private donations from individuals, foundations, and corporations and use a newly...

This paper discusses different approaches to the measurement of global interpersonal in equality. Trends in global interpersonal inequality during 1975-2005 are measured using data from UNU-WIDER's World Income Inequality Database. In order to better understand the trends, global interpersonal...

In this paper, we estimate the recent evolution of global interpersonal inequality and examine the effect of omitted top incomes on the level and direction of global inequality. We propose a methodology to estimate the truncation point of household surveys by combining information on income...

Household budget surveys in sub-Saharan Africa are designed to facilitate poverty measurement and may fail to fully capture consumption in wealthy households. As a result, inequality is likely underestimated. We address upper tier consumption underreporting by aligning consumption derived from...