Early states like China, India, Italy and Greece have been experiencing more rapid economic growth in recent decades than have later-comers to agriculture and statehood like New Guinea, the Congo, and Uruguay. We show that more rapid growth by early starters has been the norm in economic...

This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion,...

Paper reviews India's growth performance since independence. Phrases suchas "Hindu Rate of Growth," sometimes make a telling comment and expose obscureeconomic data to a wider audience, but they can just as readily obscure reality byfocussing attention on the wrong issue. There is nothing in the...

Comparisons of India and China have been made for over 50 years. This paper focuses on purchasing power estimates in China and India in the 2005 round of the UN International Comparison Programme (ICP) that was coordinated by the World Bank, the Regional Banks and Economic Commissions. The 2005...

Several recent papers suggest that the negative association between natural resource intensity and economic growth can be reversed if institutional quality is high enough. We try to understand this result in more detail by decomposing the resource measure, using alternative measures of both...

During the 1990s, conditional cash transfers (CCTs) were adopted by countries across Latin America as central elements of their poverty reduction strategies. Alongside other developments in the area of social assistance, CCTs represent an opportunity for countries to develop an integrated and...

Latin America is a volatile, crisis-prone region, with limited and inadequate social insurance. Therefore, the long-term as well as the recent poor suffer significantly during crises. Furthermore, social spending is procyclical in the region, but less so than total spending, indicating that the...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of state-owned banks and also presents some new results and a robustness analysis. The paper shows that state-owned banks located in developing countries have fiscal costs because they are characterized by lower returns than...

This paper surveys evidence on discrimination in Latin America and shows that there is a widespread perception of discrimination, especially against the poor, the uneducated and those who lack connections. The channels through which discrimination occurs may be built on the basis of economic...

This paper presents a comparative overview of mobility patterns in 14 Latin American countries between 1992 and 2003. Using three alternative econometric techniques on constructed pseudo-panels, the paper provides a set of estimators for the traditional notion of income mobility as well as for...