Ragnar Nurkse was one the pioneers in development economics. This paper celebrates the hundredth anniversary of his birth with a critical retrospective of his overall contribution to the field, in particular his views on the importance of employment policy in mobilizing domestic resources and...

Over the last two centuries in Latin America a Washington Consensus development strategy based on integration in the global trading system has dominated both domestic demand management and industrialization from within." This paper assesses the performance of each from the point of view of the...

We investigate the effect of financial integration on the degree of international business cycle synchronization. For identfication, we use a confidential database on banks' bilateral exposure over the past three decades and employ a novel bilateral country-pair panel instrumental vari- ables...

We investigate the relationship between financial integration and output volatility at micro and macro levels. Using a very large firm-level dataset (AMADEUS) from 16 European countries, we construct a measure of deep financial integration at the regional level based on observations of foreign...

This paper analyzes the impact of public investment on private investment in panel of 116 developing countries between 1980 and 2006 using dynamic panel data techniques, finding a strong and robust crowding-out effect that seems to be the norm rather than the exception, both across regions and...

Capital inflows have an enormous importance in the financing of investment in emerging and transition economies. However short-term inflows, intermediated by the banking sector of the emerging economy, may be subject to early withdrawals. We model a situation where such withdrawals are motivated...

Does official aid pave the road for private foreign investment or does it suffocate private initiative by diverting resources towards unproductive activities? In this paper we explore this question using data for a large number of developing and emerging economies. Controlling for countries'...

We explore whether foreign aid affects developing countries' creditworthiness, as proxied by the Institutional Investor's measure of country credit risk. Based on a simple model of international borrowing and lending, we develop the hypothesis that current aid reduces the likelihood of future...

We argue that increased foreign borrowing by the private sector reduces the risk that a developing country's government defaults on its foreign debt. We present a simple model in which private foreign borrowing reflects a surge of private entrepreneurship. A larger "entrepreneurial class" raises...

This paper first explores the role of digital financial services, e.g. mobile money systems and cryptocurrency-based systems, and their impact on the choice of migrants to send remittances. Secondly we discuss whether alternative remittances sending channels increase access to financial services...