This paper examines the relationship between witchcraft beliefs, a deep-rooted cultural phenomenon, and trust, an integral element of social capital. We argue that witchcraft beliefs erode trust and cooperation and exploit novel survey data from nineteen countries of Sub-Saharan Africa to test...

How much larger are the consumption possibilities of an urban US household with per capita expenditures of 1,000 US dollars per month than a rural Indonesian household with per capita expenditures of 1,000,000 Indonesian Rupiah per month? Consumers in different markets face widely different...

Noting that Africa’s resource-rich countries have not translated their wealth into sustained economic growth and poverty reduction, this paper shows that by transferring a portion of resource-related government revenues uniformly and universally as direct payments to the population, some...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are widely cited as the primary yardstick against which advances in international development efforts are to be judged. At the same time, the Goals will be met or missed by 2015. It is not too early to start asking ‘what next?’ This paper builds on a...

Many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry—that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what policies or organizations look like rather than what they actually do. In...

The two sides of envy, destructive and constructive, give rise to qualitatively different equilibria, depending on the economic, institutional, and cultural environment. If investment opportunities are scarce, inequality is high, property rights are poorly protected, and social comparisons are...

The evil eye belief is a widespread superstition according to which people can cause harm by a mere envious glance at coveted objects or their owners. This paper argues that such belief originated and persisted as a useful heuristic under conditions in which envy was likely to trigger...

We construct a panel data at the state level in Mexico for the years 2006, 2008 and 2011 in order to investigate the impact that entry deregulation efforts have on the cost of opening new businesses in Mexico, where this cost is taken from the Doing Business in Mexico report of the World Bank....

We review some patterns of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth in the Mexican economy during the period 1991-2011 using the KLEMS data set published by INEGI in 2013. The data shows a strong positive correlation between TFP and output growth. As a result, tests were performed in order to...

The paper considers the process of discovery for subsoil resources, including both hard minerals and hydrocarbons and estimates its magnitude in recent years, as derived from the sum of extraction and changes in proven reserves. Spurred on by technology change and strong market conditions,...