Ever since India decided to globalize, concentrated effort was made to attract Japanese participation through foreign direct investment. However, response from Japan has been rather subdued. This paper attempts to gain some insight into this reluctance of Japanese investors by studying the...

Why has the expansion of women's economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question, focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and...

Universal access to modern energy services, in terms of access to electricity and to modern cooking facilities, has been recognized as a fundamental challenge for development. Despite strong praise for action and the deployment of large-scale electrification programs and improved cookstove (ICS)...

Universal access to modern energy services, in terms of access to electricity and to modern cooking facilities, has been recognized as fundamental challenge for development and is likely to be included in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Despite a strong praise for action and several...

We study the sectoral allocation of public infrastructure investments in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors in India. In addition to the changing employment and output shares of these two sectors, the capital output ratio in agriculture in India has fallen, while it has risen in...

A renewed interest in explaining growth in the Caribbean countries is motivated by the somewhat slow but uneven performance in the past decade: per capita GDP gaps in Caribbean countries have widened in relation to the United States, whereas standard theories would predict convergence. This...

Until a vaccine is widely available, face masks and other nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) will continue to be the frontline defense against Covid-19 in developing countries. But their effectiveness depends critically on compliance by young adults, who are most likely both to become...

There is a debate in the literature on the appropriate methods and metrics for evaluating the economic impacts of tourism investments. Available analytical techniques include input-output modelling, computable general equilibrium modelling, cost benefit analysis, expenditure-based methods, and...

Corruption literature within economics has long returned ambiguous results with no concise cause or impact of corruption identified. This meta-analysis aims to find synergy within the corruption literature by assessing macroeconomic empirical studies that evaluate whether corruption "greases or...

This paper quantifies the impacts of transport infrastructure investments on economic activity in Haiti, proxied by satellite luminosity data. Our identification strategy exploits the differential timing of rehabilitation projects across various road segments of the primary road network. We...