Six Southeast Asian countries (Cambodia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand) defied Gunnar Myrdal's pessimistic prognosis in his 1968 volume, Asian Drama, regarding their prospects for development. In the past half-century, these countries raised...

This paper argues that official development assistance (foreign aid) is partly responsible for the lack of structural change in Africa. Africa's development partners have devoted too few resources and too little attention to two critical constraints to private investment, infrastructure and...

Aid providers frequently link supporting small firms to job creation. Small firms create about half of new jobs in Africa, but they also have higher failure rates. Ignoring firm exit exaggerates net employment growth. Using panel data for Ethiopia, we find that small and large enterprises create...

During 1985-2015, globalization intensified the factor-endowment-related pattern of sectoral specialization. In skill-abundant developed countries, manufacturing became more skill-intensive. In land-scarce developing East Asia, labour-intensive manufacturing expanded, especially in China. In...

This paper considers the impact of agriculture and international trade development on income distribution and economic activity in Mozambique. A social accounting matrix multiplier decomposition model is used -- in particular, an extension of the standard model that details the process of income...

Despite the frequent use of fiscal policy for stabilization purposes and the important role fiscal activism has played over the last decade, the size of budgetary multipliers (i.e. the output response following an exogenous shock to fiscal policy) has been heatedly debated at the theoretical and...

Much of the research on fiscal multipliers has used reduced form modelling approaches. While these models have been extended to include richer controls and identification approaches, it remains unclear whether shocks identified capture the true structural shocks. An alternative way to identify...

We analyse implications of financial sector dynamics for fiscal expenditure multipliers in recessionary conditions. We employ a stock-and-flow-consistent model for South Africa with four financial instruments and detailed balance sheets for the household, government, financial, non-financial,...

A critical requirement for efficient fiscal policy is a reliable understanding of its impact on the aggregate economy for different policy instruments and under different economic conditions. Indeed, there is strong evidence to suggest that fiscal multipliers vary with economic conditions, the...

The aim of this paper is to assess South Africa's fiscal multiplier across different states of the economy, with a focus on the financial accelerator mechanism of fiscal policy shocks, by estimating impulse response functions from both linear and non-linear local projections. The model finds...