The role of the state in promoting development is well established in the institutional economics literature. Yet, in recent decades the attention has been turned to the opposite side of the spectrum. Facing high levels of poverty and showing a slower progress in achieving development outcomes,...

There are large volumes of gas offshore Tanzania, which has raised hopes of a boom. But those hopes look set to be disappointed. A boom would depend on there being a sizeable flow of revenue to government from producing and exporting gas. This paper sets out the scale of the gas, and the array...

A significant natural resource discovery creates excited popular expectations of imminent wealth. But the size of a boom is usually overestimated and the delay in receiving revenues is underestimated. This paper takes stock of the sequencing, timing, and scale of the development of a natural...

In this study, we assess the inclusiveness of growth by tracking the yearly percentage change in the household consumption of individuals over different growth spells in Cameroon, Senegal, and Tanzania. With cross-sectional data, we track the consumption of groups of individuals that share...

The study presents recent global evidence on the transformation of economic growth to poverty reduction in developing countries, with emphasis on the role of income inequality. The focus is on the period since the early/mid-1990s when growth in these countries as a group has been relatively...

This paper uses recently published top 1% income share series in studying the inequality-development association. The top income shares data are of high quality and cover about a century for some countries and thus provide an interesting opportunity to study slow development processes. The...

An influential paper by Berg et al., 'Redistribution, inequality, and growth: new evidence', uses the SWIID data to examine the impact of inequality and redistribution on growth in both developing and developed countries. It finds that while inequality is harmful for growth, redistribution does...

This paper re-examines the determinants and consequences of redistribution in light of improved data and methods relative to earlier literature. In particular, we use the latest version of the UNU-WIDER' Income Inequality Database to have the best available estimates of both pre- and...