During Sudan's "interim period" from the end of civil war in January 2005 until South Sudan's independence in July 2011, foreign development agencies provided extensive support and billions of dollars in aid - for which institutional development and capacity building of the nascent Government of...

Thailand's development strategy has been strongly market-oriented and open to trade and investment flows with the rest of the world. Since the late 1950s, its growth performance has been outstanding. Poverty incidence has declined dramatically, but economic inequality has increased. Economic...

South Africa has exhibited tepid economic growth over the past twenty years as well as high levels of income inequality characteristic of a middle income country growth trap. This paper compares and contrasts South Africa's growth trap relative to middle-income peer economies. In addition, we...

This piece synthesizes the development strategies of Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam and draws some relevant lessons. Using a complex adaptive systems approach, strategic openness, a set of heterodox macroeconomic policies, creation of institutions for productive investment in both...

Reflection about the role of corporate social investment in Brazil, associated with the presence of a large economic enterprise, is the major stimulus of this paper. It seeks to present how cross-sector governance can contribute to the social development of a city and how this process can be led...

Gunnar Myrdal published Asian Drama in 1968, a work which made important analytical contributions to our understanding of development but was deeply pessimistic about Asia's future prospects. Since then, contrary to Myrdal's expectations, Asia's development has been remarkable, although...

Do sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) contribute to Africa's development? This paper assesses the objectives of SWFs (fiscal stabilization, productive investment, intergenerational saving) and discusses alternatives. We argue that fiscal stabilization funds are often necessary, but entail...

This study aims to provide a neo-institutional explanation of why South Korea increasingly intends to share its developmental experience with the rest of the world. South Korea's knowledge sharing projects are the leading example of expansionary and self-defining efforts of its aid...

Public sector reforms are commonplace in developing countries. Much of the literature about these reforms reflects on their failures. This paper asks about the successes and investigates which of two competing theories best explain why some reforms exhibit such positive deviance. These theories...

This paper examines the questions of why and how foreign assistance was utilized successfully in South Korea but less so in Ghana, with a focus on the role of aid in the process of state building and state transition in these two countries. Before the 1960s, South Korea and Ghana shared...