A frontier challenge for development strategy is to move beyond prescribing optimal economic policies, and instead -- taking a broad view of the interactions between economic, political and social constraints and dynamics -- to identify entry points capable of breaking a low-growth logjam, and...

This paper presents new evidence on the patterns of cyclicality in the fiscal policy stance of developing and industrialized countries over a period of more than three decades covering 180 countries during 1980?2012. First, the paper considers issues of robustness in the choice of the proxy for...

Using a new tax database for 28 countries and a variety of econometric methods, this paper contributes to the debate on the effects of fiscal policy on economic activity in a number of ways. The analysis finds that tax cuts have a stimulative effect on economic growth in developing countries....

The paper introduces a Bayesian cross-entropy forecast (BCEF) procedure to assess the variance and skewness in density forecasting. The methodology decomposes the variance and skewness of the predictive distribution accounting for the shares of selected risk factors. The method assigns...

In projecting global food demand to 2050, much attention has been given to rising demand due to the projected population increase from the current 7.4 billion to more than 9 billion. An increasingly important source of the increase in food demand is per capita demand growth induced by rising...

Much micro-econometric evidence suggests that precipitation has wide ranging impacts on vital economic indicators such as agricultural yields, human capital, and even conflict. And yet paradoxically most macro-econometric evidence (especially in the climate economy literature) finds that...

This paper revisits four recent cross-country empirical studies on the effects of inequality on growth. All four studies report strongly significant negative effects, using the popular system generalized method of moments estimator that is frequently used in cross-country growth empirics. This...

The literature on aid and growth has not found a convincing instrumental variable to identify the causal effects of aid. This paper exploits an instrumental variable based on the fact that since 1987, eligibility for aid from the International Development Association (IDA) has been based partly...

One of the most striking features of economic growth is the process of structural change whereby the share of agriculture in GDP decreases as countries develop. The cross-country growth literature typically estimates an aggregate homogeneous production function or convergence regression model...

The influence of climate on economic growth is a topic of growing interest. Few studies have investigated the potential role that climate hazards and their cumulative effects have on the growth prospects for a country. Due to the relatively stationary spatial patterns of global climate, some...