This paper provides a review of the literature on the development impact of migration and remittances on origin countries and on destination countries in the South. International migration is an ever-growing phenomenon that has important development implications for both sending and receiving...

This paper studies the relationship between inequality of opportunity and development outcomes in a cross-country setting. Scholars have long debated the impact of inequality on growth, development, and the quality of institutions in a society. The empirical relationships are however confounded...

The role of' first movers' in fragile states is critical: they grow and diversify markets in ways that no other firms do, generating disproportionate impact in terms of development and stability. But pioneer firms are rare in fragile states. This study documents their profile, their challenges,...

This paper examines how a country's weak institutions and polarized government can affect the likelihood of its default on sovereign debt. Using a data set of 90 countries, it shows that strong institutions are associated with fewer sovereign default crises. In addition, when institutions are...

The authors examine how institutions that enforce contracts between two parties - producers and consumers - interact in a competitive market with one-sided asymmetric information and productivity shocks. They compare an informal enforcement mechanism, reputation, the efficacy of which is...

The economic thinking around the role of agriculture for development has evolved since the 1950s. Over the past decades, the agriculture sector has been rediscovered as a sector with great potential for triggering growth, reducing poverty and inequality, providing food security, and delivering...

This paper considers institutional and structural factors associated with investment activity in a panel of up to 129 developed and developing countries. It introduces these factors to a standard neoclassical investment function for open economies, and find that financial development and...