In the new millennium, the Western aid effort towards Africa has surged due to writings by well-known economists, a celebrity mass advocacy campaign, and decisions by Western leaders to make Africa a major foreign policy priority. This survey contrasts the predominant "transformational" approach...

Explaining cross-country differences in growth rates requires not only an understanding of the link between growth and public policies, but also an understanding of why countries choose different public policies. This paper shows that ethnic diversity helps explain cross-country differences in...

Ethnic divisions explain a significant part of Africa's slow growth and Africa's choice of growth-reducing policies. Africa's poor growth is associated with Africa's low schooling, political instability, underdeveloped financial systems, distorted foreign exchange markets, high government...

Hopes for development aid remain high among Western politicians and pundits, but the evidence is depressing. Foreign aid has on average probably no effect on long-run growth. To understand the failure of many development projects, we need a deeper consideration of the failure of top-down...

Since the end of World War II, economists have tried to figure out how poor countries in the tropics could attain standards of living approaching those of countries in Europe and North America. Attempted remedies have included providing foreign aid, investing in machines, fostering education,...

The IMF uses its well-known "financial programming" model to derive monetary and fiscal programs to achieve desired macroeconomic targets in countries undergoing crises or receiving debt relief. Financial programming is based on monetary, balance of payments, and fiscal accounting identities....

The Harrod--Domar growth model supposedly died long ago. Still today, economists in the international financial institutions (IFIs) apply the Harrod--Domar model to calculate short-run investment requirements for a target growth rate. They then calculate a "financing gap" between the required...

The poor suffer more from inflation than the rich do, reveals this survey of poor people in 38 countries. Using polling data for 31,869 households in 38 countries and allowing for country effects, Easterly and Fischer show that the poor are more likely than the rich to mention inflation as a top...

Using polling data for 31,869 households in 38 countries and allowing for country effects, Easterly and Fischer show that the poor are more likely than the rich to mention inflation as a top national concern. This result survives several robustness checks. Also, direct measures of improvements...

The ghost of a long-dead growth model still haunts aid to developing countries. The Harrod-Domar growth model supposedly died long ago. But for more than 40 years, economists working on developing countries have applied- still apply- Harrod-Domar model to calculate short-run investment...