Failure to accumulate human capital is one of the pressing problems of developing countries. Lacking human capital formation bears consequences on an economy wide level, since education contributes to labor productivity. We examine the impact of increased school enrollment with regard to...

Since the abolition of its Apartheid regime in 1994, South Africa has launched a massive program of education, which has been financed through resources representing on average 21% of the national budget or 7% of GDP. Today, the GDP share of public spending on education is 1.3 times the average...

This paper is based on an ongoing joint work with David Sahn and Xiaobo Zhang.

This study uses a unique firm-level dataset to examine how falling trade costs from 1993-2001 affected entry, exit, productivity, and exporting in the Korean manufacturing sector. We verify many of the predictions of recent heterogeneous-firm models of international trade. For example, falling...

The emphasis of education as a driving force for the growth of agricultural productivity can be dated back to the early 1960s. However, most empirical work failed to take into account of the fact that production technology changes with timeand consequently obscure the true contribution of...

There is a widely held view that off-farm income in developing countries tends to reduce poverty, leading to the conclusion that policies should focus on the further diversification of income options of rural households. However, much off-farm employment might be initiated rather as a survival...

Empirical evidence on three assertions commonly-made by populationpolicy advocates about the relationships among population growth, humancapital formation and economic development is discussed and evaluated inthe light of economic-biological models of household behavior and of itsrelevance to...

Since the seminal work of Adam Smith, markets have been considered an efficienttool for co-ordinating the behaviour of economic agents. The basic characteristicof a market economy is that the complex system of interaction amongindividuals is not centrally coordinated. Under the assumption of...

Today, more than ever, development of agriculture leans on science research results and their practical application. Research in the field of agriculture is conducted by large network of public institutions, institutes and universities are mostly directed toward improvement of production....

Simple plots of data show that malaria has a negative correlation with national income per capita, whether looking across countries at a point in time, or looking at a single country over time. Some countries have been able to move from an equilibrium characterized by low income and high...