We use social welfare functions that assign weights to individuals based on their income levels to document the relative importance of growth and inequality changes for changes in social welfare. In a large panel of industrial and developing countries over the past 40 years, we find that most of...

Incomes in the poorest two quintiles on average increase at the same rate as overall average incomes. This is because, in a global dataset spanning 118 countries over the past four decades, changes in the share of income of the poorest quintiles are generally small and uncorrelated with changes...

China’s increased trade with and investment in Africa have boosted the continent’s economic growth but have also generated considerable controversy. In this paper we investigate China’s outward direct investment ODI in Africa using macro and micro data. The aggregate data on China’s ODI...

This paper investigates the role of aid in mitigating the adverse effects of commodity export price shocks on growth in commodity-dependent countries. Using a large crosscountry dataset, we find that negative shocks matter for short-term growth, while the ex ante risk of shocks does not seem to...

Empirical work in labour economics has focused on rent sharing as an explanation for the observed correlation in cross-sections between wages and profitability. The alternative explanation of risk sharing between workers and employers has not been tested. Using a unique panel data set for four...

This paper investigates the scope for international rules to address market failures in trade in natural resources and the associated international transactions of prospecting and investment in resource exploitation. We argue that several market failures are likely to have substantial costs....

The paper considers the macroeconomic impact of shocks to agricultural output and of negative and positive price shocks. It is shown that negative price shocks have particularly large externalities: it is estimated that the overall impact of these negative shocks on GDP may well be double their...

The origins of European populism are two socio-economic divergences that began around 1980 and have been at their most extreme in Britain. One is spatial, the other educational.

Cette étude propose de définir les Etats fragiles par les caractéristiques qui les éloignent de l'Etat d'intérêt commun et de l'autocratie répressive. Les « Failed states » constituent un des plus grands défis du développement car ils ont peu de raisons de tendre vers ces deux formes...