Summary How do international policies on aid, trade, and factor movements affect the international distribution of income? We calculate the impact by world decile of the actual level of aid flows and the effect on income of merchandise trade restrictions by high-income countries. We find that...

In recent years, an ample literature has emerged on the evolution of global inequality during the last two decades. A few stylized facts emerge. If one weights countries by their population, then inequality across countries has declined. However, if one treats countries equally – as in the...

This paper analyzes the historical evolution of the international monetary system in the context of the rising role of developing countries in the world economy and the emerging multi-polar growth setting. It evaluates the stability of the current"non-system"and how the global economic context...

There has been substantial research in recent years examining the regional evolution of economic growth across states in Mexico -- with a particular focus on the post North American Free Trade Agreement period. There is also a vast literature using cross-country regressions to examine...

One of the two goals of the World Bank Group's new strategy is to promote shared prosperity, defined as the income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population. The simple monitoring indicator then is the income per capita of the bottom 40 percent of the population. The growth of this...

This paper provides an historical overview of both the evolution of the economic performance of the developing world and the evolution of economic thought on development policy. The 20th century was broadly characterized by divergence between high-income countries and the developing world, with...

In recent years, the term"middle-income trap"has entered common parlance in the development policy community. The term itself often has not been precisely defined in the incipient literature. This paper discusses in more detail definitional issues on the so-called middle-income trap. The paper...