There has been a growing interest in what have come to be termed"multidimensional indices of poverty."Advocates for these new indices correctly point out that command over market goods is not all that matters to peoples'well-being, and that other factors need to be considered when quantifying...

Two otherwise identical firms that enter the same market in different months, one in January and one in December, will report dramatically different annual sales for the first calendar year of operations. This partial year effect in annual data leads to downward biased observations of the level...

There is significant academic evidence that growth in one country tends to have a positive impact on growth in neighboring countries. This paper contributes to this literature by assessing whether growth spillovers tend to vary significantly across world regions and by investigating the...

Using panel data for the fourteen major states of India over the 1980-2000 period, the authors estimate the effect of human capital endowment on the performance of the state economies. They find that greater availability of skilled workers had a positive and significant impact on output in the...

South Asia has attracted global attention because it has experienced rapid GDP growth over the last two decades. What is not so well known is that South Asia is the least integrated region in the world. South Asia has opened its door to the rest of the world but it remains closed to its...

This paper examines whether infrastructure investment has contributed to East Asia's economic growth using both a growth accounting framework and cross-country regressions. For most of the variables used, both the growth accounting exercise and cross-country regressions fail to find a...

The authors study the empirical, cross-country relationship between macroeconomic volatility and long-run economic growth. They address four central questions: 1) Does the volatility-growth link depend on country and policy characteristics, such as the level of development or trade openness? 2)...

The rapid growth of exports since the early 1990s is a central feature in the extraordinary rise of Peru's economy in recent years. This study puts a lens on this export growth episode, with special attention to two issues. The first one is the role of international price levels as well as...

The author estimates the effects on growth of commodity price shocks, and uncertainty within an established empirical growth model. Ex-post shocks, and ex-ante uncertainty have been treated in the empirical literature as if they were synonymous. But they are distinct concepts, and it is both...

Recent research highlights the relationship between economic development and productive diversification, which may be hindered by market failures. After identifying stages of diversification in disaggregated export data, the authors develop a metric for the flows of export"discoveries,"or...