Modern economic development is accompanied by the structural transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy and occurs through a process of continuous industrial and technological upgrading. Since the 18th century, all countries that industrialized successfully in Europe, North America...

Output collapses, and crises are a fact of life. Severe economic downturns occur periodically, and have grave consequences on the poor. The authors propose a new measurement for economic downside risk, and severity: Growth at risk. Similar to the concept of Value at Risk in finance, Growth at...

The authors investigate recent rends in poverty, and inequality in China, decomposing data on poverty reduction to see who has benefited most from China's economic growth. They find that, by several measures, poverty declined significantly in the 1990s, across a wide range of poverty lines,...

Banking sector openness may directly affect growth by improving the access to financial services and indirectly by improving the efficiency of financial intermediaries, both of which reduce the cost of financing, and in turn, stimulate capital accumulation and economic growth. The objective of...

China's performance in economic growth, and poverty reduction has been remarkable. There is an ongoing debate about whether this growth is mainly driven by productivity, or factor accumulation. But few past studies have incorporated information on China's human capital stock, and thus contained...

Aid is good for the poor. This paper uses detailed aid data spanning 60 developing countries over the past two decades to show that social aid significantly and directly benefits the poorest in society, while economic aid increases the income of the poor through growth. This new and unequivocal...

As the world approaches the target year of the Millennium Development Goals and passes into the new, post-2015 era, the development community has made a call for a new international development goal of eradication of extreme poverty by 2030. How feasible is that? For most of the developing...

For a representative sample of manufacturing firms in 26 countries, this paper shows that changes in the cost of importing over time are significantly and negatively correlated with changes in the percentage of firms'material inputs that are of foreign origin. Furthermore, the paper shows that...

Obtaining consistent estimates on poverty over time as well as monitoring poverty trends on a timely basis is a priority concern for policy makers. However, these objectives are not readily achieved in practice when household consumption data are neither frequently collected, nor constructed...