Transport costs are widely considered an important barrier to local economic activity but their impact in developing countries is not well-studied. This paper investigates the role of inter-city transport costs in determining the income of Sub-Saharan African cities, using two new data sources....

This study investigates the impact of the Golden Quadrilateral highway project on the urban and rural growth of Indian manufacturing. The Golden Quadrilateral project upgraded the quality and width of 5,846 km of roads in India. The study uses a difference-in-difference estimation strategy to...

The infrastructure gap is one of the most significant impediments to India realizing its growth and poverty reduction potential. Although India’s transport network is one of the most extensive in the world, accessibility and connectivity are limited. Only 20 percent of the national highway...

This study examines the major constraints of rural business entry and performance in Yemen. The Yemen rural investment climate survey made it possible to analyze rural investment climate constraints for rural businesses. The survey was used to investigate both farm and nonfarm rural enterprises....

The authors summarize the main lessons emerging from Argentina's experience, including universal service obligations in concession contracts. They discuss free-riding risks, moral hazard problems, and other issues that arise when social concerns are delegated to private operators. After...

This paper applies the Growth Identification and Facilitation Framework developed by Lin and Monga (2010) to Nigeria. It identifies as appropriate comparator countries China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and selects a wide range of industries in which these comparator countries may be losing...

This paper examines locational factors that increase the odds of a firm's entry into export markets and affect the intensity of its participation. It differentiates between two different sources of spillovers: clustering of general economic activity and that of export-oriented activity. It also...

Private inspection of international shipments has been used over the last half-century for a variety of purposes. These include prevention of capital flight and improvement of import duty collection, among others. The existing literature has failed to find much impact of these inspection...

Using subnational historical data, this paper establishes the within country persistence of economic activity in the New World over the last half millennium. The paper constructs a data set incorporating measures of pre-colonial population density, new measures of present regional per capita...

In the past 30 years, China has achieved phenomenal economic growth, an unprecedented development"miracle"in human history. How did China achieve this rapid growth? What have been its key drivers? And, most important, what can be learned from China's success? Policy makers, business people, and...