Keefer reviews progress made in understanding the effects of different dimensions of governance on economic development, and the sources of good governance. The term governance has been used to embrace concepts that are heterogeneous both with respect to their effects on economic development and...

This paper reviews the unintended consequences of the war on drugs, particularly for developing countries, and weighs them against the evidence regarding the efficacy of prohibition to curb drug use and trade. It reviews the available evidence and presents new results that indicate that...

The author proposes a new approach to explain why the costs of crisis are greater in some countries than in others. He begins with the premise that many crises result from the willingness of politicians to cater to special interests, at the expense of broad social interests. A parsimonious model...

Most analyses of property rights and economic development point to the negative influence of insecure property rights on private investment. The authors focus instead on the largely unexamined effects of insecure property rights on government policy choices. They identify one significant...

The author reviews how three pillars of political economy-collective action, institutions, and political market imperfections-help us answer the question: Why do some countries develop and others do not? Each makes tremendous advances in our understanding of who wins and who loses in government...

This paper identifies systematic performance differences between younger and older democracies: younger democracies are more corrupt; exhibit less rule of law, lower levels of bureaucratic quality, and lower secondary school enrollments; and spend more on public investment and government...

Most efforts to trace the effects of income inequality on growth have focused on redistribution. However, empirical investigation has not substantiated either the positive association of income inequality with redistribution or the negative association of redistribution with economic growth. The...

Countries vary systematically with respect to the incentives of politicians to provide broad public goods, and to reduce poverty. Even in developing countries that are democracies, politicians often have incentives to divert resources to political rents, and to private transfers that benefit a...

This paper advances research on inequality with unique, new data on income distribution in 61 countries, including 20 Latin American countries, to explore the effects of political parties on redistribution. First, consistent with a central -- but still contested -- assumption of the political...

The authors develop and test several new hypotheses about the anti-inflationary effect of central bank independence and exchange rate pegs in the context of different institutions and different degrees of citizen information about government policies. Theory provides strong reason to believe...