In this paper, foreign aid transfers can distort individual incentives, and hence hurt growth, by encouraging rent-seeking as opposed to productive activities. We construct a model of a small growing open economy that distinguishes two effects from foreign transfers: (i) a direct positive...

This paper studied whether the complementarity between financial development and foreign aid promotes economic growth in selected emerging markets using the panel Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) approach, with data ranging from 1994 to 2014. Although (1) aid-growth and (2)...

We examine the impact of geo-referenced World Bank development programs on subnational development using equally sized grid cells with a spatial resolution of 0.5 decimal degrees latitude x longitude as the unit of investigation. The proposed grid cell approach solves a number of endogeneity...

The majority of the world's poor, by income poverty and multi-dimensional poverty, now live in countries officially classified by the World Bank as middle-income countries. Of course nothing happens when a country crosses a (somewhat) arbitrary threshold in per capita income but it does matter...

Comparing the emigration rates of countries at different stages of economic development, an inverse u-shape emerges. Although merely based on cross-sectional evidence, the "migration hump" is often treated as a causal relationship. Since the peak is located at rather high per capita incomes of...

The three main financial inflows to developing countries have largely increased during the last two decades, despite the large debate in the literature regarding their effects on economic growth which is not yet clear-cut. An emerging literature investigates the dependence of their effects on...