Does capital flow from rich to poor countries? We revisit the Lucas paradox and explore the role of capital account restrictions in shaping capital flows at various stages of economic development. We find that, when accounting for the degree of capital account openness, the prediction of the...

This paper examines to what extent gender gaps in education, health, employment, productive assets and inputs can affect pro poor growth (in the sense of increasing monetary incomes of the poor). After discussing serious methodological problems with examining gender issues in the context of an...

The informal sector (IS) plays a significant role in developing countries viz. the provision of employment, income and supplying ignored markets. However, working and employment conditions within the sector are still poor. Its expansion and changing structures have thus drawn the attention of...

Genetically Modified Crops (GMO foods) have been widely available to farmers since 1996. The Gene Revolution, based on recombinant DNA (rDNA) genetic engineering techniques, is seen by proponents as both supplanting Green Revolution varieties, based on conventional plant breeding techniques, and...

The article criticizes the World Bank as overy optimistic concerning its ability to raise the effectiveness of aid by concentrating aid on countries with "good" policies. It is shown that aid flows to the main recipient regions yielded the highest correlation to growth when their magnitudes...

This paper reviews the obstacles for an appropriate financial architecture of new economy firms in developing countries by reviewing the theoretical and some preliminary empirical underpinnings of the importance of legal and institutional barriers. Apart from the more conventional institutional...

Using cross-country and panel regressions, we investigate to what extent gender gaps in education and employment (proxied using gender gaps in labor force participation) reduce economic growth. Using most recent data and investigating a long time period (1960-2000), we update the results of...

We analyse the Granger causal relationships between foreign direct investment (FDI) and GDP in a sample of 31 developing countries covering 31 years. Using estimators for heterogeneous panel data we find bi-directional causality between the FDI-to-GDP ratio and the level of GDP. FDI has a...

The paper examines the causal relationship between FDI and economic growth by using an innovative econometric methodology to study the direction of causality between the two variables. We apply our methodology, based on the Toda-Yamamoto test for causality, to time-series data covering the...