For years economists have ignored the diversity in agriculture and its potential to increase long run growth rates by enhancing a country's knowledge base. Nontraditional agriculture requires significant investments in infrastructure and knowledge: and therefore, has the potential to increase...

Agricultural insurance has attracted considerable interest in recent years. Innovations in agricultural index insurance have raised expectations that the private sector can overcome shortcomings associated with more traditional indemnity-based products like multi-peril crop insurance, and...

In this chapter we explore the popular but controversial idea that developing countries benefit from abandoning policy neutrality vis-a-vis trade, FDI and resource allocation across industries. Are developing countries justified in imposing tariffs, subsidies, and tax breaks that imply...

In this paper, we investigate whether and how households adjust their agricultural practices such as cultivation and livestock to adapt to a severe typhoon. We, therefore, make use of a natural experiment coming from the strong typhoon Ketsana in 2009. We apply the difference-in-differences...

Not anytime soon. Using a novel dataset covering 127 countries and spanning two centuries, we find evidence for an energy Kuznets curve, with an initial decline of energy demand at low levels of per capita income followed by stages of acceleration and then saturation at high-income levels....

While debates on sustainable development have traditionally pitted the developing countries of the global South against the industrialized countries of the North, this essay addresses possible new elements in the so-called North-South debate, mainly by examining it from the perspective of a...

This paper extends the North, Wallis, and Weingast (2009) framework for understanding the problems of development. Our approach distinguishes two development problems that are normally conflated. Most approaches to development focus on the second problem, namely, the transition of societies from...

Access to modern energy is vital for sustainable development. In rural areas, decentralized energy solutions may play a significant role in reducing poverty, supporting community institutions and facilitating the generation of basic services such as communication, water access, education and...

Despite the short run negative effect of adverse climate shocks on economic outcomes is undisputed, our understanding of their long run institutional impact is limited. To clarify this issue, we propose a time inconsistency theory of state-building and we document that, in the world's most...

The effects of immigration are reasonably well understood in developed countries, but they are far more poorly understood in developing ones despite the importance of these countries as immigrant destinations. We address this shortcoming by studying the effects of immigration to Brazil during...