Panel data on 54 developing countries between 1960 and 2000 are used to investigate how the impact of opening to trade on economic growth is affected by wealth inequality.  The results suggest (a) that opening to trade tends to accelerate growth but (b) that the addition to growth depends...

Risk has been presented as a cause of poverty persistence under imperfect insurance mechanisms.  This paper assesses the ex post effect of hurricane Mitch on consumption growth of Nicaraguan agricultural households.  How persistent was Mitch's direct impact beyond October 1998 damage?  A...

This paper investigates the role of aid in mitigating the adverse effects of commodity export price shocks on growth in commodity-dependent countries.  Using a large cross-country dataset, we find that negative shocks matter for short-term growth, while the ex ante risk of shocks does not seem...

The current paper demonstrates a dochotomy of the growth response to changes in the barter terms of trade (TOT), employing as case studies the following two African countries: Botswana and Nigeria.  Using distributed-lag analysis, the paper finds that the effect of TOT on output is positive and...

The study presents recent global evidence on the transformation of economic growth to poverty reduction in developing countries, with emphasis on the role of income inequality.  The focus is on the period since the early-mid-1990s when growth in these countries as a group has been relatively...

Currently, evidence on the 'resource curse' yields a conundrum.  While there is much cross-section evidence to support the curse hypothesis, time series analyses using vector autoregressive (VAR) models have found that commodity booms raise the growth of commodity exporters.  This paper adopts...

Many developing countries periodically face large adverse shocks to their economies.  We study two distinct types of such shocks - large declines in the price of a country's commodity exports and severe natural disasters - , both of which have occurred frequently in the recent past. ...

We present evidence that an increase in investment as a share of GDP predicts a higher growth rate of output per worker, not only temporarily, but also in the steady state. These results are found using pooled annual data for a large panel of countries, using pooled data for non-overlapping...

This paper examines the evidence for regional convergence or catch-up in levels and growth rates of per capita income among the 16 major states in India between 1960 and 1992. The results - estimated using OLS, the within-group LSDV estimator, Re-Weighted Least Squares, and Least Trimmed Squares...

Turning Europe into a leading `global knowledge-based` economy has become something of an obsession for policy-makers in the EU. From the integrated guidelines of the Lisbon Agenda to the July 2005 announcement of a new scientific European Research Council, considerable effort has been directed...