To address the relationship between concessional assistance, corruption, and other types of rent-seeking activities, the author provides a simple game-theoretic rent-seeking model. Insights with interesting implications emerge from the analysis: 1) An increase in government revenue (from...

The authors of this paper use a new database on foreign aid to examine the relationships among foreign aid, economic policies, and growth of per capita GDP. In panel growth regressions for 56 developing countries and 6 four-year periods (1970-93), they find that the policies that have a great...

In the 1980s development assistance shifted largely from financing investments (such as roads and dams) to promoting policy reform. This change came because of a growing awareness that developing countries were held back more by poor policies than by a lack of finance for investment. After...

The neoclassical theory of project evaluation is based on models in which agents discount the future at a constant exponential rate. But there is strong empirical evidence that people discount the future hyperbolically, applying larger annual discount rates to near-term returns than to returns...

Considerations of risk and vulnerability are key to understanding the dynamics of poverty. This study conceives vulnerability as expected poverty and illustrates a methodology to empirically assess household vulnerability using pseudo panel data derived from repeated cross sections augmented...

The authors empirically review and analyze the link between income distribution and aggregate savings. Recent research has focused on the impact of income inequality and growth. Less attention has been paid to the link between inequality and savings. Once the conventional representative-agent...

Lack of food is no longer the major cause of malnutrition. Many households and individuals remain malnourished when income and supplies of food are adequate. Nutrition policy and programs must be based on a sound knowledge of household behaviour patterns. The microeconomic theory of the...

How well do rural households in developing countries mitigate the income risk of the rural sector? There are several sensible reasons why households cannot fully insure consumption against income fluctuations. The well-known problems of moral hazard, information asymmetries, and deficient...

Cross-country comparisons of social indicators controlling for income and/or social spending have been widely used to measure and explain"social efficiency"analogously to"technical efficiency"in production. The author argues that these methods are clouded in ambiguities about what exactly is...

The author tests for external effects of local economic activity on consumption and income growth at the farm-household level using panel data from four provinces of post-reform rural China. The tests allow for non-stationary fixed effects in the consumption growth process. Evidence is found of...