"An introduction to the contemporary challenges states in the developing world face, and to the ways in which they can build capacity to handle them. It examines the key institutions of the state, the challenges of institutional reform, and the importance of institutional reform in achieving...

Several countries around the world have adopted the inflation targeting regime for monetary policy. Despite the growing literature on the issue, it is not clear whether developing and emerging countries can improve their economic performance by adopting inflation targeting. This working paper...

This is an attempt to derive broad, strategic lessons from the diverse experience with economic growth in last fifty years. The paper revolves around two key arguments. One is that neoclassical economic analysis is a lot more flexible than its practitioners in the policy domain have generally...

This paper studies the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis in two areas with strong differences in economic development, sixteen OECD countries and sixteen Latin American economies. Applying panel cointegration and bootstrapping techniques that solve for cross-sectional dependence problems in the data,...

This paper studies the Balassa-Samuelson effects in two areas with strong differences in economic development, sixteen OECD countries and sixteen Latin American economies. The USA is taken as a benchmark. Applying recent panel cointegration and bootstrapping techniques that solve for...

We use panel probit models with unobserved heterogeneity, state-dependence and serially correlated errors in order to analyze the determinants and the dynamics of current-account reversals for a panel of developing and emerging countries. The likelihood-based inference of these models requires...

This paper presents an in-depth analysis of developments in the microfinance sector before and after the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008 by comparing them with developments in traditional banking sectors of emerging market economies and developing countries. The findings indicate that...