New research on urban air pollution casts doubt on the conventional view of the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality. This view holds that pollution automatically increases until societies reach middle-income status because poor countries have neither the institutional...

There is growing interest in using messaging to drive prosocial behaviors, which contribute to investment in public goods. The authors worked with a leading nongovernmental organization in Peru to randomize nine different prorecycling messages that were crafted on the basis of best practices,...

Citizen feedback is considered an effective means for improving the performance of public utilities. But how well does such information reflect the actual quality of service delivery? Do so-called scorecards or report cards measure public service delivery accurately, or do personal and community...

The authors analyze and compare sectoral growth in three African economies - Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Zimbabwe - since 1965. They extend the classic dual economy - the agriculture and industry sectors - by adding the services sector. For all the three countries, they find at least one...

The authors examine whether financial development boosts the growth of small firms more than large firms and hence provides information on the mechanisms through which financial development fosters aggregate economic growth. They define an industry's technological firm size as the firm size...

How does economic geography influence industrial production and thereby affect industrial location decisions and the spatial distribution of development? For manufacturing industry, what are the externalities that matter, and to what extent? Are these externalities spatially localized? The...

Business cycles are less volatile in rich countries than in poor ones. They are also more synchronized with the world cycle. The authors develop two alternative but noncompeting explanations for those facts. Both explanations proceed from the observation that the law of comparative advantage...

Productivity, and the Rybczynski effects of factor endowments, have been highlighted as the two main reasons behind the growth of newly industrializing economies in East Asia. However, empirical studies at the aggregate level, do not find support for these claims. Focusing on Singapore's...

Intra-industry trade as a share of total tradebetween Central and Eastern European nations and the European Union (EU) is among the highest of all the EU's bilateral trade flows. The authors break down data on these trade flows into horizontal and vertical components, and investigate the...

This paper argues that the definition of"manufactures"used in compiling production data for industrial and developing countries is far broader than the definition used for trade statistics. This limits the analytical utility of output and trade data for studies using, say, apparent consumption...