Between 1975 and 2000, annual per-capita GDP in Chile grew at 5%. Yet, regions did not benefit equally: poverty declined significantly in all regions but regional income inequality remained stagnant. We found that convergence in per-capita income and prod

The UAE is blessed with vast deposits of oil and gas. Contrary to other oil-rich economies, the UAE seems to have escaped from the so-called “oil curse”. We study how the UAE used resource rents to achieve economic development and provide higher welfare for the local population. We identify,...

Natural resources have been blamed for inducing slow growth and sparking civil conflicts and violence. This paper first develops a model to account for the hazard of armed civil conflicts as a manifestation of the natural resource curse which is mediated by the quality of both economic and...

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on oil and other point-source resource curse. We find that the curse does exist but conditional on bad political governance. Unlike previous studies we estimate a flexible econometric growth model that accounts for long-term country...

Generating sustained growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is one of the most pressing challenges in global development. As the region clearly needs assistance to jump start its development, foreign aid becomes crucial. This paper investigates the nexus between foreign aid, exchange rate...

This paper asks the question as to whether the choice of the exchange rate regime matters for post-conflict economic recovery and macro stabilization. Though an important aspect of the macroeconomic agenda for post-conflict, it has however, been largely ignored by the literature. We identify...

Dollarization brought economic stability to Ecuador and higher economic growth. The labor market has not reacted accordingly and unemployment rates remain stubbornly around 10%. I use a simple econometric model of the labor market to disentangle the impact on employment of GDP growth, real...