Similar looking Lorenz Curves can imply very different income density functions and potentially lead to wrong policy implications regarding inequality. This paper derives a relation between a Lorenz Curve and the modality of its underlying income density: Given a parametric Lorenz Curve, it is...

Recent empirical research relates lower aggregate total factor productivity to more dispersed productivity levels within narrowly defined industries. This paper shows that specificity in creditor-borrower relationships will cause adverse selection in line with this evidence. It demonstrates how...

This paper interprets economic growth as a sequence of transitions between four growth regimes: crisis, stagnation, stable growth, and miracle growth. Countries experience distinct patterns of growth because they switch between the growth regimes with different frequencies. The aim of this paper...

In theory, the IMF could influence economic growth via several channels, among them advice to policy makers, money disbursed under its programs, and its conditionality. This paper tries to disentangle those effects empirically. Using panel data for 98 countries over the period 1970-2000 it...

While undernutrition among children is very pervasive both in Sub- Saharan Africa and South Asia, child mortality is rather low in South Asia. In contrast to that Sub-Saharan African countries suffer by far the worst from high rates of child mortality. This different pattern of child mortality...

The measurement of gender inequalities has become an important topic in the academic literature. First, appropriate indicators are needed to compare the relative situation of women in developing countries. Second, there is renewed attention given to the relationship between gender inequality and...

Differences in key features of the development process across rich and poor countries can provide clues to the sources of the large variation of cross-country income. Kuznets included structural transformation as one of six stylized facts of economic development, nding that developed countries...

Agro-food trade between the BRIC countries has increased. Brazil and China contributed to the rapid increase of agro-food trade. The Russian Federation experienced the stagnating and the most volatile agro-food trade over time. The composition of agro-food trade for the BRIC countries varies by...

Deployment of broadband, particularly, FTTx, is now one of major policy objectives in many countries, including Japan, Korea, and the U.S., for example. The U.S. announced a National Broadband Plan which aimed at providing 100 million households with access to 100 Mbps broadband services by...

The productivity generated by capital goods is not uniform along the time. When there exist conventional physical capital goods the productivity obtained is minor that the one generated by quality capital goods. To obtain a correct measure of growth in presence of this embodied technical...