Contemporary policy debates on the macroeconomics of aid often concentrate on short-run Dutch disease effects, ignoring the possible supply-side impact of aid financed public expenditure. In the simple model of aid and public expenditure presented here, public infrastructure generates an...

The article empirically examines the determinants of debt distress, defined as periods in which countries resort to any of three forms of exceptional finance: significant arrears on external debt, Paris Club rescheduling, and non-concessional International Monetary Fund lending. Probit...

Poor rural and urban households in developing countries face substantial risks, which they handle with risk-management and risk-coping strategies, including self-insurance through savings and informal insurance mechanisms. Despite these mechanisms, however, vulnerability to poverty linked to...

A new assessment is made of the developing world’s progress against poverty. By the frugal $1 a day standard there were 1.1 billion poor people in 2001—almost 400 million fewer than 20 years earlier. During that period the number of poor people declined by more than 400 million in China,...

One of the most contentious issues of globalization is the effect of global economic integration on inequality and poverty. This article documents five trends in the modern era of globalization, starting around 1980. The first trend is that growth rates in poor economies have accelerated and are...

Over the 1990s macroeconomic policies improved in most developing countries, but the growth dividend from this improvement fell short of expectations, and a policy agenda focused on stability turned out to be associated with a multiplicity of financial crises. This article examines the contents...

This paper introduces a new dataset on the stock and structure of domestic debt in 36 Low-Income Countries over the period 1971–2011. We characterize the recent trends regarding LICs domestic public debt and explore the relevance of different arguments put forward on the benefits and costs of...

Many key development outcomes depend on women s ability to negotiate favorable intrahousehold allocations of resources. Yet it has been difficult to clearly identify which policies can increase women's bargaining power and result in better outcomes. This paper reviews both the analytical...

Women make essential contributions to agriculture in developing countries, where they constitute approximately 43 percent of the agricultural labor force. However, female farmers typically have lower output per unit of land and are much less likely to be active in commercial farming than their...

For a representative sample of manufacturing firms in 26 countries, the article shows that changes in the cost of importing over time is significantly and negatively correlated with changes in the percentage of firm’s material inputs that are of foreign origin. Furthermore, we show that there...