Rapid economic growth involves significant changes in land use patterns. The paper uses the recent history of Chinese economic growth to highlight and interrogate the implication of such changes within the context of structural transformation. It argues that though land use change is an...

Since the financial meltdown of 2007, unemployment has consistently been above 6.0 percent. On one level, long-term unemployment can be accounted for by structural changes. But, on another level, the problem of long-term unemployment is really no more complicated than the absence of effective...

The paper focuses some of the non-monetary structural causes of inflationary persistence in Brazil in the post-Real plan period. A connection is made between the de-industrializing trend and the emergence of primary pressures that set a floor to inflation levels. The framework is set up in terms...

The influence of climate variability on agricultural production and financial risks faced by an individual or an institution has been the center of the public discussion in the recent years. The changing weather patterns and environmental conditions could cause substantial unpredicted economic...

Farm size in industrialized countries grew significantly over the second half of the twentieth century. Using several econometric models, this article examines factors that influence farm size, the probability of an increase in farm size, and the intensity of farm growth. We find that farm...

The paper advocates public support for the development of agriculture as a way to facilitate structural change in developing countries. In the first chapter we describe the global transformation in agriculture that has taken place over last few decades. Despite fast population growth, the growth...

A two-stage forecasting approach for long memory time series is introduced. In the first step we estimate the fractional exponent and, applying the fractional differencing operator, we obtain the underlying weakly dependent series. In the second step, we perform the multi-step ahead forecasts...

The world's poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-term randomized control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of...

In this paper, we argue that the Arab spring can be understood as a violent criticism of and attack against the post-Independence social contract that prevailed in most Middle East and North African countries. We show that this social contract, characterized by the combination of high levels of...

This paper quantitatively compares Middle East and North African (MENA) countries’ growth patterns with those of a sample of middle-income countries. Three complementary sets of growth determinants are tested: accumulation, institutions and structural change. After having estimated the model...