The expansion of digital financial services raises serious consumer protection concerns, including fraud, especially in developing countries. This column reports findings from an online experiment in Kenya which suggest that conventional scam detection tips do not improve individuals' ability to...

The impact of conflict on taxation and development has long been debated. Most studies suggest that conflict will have a depressive effect on state tax collection, negatively impacting economic growth and development. After reviewing the existing literature, we argue for an approach that...

This study is a review of the recent trends in development economics research. The focus is on the development in the recent decades as a result of increased globalization of knowledge, technologies and economies. In particular I look at the development in a number area where similar trends are...

Starting from the recent UNICEF publications on child poverty in the developed countries, which received a wide audience in the political and scientific world, in this paper we further analyze the UNICEF study data base and present three composite indices that are multidimensional and...

This paper examines the consequences of data error in data series used to construct aggregate indicators. Using the most popular indicator of country level economic development, the Human Development Index (HDI), we identify three separate sources of data error. We propose a simple statistical...

This paper examines the impact of North-South trade-related technology diffusion on TFP growth in small and large states in the South. The main findings are: i) TFP growth increases with North-South trade-related technology diffusion, with education, and with the interaction between the two, and...

This paper examines the relative contribution of openness and the R&D content of trade to TFP growth for North-South trade-related technology diffusion. The measure of foreign R&D used in the literature on trade-related technology diffusion imposes identical contributions of openness and the R&D...

This paper uses efficiency wage theory and the existence of community-based sharing to hypothesize that labor markets in developing countries have multiple equilibria - the same economy can be stuck at different levels of unemployment with different levels of wages. The model is meant for...