Everyone knows that aid is not working as intended, and that something must change. The big question is how to change the status quo. The current international aid debate is characterized by dichotomies and over-simplified generalizations. In order to push the debate forward and identify...

This new DIIS Working Paper examines the role of the mild stimulant khat in the economic and political transformation of the independent, yet internationally unrecognized Republic of Somaliland. Rather than seeing khat as a hindrance for nation-state formation and as a developmental problem, the...

The existence of a natural resources curse is widely accepted in academic and policy circles. With its focus on institutional quality, the resource curse thesis is symptomatic of the current 'good governance' agenda. This paper subjects the thesis to critical evaluation and finds it wanting. It...

This paper discusses the difficulties associated with measuring entrepreneurship in developing countries. Three important dichotomies in the research on entrepreneurship are discussed: formal-informal, legal-illegal, and necessity-opportunity. Several common measures of entrepreneurship are...

This paper examines the implications of the liberalization of capital outflows in China, India, Brazil, and South Africa (CIBS) for other developing countries. It focuses on their prospects of attracting not only foreign direct investment (FDI), but also portfolio capital flows from CIBS. To...

A stylized fact of economic development is the structural transformation of countries from traditional, mainly agricultural societies to modern economies dominated by manufacturing and services. In this paper we provide an endogenous growth model to illuminate the role of entrepreneurial...

In this paper, we formalize the view that economic development requires high rates of productive entrepreneurship, and this requires an efficient matching between entrepreneurial talent and production technologies. We first explore the role of financial development in promoting such efficient...

This paper studies state failure and governance in two conflict-states in the Middle East: Iraq and Somalia. Iraq is currently undergoing a social experiment under which a new form of government is being constructed after the passage of autocratic rule. The government envisaged is a...

There is some scepticism about Korea as role model of development as the Korean model involved a considerable degree of state activism, unacceptable in today's global environment. This paper propose a capability-based view of the country's catch-up development, arguing that the real lesson from...

This paper argues that economic competition and political contestability are two key determinants of the successful development of the Swiss economy in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We describe how Switzerland evolved from a relatively poor country with no natural resources and net...