The authors present new estimates of long-term total factor productivity (TFP) growth for 83 industrial and developing countries for 1960-87. These estimates are based on new data developed for the research project on total factor productivity growth (and available on diskette). Although based...

The author surveys recent growth models that try to explain the diversity among countries in rates of economic growth. The author finds that these models can generate differences in growth rates only in the absence of international capital markets. Under these models, if there were free...

Are natural resources a blessing or a curse? The authors present a model in which natural resources have a positive effect on the level of income and a negative effect on its growth rate. The positive and permanent effect on income implies a welfare gain. There is a growth effect stemming from a...

The authors investigate the implications of pollution as a byproduct of production and analyze how environmental concern affects the optimal rate of economic growth and optimal government policy. The government must levy taxes on income to finance both productive government spending and...

The arithmetic of poverty in Bangladesh is challenging from a number of perspectives. Counting Bangladesh's poor is difficult to do with seemingly tolerable precision, even just to get some idea of whether recent efforts to alleviate poverty have succeeded. But that is only the beginning of the...

The authors used distribution data from 109 household surveys done since 1980 in 42 developing and transitional economies to find evidence that high rates of growth in average living standards are associated with higher rates of poverty reduction. The adverse distributional effect of recent...

Starting with a general impact indicator as an evaluation criterion, The author offers an integrative framework for a unified discussion of various concepts and measures of pro-poor growth emerging from the current literature. He shows that whether economic growth is considered pro-poor depends...

After the"adjustment decade"of the 1980s, attention in the 1990s seems to be turning once again to longer-term issues of development - particularly of poverty alleviation. Just as the 1980s were heralded by a series of reports on adjustment, so the 1990s have seen two major reports on poverty:...

In the last year or so, markedly different claims have been heard within the development community about just how much progress is being made against poverty and inequality in the current period of"globalization."Ravallion provides a nontechnical overview of the conceptual and methodological...

The authors investigate whether micro-simulation techniques can shed light on the types of policies that should be adopted by countries wishing to meet their Millennium Development Goals. They compare two families of micro-simulations. The first family of micro-simulations decomposes required...