The contemporary approach to political economy is built around vested interests - elites, lobbies, and rent-seeking groups which get their way at the expense of the general public. The role of ideas in shaping those interests is typically ignored or downplayed. Yet each of the three components...

Africa's recent growth performance has raised expectations of a bright economic future for the continent after decades of decline. Yet there is a genuine question about whether Africa's growth can be sustained, and if so, at what level. The balance of the evidence suggests caution on the...

The manner in which the political system responds to external economic shocks in developing countries is a key determinant of the private investment response. We look at a simple model of political-economic equilibrium to make this intuition more precise. and develop the idea of a "political...

Basic economic theory identifies a number of efficiency gains that derive from international capital mobility. But just as free trade in goods, there is no guarantee that capital mobility makes everyone better off. Consequently, capital mobility may be politically unsustainable even though it...

This is an attempt to derive broad, strategic lessons from the diverse experience with economic growth in last fifty years. The paper revolves around two key arguments. One is that neoclassical economic analysis is a lot more flexible than its practitioners in the policy domain have generally...

South Africa has undergone a remarkable transformation since its democratic transition in 1994, but economic growth and employment generation have been disappointing. Most worryingly, unemployment is currently among the highest in the world. While the proximate cause of high unemployment is that...

How likely is trade liberalization to produce efficiency gains in the presence of imperfect competition, scale economies, and higher-than-average wages in the modern sectors -- all common features of developing economies? These features create a potential conflict to the extent that traditional...

We estimate the interrelationships among economic institutions, political institutions, openness, and income levels, using identification through heteroskedasticity (IH). We split our cross-national dataset into two sub-samples: (i) colonies versus non-colonies; and (ii) continents aligned on an...

Unlike economies as a whole, manufacturing industries exhibit unconditional convergence in labor productivity. The paper documents this finding for 4-digit manufacturing sectors for a large group of developed and developing countries over the period since 1990. The coefficient of unconditional...

The question addressed in this paper is whether the gap in performance between the developed and developing worlds can continue, and in particular, whether developing nations can sustain the rapid growth they have experienced of late. The good news is that growth in the developing world should...