This paper studies how the effect of trade openness on economic growth may depend on complementary reforms that help a country take advantage of international competition. This issue is illustrated with a simple Harris-Todaro model where welfare gains after trade openness depend on the degree of...

This paper uses a unique database covering 44 countries in sub-Saharan Africa between 2000 and 2007 to study the determinants of the allocation and composition of private capital flows across countries, as well as channels through which these flows could affect growth. In the sample, the degree...

Brazil's slow pace of poverty reduction between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s reflects both low growth and a low growth elasticity of poverty reduction. Using GDP data disaggregated by state and sector for a twenty-year period, this paper finds considerable variation in the poverty-reducing...

In recent years Argentina's economy has experienced both rapid growth and severe decline. In this paper, we use a series of one-year long panels to study who gained the most in pesos when the economy grew and who lost the most in pesos when the economy contracted. Various considerations led us...

This study uses cross-sectional time-series data to examine the relationship between wealth and child labour and schooling in Pakistan and finds that wealth is crucial in determining a child's activities, but is far from being a sufficient condition to enrol a child in school. This is...

This paper provides an historical overview of both the evolution of the economic performance of the developing world and the evolution of economic thought on development policy. The twentieth century was broadly characterized by divergence between high-income countries and the developing world,...

The extent to which India's poor have benefited from the country's economic growth has long been debated. A new series of consumption-based poverty measures spanning 50 years, including a 15-year period after economic reforms began in earnest in the early 1990s, is used to examine that issue....

Brazil, China, and India have seen falling poverty in their reform periods, but to varying degrees and for different reasons. History left China with favorable initial conditions for rapid poverty reduction through market-led economic growth; at the outset of the reform process there were many...

The authors survey the recent literature which examines the impact of the business climate on productivity and growth in developing countries using enterprise surveys. Comparable enterprise surveys today cover more than 100,000 firms in 123 countries. The literature that has analyzed this data...

This article suggests how state enterprises can be incorporated into the theoretical and empirical growth literature. Specifically, it shows that if state enterprises are less efficient than private firms, invest less, employ less skilled labor, and are less eager to adopt new technology, then a...