Recently, much attention has been paid in the literature on economic growth to the phenomenon of"conditional convergence,"the tendencies of economies with lower-level incomes to grow faster, conditional on their rate of factor accumulation. The author documents that, regardless of conditional...

As part the Local Level Institutions study of local life in villages in rural Indonesia information was gathered on sampled household's participation in social activities. We classified the reported activities into four distinct types of social activity: sociability, networks, social...

As a less restrictive trade regime is associated with greater responsiveness to economic incentives, econometric evidence that does not allow for the impact of import controls cannot be used reliably to assess the effect of a devaluation on the trade balance. Indeed, devaluation combined with...

Except during the Great Depression, the historical path for per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the United Stateshas been reasonably stable exponential trend growth, with modest cyclical deviation. Graphically, growth in the United States displays as a modestly sloping, only slightly...

Firms in Africa report"regulatory and economic policy uncertainty"as a top constraint to their growth. This paper argues that often firms in Africa do not cope with policy rules, rather they face deals: firm-specific policy actions that can be influenced by firm actions (such as bribes) and...

This paper has an empirical and overtly methodological goal. The authors propose and defend a method for estimating the effect of household economic status on educational outcomes without direct survey information on income or expenditures. They construct an index based on indicators of...

With cross-country, time series data on health (infant and child mortality, and life expectancy) and per capita income, the authors estimate the effect of income on health. They use instrumental variables estimation to identify the effect of income on health that is structural and causal,...

Exchange rate policy has received renewed attention because of its prominent role in adjustment programs. Several analysts have examined the impact of real exchange rate uncertainty on the performance of such economic variables as GDP growth, exports, and investment. The author uses data on the...

Trade among sub-Saharan African countries is very limited. This fact, plus other political and economic considerations, has been used to motivate a growing number of regional integration schemes. Although many authors have shown that intra-sub-Saharan African trade is limited, none has yet asked...

The pressure for trade reform as an integral component of adjustment programs has intensified the ongoing debate about the benefits of trade liberalization of trade regimes in the less developed countries (LDCs). This heightened interest has in turn generated continued empirical study of the...