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,...

The cost of public investment is not the value of public capital. Unlike for private investors, there is no remotely plausible behavioral model of the government as investor that suggests that every dollar the public sector spends as"investment"creates capital in an economic sense. This...

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...

Using data assembled from the Demographic Health Surveys of over 50 countries and from the National Family Health Surveys of individual states in India, the authors create a new data set of comparable indicators of gender disparity. They establish three findings: 1) As is by now well-known, the...

Imagine several mountain climbers, scaling a cliff face, who want protection from falling. One way to protect them would be to place a net at the bottom of the cliff to catch any climber just before he hits the ground. Another would be to provide a rope, and a set of movable devices that can be...

Cross-national data on economic growth rates show that increases in educational capital resulting from improvements in the educational attainment of the labor force have had no positive impact on the growth rate of output per worker. In fact, contends the author, the estimated impact of growth...

The authors use cross-national data to examine the impact on child (under 5) and infant mortality of both nonhealth (economic, cultural, and educational) factors and public spending on health. They come up with two striking findings: 1) Roughly 95 percent of cross-national variation in mortality...

The authors construct a measure of"social capital"in rural Tanzania, using data from the Tanzania Social Capital and Poverty Survey (SCPS), a large-scale survey that asked individuals about the extent and characteristics of their associational activity and their trust in various institutions and...