The evolution of the world economy is a sinuous one, periods of prosperity and economic growth alternating with decline and recessions. Despite the acceptance of this reality, the outbreak of eco-nomic crises as turning points in economic activity, always raise questions that have been given...

Over the last two centuries in Latin America a Washington Consensus development strategy based on integration in the global trading system has dominated both domestic demand management and industrialization "from within." This paper assesses the performance of each from the point of view of the...

Ragnar Nurkse was one the pioneers in development economics. This paper celebrates the hundredth anniversary of his birth with a critical retrospective of his overall contribution to the field, in particular his views on the importance of employment policy in mobilizing domestic resources and...

Sub-Saharan Africa has made the least progress over the past three decades, and - except for South Africa - it is now one of the world's poorest regions. Even a country relatively untouched by war that had been widely hailed as "reformed" by the early 1990s, Tanzania, has turned in a...

The literature on aid effectiveness has focused more on recipient policies than the determinants of aid allocation yet a consistent result is that political allies obtain more aid from donors than non-allies. This paper shows that aid allocated to political allies is ineffective for growth,...

Most of the FDI specialists think that FDI had a positive impact upon the economic growth in the receiving countries. They showed that it was a direct relation between the FDI flows (as percent of the GDP) and the growth of GDP per capita not just for the developed countries, but also for most...

This paper compares Japan and the US as they provide different types of capital to the developing world, focusing especially on foreign aid and, to some extent, also on remittances and the role of NGOs. The main focus is on the quality of aid and on past conceptual differences and on an emerging...

Research on Singapore's economic history has been complicated by the absence of economic data on pre-independence Singapore. This book aims to fill the gap by presenting a time-series of historical GDP estimates for the periods 1900–39 and 1950–60. The new data presented in the...

This note explores the costs and benefits of different policy options to reduce the risks associated with credit booms, drawing upon several country experiences and the findings from econometric analysis.

We study the characteristics of credit booms in emerging and industrial economies. Macro data show a systematic relationship between credit booms and economic expansions, rising asset prices, real appreciations and widening external deficits. Micro data show a strong association between credit...