This paper looks beyond the comparatively good performance of the large emerging economies that gave rise to the mainstream narrative of decoupling. I discuss the negative economic and social impacts of the financial and economic crisis on the Least Developed Countries that the mainstream...

Empirical evidence suggests that regional disparities in incomes are often very high, that these disparities do not necessarily disappear as economies grow and that these disparities are itself an important driver of growth. We use a novel approach based on multilevel modeling to decompose the...