This study revisits the effect of aid on the quality of institutions and examines the effects of a major source of instability, namely terms-of-trade instability, on the quality of democracy. We take advantage of previous empirical findings which explain the role of aid in mitigating the adverse...

Industrial policy has attracted considerable controversy in the development context. This paper makes a case for a pragmatic and limited approach to interventions as a means of stimulating industrialization in the context of current and future challenges facing newly industrializing economies....

The growing urbanization of poverty poses a significant challenge to governments and donors alike, particularly in Asia, which houses 60 per cent of the world.s slum dwellers. Donors have been slow to respond to the urban challenge, however, both in their funding patterns and their priorities....

The youth have long represented an important constituency for electoral mobilization in Africa. Today, as the region faces a growing .youth bulge. that is disproportionately burdened by un- and underemployment, capturing the votes of this demographic is becoming more important than ever before....

Unlike in the past where industrial policy was either focused on creation and growth of state-owned firms or alternatively consisted merely of broadly functional policies without consideration for firm or entrepreneurial specifics, the requirement now is that future industrial policy ought to be...

We use data on inter-generational gains in educational attainment by some 500,000 individuals in 200 West Bengal villages to explore gender-differentiated impacts of land reform on human capital accumulation at the individual level. While there are significant gains (of about 0.3 years for...

Using original survey data on Senegal that include an individualized measure of consumption, we study the role played by land inheritance, other bequests and parental background as influences on an adult.s economic welfare and economic activities. While intergenerational linkages are evident, we...

This study examines the Prebisch and Singer hypothesis using a panel of 24 commodity prices from 1900 to 2010. The modelling approach stems from the need to meet two key concerns: (1) the presence of cross-sectional dependence among commodity prices; and (2) the identification of potential...

The paper revisits the policy debate on institutional reform approaches to property rights protection and empirically examines it in the context of FDI flows to the Middle East and Northern Africa region (MENA).Using panel data on 11 MENA countries for the period 1991.2007 and adopting feasible...

Climate change is a phenomenon leading to randomly distributed disasters around the globe. Due to massive economic and technical asymmetry between the advanced North and the developing South efficient climate and industrial policy is particular difficult. Globally efficient policy would need to...