Social cohesion - that is, the inclusiveness of a country's communities - is essential for generating the trust needed to implement reforms. Citizens have to trust that the short-term losses that inevitably arise from reform, will be more than offset by long-term gains. However, in countries...

We present evidence that measures of “social cohesion,” such as income inequality and ethnic fractionalization, endogenously determine institutional quality, which in turn casually determines growth.

Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop-based economies experienced a substantial deceleration of growth since the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. Rodrik (1999) has demonstrated that the magnitude of a country’s growth deceleration since the 1970s is a function of both the...

This paper focuses on both expanding and refining the analytical scope of the “social†(or non-economic) aspects of chronic poverty, and thereby, to enhance efforts to respond more effectively to it. The argument in this paper proceeds as follows. In recognizing that poverty is...

What are the distinctive skills and attributes that should be expected of Masters (as opposed to undergraduate and doctoral) graduates of international development programmes? Given the diversity of their academic and cultural backgrounds, the inherent uncertainty of their career trajectories,...

Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop--based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. This article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources (those extracted from a narrow...