The least developed country category was established by the international community for countries requiring special support measures for dealing with their structural impediments to growth. Despite the availability of these measures and the efforts of the LDCs themselves, relatively little...

Nepal was the first Least Developed Country to negotiate its accession to the World Trade Organization. The negotiation process was demanding, yet it succeeded in securing a relatively well-balanced accession package. The purpose of this paper is to describe the contours of the negotiation...

Evidence about developing countries’ commercial banks’ liquidity preference suggests the following about their loan markets: (i) the loan interest rate is a minimum mark-up rate; (ii) the loan market is characterized by oligopoly power; and (iii) indirect monetary policy, a cornerstone of...

This paper analyses the nature and causes of the patterns of inequality and poverty in India. Since the economic liberalization in the early 1990s, the evidence suggests increasing inequality (in both spatial and vertical terms) as well as persistent poverty. The macroeconomic policies possibly...

We analyze the growth impact of official development assistance to developing countries. Our approach is different from that of previous studies in two major ways. First, we disentangle the effects of two components of aid: a developmental, growth-enhancing component, and a geopolitical,...

This United Nations Policy Note on Financial Policies provides practical guidance on how to operationalize alternative equitable and employment-generating financial policies in National Development Strategies. This Policy Note has been developed in cooperation with UN agencies, and has been...

One element explaining the financial crisis is what Hyman Minsky called ‘destabilizing stability’: long periods of stability lead to increasing vulnerability. This paper argues that similar mechanisms are at work inside economics: long periods of economic progress in the core countries lead...

This paper compares the experience of poverty reduction in China and India. It finds that more than economic growth per se, what has mattered crucially is the nature of the growth: whether it is associated with growing inequalities that do not allow the benefits of growth to reach the poor;...

This article evaluates and compares the forecasting performance of three international organizations: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The annual forecasts made by the United Nations in the period of 1981-2011 are found to be fairly robust, in terms of bias...

The paper reviews the sluggish growth and inclusive developments of the Brazilian economy in the last decade. The first section analyzes the macroeconomic performance pointing export growth as the engine of growth. The second evaluates social policies and their relationship with the improvements...