This paper presents an overview of the economics of international aid, highlighting the historical literature and the contemporary debates. It reviews the “trade-theoretic” and the “contract-theoretic” analytical literature, and the empirical and institutional literature. It demonstrates...

This is our contribution to the project on Conversations between Anthropologists and Economists, focusing on analysis of the Commons. The short note is in the form of a “talk and response” exchange, coming as close to a conversation as it is possible to do on the printed page. This is worth...

Standard economic analysis assumes the sets of public and private goods to be exogenously given. Yet societies very often choose the public-private mix, using resources to convert seemingly private goods into ones with public goods characteristics and vice versa. And, in practice, we see a...

This commentary poses a series of progressively harder questions in the economic analysis of growth, inequality and poverty. Starting with relatively straightforward analysis of the relationship between growth and inequality, the first level of hard questions come when we ask what policies and...

The global International Financial Institutions (IFI’s) increasingly justify their operations in terms of the provision of International Public Goods (IPG’s). This is partly because there appears to be support among the rich countries of the North for expenditures on these IPG’s, in...

How does development economics address the issue of gains and losses from the displacement that inevitably accompanies many development processes? This paper argues that economists have struggled mightily between the core criterion of a “Pareto improvement”, which vests individuals with...

This paper establishes some general principles of the rationale for development assistance in Middle Income Countries and then applies these principles to the operations of the World Bank. It then puts the argument through its paces for the specific case of India, which has just transitioned...

Two decades ago, 93% of the world’s poor lived in countries officially classified as Low Income (LICs). Now, 72% of the world’s poor live in Middle Income Countries (MICs). The dramatic shift has been brought about by fast growth in a number of countries with large populations. On present...

Governance and the “Karnataka Model of Development” Gopal Kadekodi, Ravi Kanbur and Vijayendra Rao; Change in Karnataka Over the Last Generation: Villages and the Wider Context James Manor; The Political Economy of Gram Panchayats in South India Timothy Besley, Rohini Pande and Vijayendra...

The standard theory of anti-poverty targeting assumes individual incomes cannot be observed, but statistical properties of income distribution in broadly defined groups are known. Targeting rules are then derived for the forms of transfers conditioned on group membership of individuals. In this...