Widespread tax evasion reflected in persistent public resistance to pay is seen as part of the problem of raising local government revenues in Tanzania. Dealing with the policy problem of revenue enhancement and tax evasion requires some understanding of the factors underlying the individual's...

This paper examines recent experiences from sub-Saharan Africa in combating corruption in customs. It argues that integrity reforms have been too focused on reforming formal institutions, and too little attention has been paid to the political economy of reforms and the role of informal...

A number of studies suggest that natural resources can have a negative impact on the developing prospects of countries. This paper reviews political economy models of the resource curse, and draws implications of these models in terms of policy and research priorities. The term impartiality...

Why do people in rich countries not transfer more of their income to people in the world's poorest countries? To study this question and the relative importance of needs, entitlements, and nationality in people's social preferences, we conducted a real effort fairness experiment where people in...

A number of low- and middle-income countries have a severe shortage of health workers. This paper studies how health workers' choices of labour supply and work effort impact on the quality of health services when health workers are in short supply. We analyse how policy measures such as monetary...

Chinese outward foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased substantially in recent years. Though this has generated considerable interest in the motivations and drivers of Chinese investment abroad, there have been few systematic empirical studies of these questions. This paper performs an...

While democracy is commonly believed to reduce corruption, there are obvious endogeneity problems in measuring the impact of democracy on corruption. This paper addresses the endogeneity of democracy by exploiting the common observation that democracies seldom go to war against each...

Given that the motivation for aid is poverty reduction, I argue that Aid for Trade (AfT) measures need to demonstrate that they are effective and have a potential impact on poverty. The debate about aid for trade measures lacks a focus on the poverty dimension of trade. Trade is an indirect...

Which is the most binding constraint to microenterprise development, human capital or financial capital? To answer this question, we present the first field experiment that jointly investigates these two constraints for poor microentrepreneurs, by introducing separate treatments of business...

There is increased awareness that success among small scale entrepreneurs in developing countries requires more than microfinance, and that an important limiting factor for business growth is the level of human capital among the entrepreneurs. The present paper uses a randomized control trial to...