The view that policies directed at the real exchange rate can have an important effect on economic growth has been gaining adherents in recent years. Unlike the traditional “misalignment" view that temporary departures of the real exchange rate from its equilibrium level harm growth by...

This paper reports the results of a major study of the impact of international agricultural research, covering eleven crops in all major regions of the developing world, over the period 1960-2000. Although much of the "common wisdom" concerning the Green Revolution suggests that gains from...

Contemporary historians usually attribute the East India Company's military success in India to its military strength, and to the mutual distrust of Indian regimes. We argue these explanations, though correct, are incomplete. The credibility of the Company's commitments, even though imperfect,...

Supporters of mega-sporting events such as the World Cup and Olympics claim that these events attract hoards of wealthy visitors and lead to lasting economic benefits for the host regions. For this reason, cities and countries compete vigorously for the right to stage these spectacles. Recently,...

Trade and export, it is argued, spur economic growth. This paper studies the microeconomics of exporting. We build a heuristic model of transactions between exporters and producers and relate it to East India Company operations in colonial Bengal. Our model and the historical record stress two...

In most poor countries, small firms and self employment are the dominant forms of business enterprise. This phenomenon is true not only in agriculture and the service sector: even in manufacturing, large fractions of the workforce are self-employed. In Ghana, as an illustration, more than 75...

This paper examines the central hypothesis of the influential Malthusian theory, according to which improvements in the technological environment during the pre-industrial era had generated only temporary gains in income per capita, eventually leading to a larger, but not significantly richer,...

We test if riskier borrowers are willing to pay higher interest rates than safer borrowers are as predicted by Stiglitz and Weiss (1981). The data are from an Indian financial institution where interest rates are determined by competitive bidding. The government imposed an interest rate ceiling...

Throughout human history, livestock producers have relied on a vibrant international exchange of genentic resources to achieve improvements in the quality and productivity of their animals. In recent years, however, some observers have argued that changes in the legal, technological, and...

This paper reviews the monetary transmission mechanism in low income countries (LICs). We use monetary transmission in advanced and emerging markets as a benchmark to identify aspects of the transmission mechanism that may operate differently in LICs. In particular, we focus on the effects of...