India poses a development puzzle on a grand scale. Sixty years of electoral democracy, thirty years of rapid growth, and a number of world class institutions (such as the Institutes of Technology or Election Commission) have led to talk of India as a superpower in a league with the United States...

We estimate the “place premium”—the wage gain that accrues to foreign workers who arrive to work in the United States. First, we estimate the predicted, purchasing-power adjusted wages of people inside and outside the United States who are otherwise observably identical—with the same...

We use cross-national data to examine the impact of both public spending on health and non-health factors (economic, educational, cultural) in determining child (under-5) and infant mortality. There are two striking findings. First, the impact of public spending on health is quite small, with a...

This paper examines the variation across countries and evolution over time of life expectancy. Using historical data going back to the beginning of the 20th century several basic facts about the relationship between national income and life expectancy are established. The paper shows that even...

This paper is the written version of a lecture that draws principally on research on safety nets and operational experience with the implementation of safety nets, drawing heavily on the crisis of safety net programs in Indonesia from 1998 to 2000. As such it provides more views than reviews of...

This paper examines de jure and de facto measures of regulations, finding the relationship between them is neither one for one, nor linear."Doing Business"provides indicators of the formal time and costs associated with fully complying with regulations. Enterprise Surveys report the actual...

Many development initiatives fail to improve performance because they promote isomorphic mimicry—governments change what they look like, not what they do. This article proposes a new approach to doing development, Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), which contrasts with standard...

There are two common failures in economic forecasting. One is excessive extrapolation of the (recent) past into the (distant) future, particularly susceptibility to “irrational exuberance” (Schiller). The second is excessive subjective certainty that relies on confidence in continuity and...

Measurement error is an enormous problem in empirical work. In some types of analysis, it is often ignored for various reasons. In some others, however, it cannot be ignored because it affects the results of analysis significantly. We use a simple procedure to estimate the extent of measurement...