The authors investigate the policy and non-policy factors behind saving disparities, using a large panel data set and an encompassing approach including several relevant determinants of private saving. They extend the literature in several dimensions, by: 1) Using the largest data set on...

The authors study the effects of regulation on economic growth and the relative size of the informal sector in a large sample of industrial and developing countries. Along with firm dynamics, informality is an important channel through which regulation affects macroeconomic performance and...

The authors consider external sustainability from the perspective of equilibrium in net foreign asset positions. Under their approach, an external situation is sustainable if it is consistent with international and domestic investors'achieving their desired portfolio allocation across countries....

Recent theoretical literature has suggested a variety of mechanisms through which poverty may deter growth and become self-perpetuating. A few papers have searched for empirical regularities consistent with those mechanisms – such as aggregate non-convexities and convergence clubs. However, a...

Conventional analyses of the effect of terms-of-trade shocks provide a misleading view of their impact on investment and the current account, because capital goods imports are excluded from the analytical framework. The author argues that such an exclusion is both arbitrary and unrealistic. The...

An adequate supply of infrastructure services has long been viewed by both academics and policy makers as a key ingredient for economic development. Sub-Saharan Africa ranks consistently at the bottom of all developing regions in terms of infrastructure performance, and an increasing number of...

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of the impact of infrastructure development on economic growth and income distribution using a large panel data set encompassing over 100 countries and spanning the years 1960-2000. The empirical strategy involves the estimation of simple equations for...

The authors provide an empirical evaluation of the impact of infrastructure development on economic growth and income distribution using a large panel data set encompassing over 100 countries and spanning the years 1960-2000. The empirical strategy involves the estimation of simple equations for...

A recent but rapidly growing empirical literature focuses on the relationship between public and private capital. But for the most part, it ignores the heterogeneity of public investment. In many countries, especially in the developing world, public investment includes not only basic...

The authors analyze the response of private and public investment to external shocks, macroeconomic adjustment, and structural reform in three sets of countries: (a) countries that pursued structural reform and liberalization in Latin American in the 1970s (Chile) or the 1980s (Mexico and...