Numbers ranging from half a trillion to two trillion dollars have been cited in recent years for global subsidies for fossil fuels. How are these figures calculated and why are they so different? The most commonly used methods for measuring subsidies are the price-gap approach -- quantifying the...

The global financial crisis and its aftermath have triggered extraordinary policy responses in advanced countries. The impacts of these policy responses?from asset price bubbles to currency depreciations?have often been felt in the developing world. As tapering talk evolves into actual...

This paper investigates the drivers of growth and prosperity in a group of eleven European countries -- Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia (the EU11). Since the EU11 began the transformation process, this group of...

Using subnational historical data, this paper establishes the within country persistence of economic activity in the New World over the last half millennium. The paper constructs a data set incorporating measures of pre-colonial population density, new measures of present regional per capita...

In Africa, most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the African context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale -- a premise supported by the often...

Latin America was an aggressive practitioner of industrial policies (IP) in the years 1950-1980. During much of the period the general practice was in line with the then mainstream thinking in development economics. Significant growth, industrialization and modernization took place, but serious...

A number of authors have argued that a worker's occupation of employment is at least as important as the worker's industry of employment in determining whether the worker will be hurt or helped by international trade. This paper investigates the role of occupational mobility on the effects of...

Following the cessation of hostilities in May 2009, the Government of Sri Lanka has announced a suitably ambitious macroeconomic vision to capitalize on the peace dividend. Its goals include growing at 8 percent or more per year and lowering government indebtedness from around 80 to 60 percent...