The authors use preliminary results from an ongoing effort to construct estimates of debt relief to study its allocation across a sample of 62 low-income countries. They find some evidence that debt relief, particularly from multilateral creditors, has been allocated to countries with better...

The Worldwide Governance Indicators, reporting estimates of six dimensions of governance for over 200 countries between 1996 and 2005, have become widely used among policymakers and academics. They have also attracted some explicit written criticisms. In this short paper the authors synthesize...

Several recent papers have attempted to identify the partial effects of trade integration and institutional quality on long-run growth using the geographical determinants of trade and the historical determinants of institutions as instruments. The authors show that many of the specifications in...

In many empirical applications involving combined time-series and cross-sectional data, the residuals from different cross-sectional units are likely to be correlated with one another. This is the case in applications in macroeconomics and international economics where the cross-sectional units...

The authors consider two alternative methods of forecasting real per capita GDP at various horizons: 1) univariate time series models estimated country by country; and 2) cross-country growth regressions. They evaluate the out-of-sample forecasting performance of both approaches for a large...

How do countries hold their financial wealth? We construct a new database of countries' claims on capital located at home and abroad, and international borrowing and lending, covering 68 countries from 1966 to 1997. We find that a small amount of capital flows from rich countries to poor...

The authors examine the empirical evidence in support of the poverty trap view of underdevelopment. They calibrate simple aggregate growth models in which poverty traps can arise due to either low saving or low technology at low levels of development. They then use these models to assess the...