The growing availability of free or inexpensive satellite imagery has inspired many researchers to investigate the use of earth observation data for monitoring economic activity around the world. One of the most popular earth observation data sets is the so-called nighttime lights from the...

What determines the quality of budget execution around the world, measured in terms of a government's ability to accurately hit its own revenue and expenditure targets? The answers could be relevant to the topics of macroeconomic stability, national development, public service delivery, and...

Sierra Leone is a small, fragile, post-conflict state on the coast of West Africa. As a consequence, Sierra Leone was one of the largest beneficiaries of foreign aid as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) and aid per capita. Projects focusing on reconstruction of basic infrastructure and on...

What determines the quality of budget execution around the world, measured in terms of a government's ability to accurately hit its own revenue and expenditure targets? The answers could be relevant to the topics of macroeconomic stability, national development, public service delivery, and...

At the time when this paper was written, the latest nationally representative survey implemented in Nigeria dated back to 1996, and the available estimations suggested that two thirds of the population was poor. This high level of poverty was due in large part to macroeconomic volatility that...