The 1990s have seen a renewed interest in issues of capital accumulation and growth. New paradigms for saving, investment, and growth have been advanced to address theoretical and empirical puzzles and to guide the design of better policies. This paper provides a policy-oriented review of recent...

Using a large cross-country income distribution dataset spanning close to 800 country-year observations from industrial and developing countries, the authors show that the size distribution of per capita income is well approximated empirically by a lognormal density. The null hypothesis that per...

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...

We show how to relate the welfare of a country's infinitely-lived representative consumer to observable aggregate data. To a first order, welfare is summarized by total factor productivity and by the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country,...

This article reviews theories of investment behavior and examines empirical studies of investment in developing countries. The emphasis is on understanding the interactions among macroeconomic policies, structural adjustment and private investment. The article deals with the effect of exchange...

This paper studies the causes and consequences of informality and applies the analysis to countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. It starts with a discussion on the definition and measures of informality, as well as on the reasons why widespread informality should be of great concern. The...

The authors investigate the patterns and determinants of the currency risk premium in two currency boards-Argentina and Hong Kong. Despite the presumed rigidity of currency boards, currency premium is almost always positive and at times very large. Its term structure is usually upward sloping,...

Credibility and transparency are at the core of the current debate about exchange rate regimes. The steady growth in the magnitude and variability of international capital flows has complicated the question of whether to use floating, fixed, or intermediate exchange rate regimes. Emerging market...

A recent, but rapidly growing, literature has focused on the impact of uncertainty and instability on the adoption of fixed investment projects, showing that if the latter are costly or impossible to reverse, uncertainty can become a powerful investment deterrent. The purpose of this paper is...