Politics and the political economy matter for whether and how reforms happen in developing as well as in developed countries. The World Bank as an institution and its individual country and task teams has been grappling with this issue for many years. The good practice framework described here...

Military expenditure in developing countries raises complex questions regarding growth, development, security and governance. This chapter provides an analytical survey of the effects and causes of defense spending in developing economies. Using stylized facts, theoretical models and empirical...

We test the reproducibility and replicability of Dincecco et al. (2022), which reports a positive relationship between pre-colonial interstate warfare and long-run development patterns across India. Overall, we confirm that all of the study's estimates are computationally reproducible by using...

Purpose - During the Communist Party of China's endeavors over the past century, China has created "two miracles," namely, large-scale and rapid economic development and long-term social stability. Design/methodology/approach - The causes for China's achieving the "two miracles" lie in the...

In this paper we study the incentives for basic-research investments by governments in a globalized world. For this purpose, we develop a two-country Schumpeterian growth model in which each country chooses its basic-research investments. We find that a country's basic-research investments...