Journal Special Issue
Aid to Africa
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) give aid to Africa a new emphasis. Yet aid flows to Africa have trended downward over the last decade, and as a consequence more Africans now live in poverty. This is especially true of Sub-Saharan Africa. Any...
Working Paper
Mozambique’s Industrialization
After the Second World War, Mozambique went through a series of transformations, from an incipient industrializing colonial society to an independent country with a central planned economy, plus a regional and internal war, and finally from 1994...
Working Paper
Aid and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper is a contribution to the literature on aid and growth. Despite an extensive empirical literature in this area, existing studies have not addressed directly the mechanisms via which aid should affect growth. We identify investment as the...
Working Paper
Long-Term Growth and Welfare in Transitional Economies
This paper analyses the long-term growth and welfare impact of the transition to the market economy in the countries of Eastern Europe. We define welfare as the average real net wage after payments of social security contributions to fund a paygo...
Journal Article
The Forgotten Property Rights
Studies of land property rights usually focus on tenure security and transfer rights. Rights to determine how to use the land are regularly ignored. However, user rights are often limited. Relying on a unique Vietnamese panel data set at both...
Working Paper
The Investment Decline in Transition Economies
All centrally planned economies suffered from over-investment. Due to low capital productivity, reasonable growth rates in output could be maintained only with high investment/GDP ratios. Nevertheless, the sharp reduction in investment during...
Working Paper
Capital markets in sub-Saharan Africa
Capital markets facilitate capital growth by mobilizing savings and converting them into investments, and they are therefore a stimulant of economic growth. There is evidence that countries with high savings rates tend to grow faster. Although most...
Working Paper
The Financial Deepening-Productivity Nexus in China
The financial intermediation-growth nexus is a widely studied topic in the literature of development economics. Deepening financial intermediation may promote economic growth by mobilizing more investments, and lifting returns to financial resources...
Book Chapter
Tourism and Economic Growth
Using a panel vector autoregressive model this paper investigates the dynamic and endogeneous contribution of tourism to output based on a sample of 40 African countries for the period 1990–2006. Results from the study confirm tourism to be an...
Working Paper
Aid as a Catalyst for Pioneer Investment
I discuss how aid can support growth in small, isolated economies. Small markets frustrate scale economies and competition. Combined with high transport costs, essential inputs become prohibitively expensive. Breaking the coordination problem...
Working Paper
Aid and Investment in Statistics for Africa
Over many past decades countries in sub-Saharan Africa have received extensive bilateral and multilateral aid in support of the production of relevant, timely, and good quality data and statistics. But assessing aid effectiveness in the statistical...
Working Paper
Political Connections and Investment in Rural Vietnam
This paper uses household panel data from rural Vietnam to explore the effects of having a relative in a position of political or bureaucratic power on farmers’ agricultural investment decisions. Our main result is that households significantly...
Working Paper
Tourism and Economic Growth
Using a panel vector autoregressive model this paper investigates the dynamic and endogeneous contribution of tourism to output based on a sample of 40 African countries for the period 1990–2006. Results from the study confirm tourism to be an...
Working Paper
Institutional Investors, Corporate Ownership, and Corporate Governance
We examine the role of institutional investors in financial markets and in corporate governance. In many countries, institutional investors have become the predominant players in financial markets and their influence worldwide is growing, chiefly due...
Working Paper
Aid and Dutch Disease in the South Pacific
The impact of aid inflows on relative prices and output is ambiguous. Aid inflows that increase domestic expenditure are likely to cause real exchange rate appreciation, ceteris paribus. However, if this expenditure raises the capital stock in the...