We show, for the first time, a causal effect of local economic growth on infant mortality. We use geo-referenced data for non-migrating mothers from 46 developing countries and 128 DHS survey rounds and combine it with nighttime luminosity data at a granular level. Using mother mixed effects we...

4207 I examine the association between nighttime light luminosity and ten pollution measures (CO2, CO, NOx,SO2, NMVOC, NH3, BC, OC, PM10 and PM2.5) across different political regimes at a local level. Although the effects of the political system and economic growth on pollution have been widely...

Corruption is widely believed to negatively affect economic growth. However, many East and Southeast Asia countries either achieved or currently are achieving impressively rapid economic growth despite widespread corruption - the 'East Asian Paradox'. Is this negative relationship equally likely...

This paper uses recently published top 1% income share series in studying the inequality-development association. The top income shares data are of high quality and cover about a century for some countries and thus provide an interesting opportunity to study slow development processes. The...

Estimating the impact of HIV/AIDS epidemic on economic growth is challenging because of endogeneity concerns. In this paper, we use novel data on male circumcision and distance from the first HIV outbreak as instrumental variables for the HIV/AIDS epidemic in 241 regions across 25 countries in...

This paper examines the connections of structural change and economic openness to labour productivity growth using a panel data set of 41 countries in sub-Saharan Africa for the period 1991-2015. A dynamic panel model of cross-country productivity growth is estimated using the least squares with...

The Republic of South Africa faces the imperative of escaping economic stagnation. This paper seeks to synthesize results from a series of research efforts, including but not limited to the work conducted under the UNU-WIDER project on 'Regional growth and development in Southern Africa', and...

This paper employs a cointegrated vector autoregressive model to assess the growth effect of aid in Uganda over the period 1972-2008. Results show that aid in Uganda has had both direct and indirect beneficial association with growth; that it is the productivity and not the stead state level of...

An influential paper by Berg et al., 'Redistribution, inequality, and growth: new evidence', uses the SWIID data to examine the impact of inequality and redistribution on growth in both developing and developed countries. It finds that while inequality is harmful for growth, redistribution does...

The main argument of this paper is that there is considerable heterogeneity in the way aid can shape tax performance in developing countries: through behavioural effects, donor conditionality, recipient policy reform and technical assistance; and these effects are country-specific. We investigate...