A country’s judiciary, police, and security forces are essential to protect the State from external aggression. By virtue of the State’s monopoly of coercion, they maintain a stable legal framework and the safety of persons and property. All these activities enhance a society’s...

Per capita output is more volatile in middle-income economies than in both low-income and high-income economies. We examine this pattern in a two-period overlapping generations model with two productive sectors (a developed sector and a subsistence sector) and a credit sector. In the early and...

This paper formalizes the role of legal infrastructure in economic development in a general equilibrium model with endogenously determined property rights enforcement. It illustrates the mutual importance of property rights protection and market production by the model’s multiplicity of...

This paper examines the role financial markets play in the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and economic development. We model an economy with a continuum of agents indexed by their level of ability. Agents can either work for the foreign company or undertake entrepreneurial...

We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining cross-country income levels using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions ""trumps"" everything else. Controlling for...

This paper studies the prospects for sustainable growth and economic development in Gabon, in the face of a severe decline in its main source of income and growth, i.e. oil. A simple Computable General Equilibrium model is used to simulate the development of the non-oil economy under various...

This paper offers possible explanations for three generally observed facts about fiscal policy and development: (F1) The relative size of government increases as an economy develops, (F2) The rise in government and taxation are associated with rising or constant economic growth rates, and (F3)...

This is the fifth of a series of papers that are being written as part of a larger project to estimate a small quarterly Global Projection Model (GPM). The GPM project is designed to improve the toolkit to which economists have access for studying both own-country and cross-country linkages. In...

This paper investigates the linkages between oil and growth in Congo, where there appears to be no evidence of direct spillover effects. The empirical results suggest however that political instability has a negative effect on non-oil growth, and that the presence of oil could have fueled...

We use a calibrated multi-sector DSGE model to analyze the likely impact of oil windfalls on the Ghanaian economy, under alternative fiscal and monetary policy responses. We distinguish between the short-run impact, associated with demand-related pressures, and the medium run impact on...