We study how local connections to persons in influential positions affect access to lucrative international migrant jobs and attractive government employment. In rural Nepal, it would not be surprising if social status, captured by a household’s caste but also by wealth or education, strongly...

The current shortage of health workers in many low-income countries poses a threat to the quality of health services. When the number of patients per health worker grows sufficiently high, there will be insufficient time to diagnose and treat all patients adequately. This paper tests the...

Livelihood strategies are identified at the household level as a function of assets held, using survey data. Only endowments that are likely to be predetermined are included in the empirical analysis. As expected, land, household size, age and primary education turn out to be important...

This paper examines recent experiences from sub-Saharan Africa in combating corruption in customs. It argues that integrity reforms have been too focused on reforming formal institutions, and too little attention has been paid to the political economy of reforms and the role of informal...

Chinese outward foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased substantially in recent years. Though this has generated considerable interest in the motivations and drivers of Chinese investment abroad, there have been few systematic empirical studies of these questions. This paper performs an...

Given that the motivation for aid is poverty reduction, I argue that Aid for Trade (AfT) measures need to demonstrate that they are effective and have a potential impact on poverty. The debate about aid for trade measures lacks a focus on the poverty dimension of trade. Trade is an indirect...

Does poverty or inequality explain the Maoist insurgency in Nepal? In contrast to previous studies we limit the analysis to the hill/mountain districts of Nepal as very few terai (plains) districts are classified as Maoist. And we conduct separate analyses for Maoist control and level of...

There is increased awareness that success among small scale entrepreneurs in developing countries requires more than microfinance, and that an important limiting factor for business growth is the level of human capital among the entrepreneurs. The present paper uses a randomized control trial to...

We develop a new theory of employee referrals into informal low - and unskilled jobs in developing country labour markets. Employers use social preferences between referees and new recruits to mitigate moral hazard problems in the workplace. We show that employers prefer to hire workers with...

Crime and the fear of being hit by crime and small-scale violence are key economic and social problems in most developing countries, not least felt strongly by the poor. Extensive corruption in the police, experienced or perceived, contributes seriously to the problem. A key question raised in...