After World War II, a new disciplinary field called “development economics” emerged, as economists began to shape specific theories in order to address the practical problems they were facing in less developed countries. Theory arose out of practice, in the sense that the shaping of...

Given a growing recognition by both the general public and international development agencies that a fundamental requirement for economic and social development is a corruption free governance, this article analyzes the macroeconomics of corruption within the context of Cost-Benefit analysis;...

This paper studies the role of disagreement in amplifying housing cycles. Speculation is easier in the land market than in the housing market due to frictions that make renting less efficient than owner-occupancy. As a result, undeveloped land both facilitates construction and intensifies the...

This paper uses a combination of survey questions to instructors and data collected from course syllabi and examinations to examine how the subject of development economics is taught at the undergraduate and masters levels in developing countries, and benchmark this against undergraduate classes...

Social norms affect almost every aspect of people?s lives, and can be an obstacle to or support economic development. This paper outlines what social norms are and how they work, providing examples from everyday life and from development case studies. Sometimes not much can be done about...

The rapid growth of trust funds at multilateral development organizations has been widely neglected in the academic literature so far. Using a simple illustrative model, this paper examines the choice by sovereign donors among various trust fund options. The authors contend that the choice among...

The origins of “capital fundamentalism” – the notion that physical capital accumulation is the primary determinant of economic growth – have been often ascribed to Harrod's and Domar's proposition that the rate of growth is the product of the saving rate and of the output-capital ratio....

Since we introduced the term ?middle-income trap? in 2006, it has become popular among policy makers and researchers. In May 2015, a search of Google Scholar returned more than 3,000 articles including the term and about 300 articles with the term in the title. This paper provides a...

Developing countries have urbanized rapidly since 1950. To explain urbanization, standard models emphasize rural-urban migration, focusing on rural push factors (agricultural modernization and rural poverty) and urban pull factors (industrialization and urban-biased policies). Using new...

Development economics in the 1950s and 1960s, as Tinbergen and Adelman saw it, was a “groping in the dark.” Besides the limited knowledge of dynamic mechanisms, the lack of data was a severe problem for any attempt at modeling, whether macroeconomic, input-output or in the tradition of...