Much of the academic debate on the effectiveness of foreign aid is centered on the relationship between aid and growth. Different aid-growth studies find conflicting results: aid promotes growth everywhere; aid has a zero or negative impact on growth everywhere; or the effect of aid on growth...

China in the past few years has emerged as a net foreign creditor on the international scene with net foreign assets slightly greater than zero percent of wealth. This is surprising given that China is a relatively poor country with a capital-labor ratio about one-fifth the world average and...

Recent literature has emphasized the importance of transport costs and infrastructure in explaining trade, access to markets, and increases in per capita income. For most Latin American countries transport costs are a greater barrier to U.S. markets than import tariffs. The authors investigate...

Vietnam grew rapidly in the 1990s, and yet by many measures it has poor economic institutions. Dollar seeks to explain this apparent anomaly. Between the 1980s and 1990s Vietnam carried out significant economic reforms, notably stabilization, the introduction of positive real interest rates,...

The authors revisit the relationship between aid and growth using a new data set focusing on the 1990s. The evidence supports the view that the impact of aid depends on the quality of state institutions and policies. The authors use an overall measure of institutions and policies popular in the...

Drawing on recently completed firm-level surveys in Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Honduras, India, Nicaragua, Pakistan, and Peru, this paper investigates the relationship between investment climate and international integration. These standardized surveys of large, random samples of firms in common...

One of the most contentious issues of globalization is the effect of global economic integration on inequality and poverty. This paper documents five trends in the modern era of globalization, starting around 1980. Trend #1: Poor country growth rates have accelerated and are higher than rich...

Viet Nam is an economic success story - it transformed itself from a country in the 1980s as one of the poorest in the world, to a country in the 1990s with one of the world's highest growth rates. With the adoption of a new market-oriented policies, Viet Nam averaged an economic growth rate of...

One of the most contentious issues of globalization is the effect of global economic integration on inequality and poverty. This article documents five trends in the modern era of globalization, starting around 1980. The first trend is that growth rates in poor economies have accelerated and are...

China has been the most successful developing country in this modern era of globalization. Since initiating economic reform after 1978, its economy has expanded at a steady rate over 8 percent per capita, fueling historically unprecedented poverty reduction (the poverty rate declined from over...