Most conventional accounts of India’s recent economic performance associate the pick-up in economic growth with the liberalization of 1991. This Paper demonstrates that the transition to high growth occurred around 1980, a full decade before economic liberalization. We investigate a number of...

We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions 'trumps' everything else. Once institutions are...

This paper furnishes robust evidence that the WTO has had a powerful and positive impact on trade, amounting to about 120% of additional world trade (or US$8 trillion in 2003 alone). The impact has, however, been uneven. This, in many ways, is consistent with theoretical models of the GATT/WTO....

Regional integration is on the rise again, despite its apparent failure among developing countries in the past. The paper first surveys the ambiguous economics of customs unions. We emphasize that the traditional dichotomy between `trade creation' and `trade diversion' is not particularly...

In thinking about policy, academic economists alternate between theoretical models in which governments can design finely-tuned optimal interventions and practical considerations which usually assume the government to be incompetent and hostage to special interests. I argue in this paper that...

Controlling for labour productivity, income levels, and other possible determinants, there is a robust and statistically significant association between the extent of democratic rights and wages received by workers. The association exists both across countries and over time within countries. The...

I document a significant deindustrialization trend in recent decades, that goes considerably beyond the advanced, post-industrial economies. The hump-shaped relationship between industrialization (measured by employment or output shares) and incomes has shifted downwards and moved closer to the...

The contemporary approach to political economy is built around vested interests -- elites, lobbies, and rent-seeking groups which get their way at the expense of the general public. The role of ideas in shaping those interests is typically ignored or downplayed. Yet each of the three components...

The design of institutions is shaped by a fundamental trade-off. On the one hand, relationships and heterogeneity push governance down. On the other, the scale and scope benefits of market integration push governance up. A corner solution is rarely optimal. An intermediate outcome, a world...

Africa’s recent growth performance has raised expectations of a bright economic future for the continent after decades of decline. Yet there is a genuine question about whether Africa’s growth can be sustained, and if so, at what level. The balance of the evidence suggests caution on the...