Despite the current fashion for issues such as institutional transparency or corruption, the modern policy development literature does too little to integrate the core ideas of modern political economy with standard economic theory. Little is done to distinguish the advice given to developing...

A recent line of research demonstrates that cognitive skills—intelligence quotient scores, math skills, and the like—have only a modest influence on individual wages, but are strongly correlated with national outcomes. Is this largely due to human capital spillovers? This paper argues that...