The politics, rules, and institutions of cooperation among nations have not kept up with the demands from global citizens for changes in the global political order. Whether norms and policies can make the global politics of managing the global economy more effective, more legitimate, and more...

In this paper we identify a group of people in Latin America and other developing countries that are not poor but not middle class either. We define them as the vulnerable “strugglers”, people living in households with daily income per capita between $4 and $10 (at constant 2005 PPP dollar)....

We argue that survey-based median household consumption expenditure (or income) per capita be incorporated into standard development indicators, as a simple, robust, and durable indicator of typical individual material well-being in a country. Using household survey data available for low- and...

We consider economic development of Sub-Saharan Africa from the perspective of slow convergence of productivity, both across sectors and across firms within sectors. Why have “productivity enclaves”, islands of high productivity in a sea of smaller low-productivity firms, not diffused more...

Africa's industrial progress has been disappointing. With the exception of South African auto components and garments, both of which have benefited from special incentives, Africa exports almost no manufactured goods that are not based on the processing of raw materials. Despite considerable...

Our central question is whether African countries can break into global manufacturing in a substantial way. Using a newly-constructed panel of firm-level data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, we look at labor costs in a range of low and middle income countries in Africa and elsewhere....

Levels and changes in the value of exports and imports divided by aggregate GDP (the trade/GDP ratio) are occasionally used as measures of trade openness. The oft-quoted work of Dollar and Kraay (2001) and the World Bank (2002) uses changes in the trade/GDP as a basis for classifying countries...

While most technical assessments classify privatization as a success, it remains widely and increasingly unpopular, largely because of the perception that it is fundamentally unfair, both in conception and execution. We review the increasing (but still uneven) literature and conclude that most...

In 1999, the United States and other major donor countries supported an historic expansion of the heavily indebted poor country (HIPC) debt relief initiative. HIPC had two primary goals: reduce poor countries' debt burdens to levels that would allow them to achieve sustainable growth; and...

This paper proposes the creation of a "Stability and Social Investment Facility" (SSF) to be housed either at the IMF or the World Bank. It would be a long-term facility to help high-debt emerging market countries cope with and ultimately overcome what will otherwise remain a chronic structural...