Growth has accelerated in a wide range of developing countries over the last couple of decades, resulting in an extraordinary period of convergence with the advanced economies. We analyze this experience from the lens of structural change – the reallocation of labor from low- to...

Developing countries made considerable gains during the first decade of the 21st century. Their economies grew at unprecedented rates, resulting in large reductions in extreme poverty and a significant expansion of the middle class. But more recently that progress has slowed with an economic...

Large gaps in labor productivity between the traditional and modern parts of the economy are a fundamental reality of developing societies. In this paper, we document these gaps, and emphasize that labor flows from low-productivity activities to high-productivity activities are a key driver of...

Recent growth accelerations in Africa are characterized by increasing productivity in agriculture, a declining share of the labor force employed in agriculture and declining productivity in modern sectors such as manufacturing. To shed light on this puzzle, we disaggregate firms in the...

We contribute to the long debated issue of whether inward foreign direct investment (FDI) can stimulate investment in developing countries by introducing a novel measure of FDI, based on industry-level data. Our results suggest a positive impact of FDI on total investment – measured as the...

Using data from the Groningen Growth and Development Center's Africa Sector Database and the Demographic and Health Surveys, we show that much of Africa's recent growth and poverty reduction has been associated with a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture....

The 1990's dealt a blow to traditional Heckscher-Ohlin analysis of the relationship between trade and income inequality, as it became clear that rising inequality in low- income countries and other features of the data were inconsistent with that model. As a result, economists moved away from...

This paper examines a possible connection between China's massive rural to urban migration and high chemical fertilizer use rates during the late 1980s and 1990s. Using panel data on villages in rural China (1987-2002), we find that labor out-migration and fertilizer use per hectare are...

We show that much of Africa's recent growth and poverty reduction can be traced to a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture. This decline has been accompanied by a systematic increase in the productivity of the labor force, as it has moved from low...

We quantify foreign direct investment (FDI) spillovers by comparing changes in total factor productivity (TFP) among domestic plants in districts that attracted a large greenfield foreign plant and districts where greenfield FDI was licensed but not yet operational. Treated and untreated...