The actual distribution of world income across countries is extremely unequal, much higher than the within country inequality faced by most countries. The question studied in this paper is: How do international policies on aid, trade, and factor movements affect the international distribution of...

In many developing countries, achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 will require significant increases in expenditures on social services and in foreign assistance. It will also require careful planning of the sector allocation and sequencing of public spending. Especially...

Cash transfers targeted to poor people, but conditional on some behavior on their part, such as school attendance or regular visits to health care facilities, are being adopted in a growing number of developing countries. Even where ex-post impact evaluations have been conducted, a number of...

The authors develop a microeconometric method to account for differences across distributions of household income. Going beyond the determination of earnings in labor markets, they also estimate statistical models for occupational choice and for conditional distributions of education, fertility,...

This paper presents an original method to study individual earning dynamics using repeated cross-sectional data. Because panel data of individuals are seldom available in developing countries, it is difficult to study individual earning dynamics and related issues such as the propensity of...

This paper explores the hypothesis that the credibility of economic policy making in Argentina (or lack thereof) has impacted the volatility of economic performance. To establish the link, a historical review of economic policy making and economic outcomes over the quarter century is presented,...

This paper analyzes the spillover effects of U.S. monetary policy announcements on emerging market economies since end-2008, the period coinciding with the use of unconventional policy measures. Monetary policy surprises are measured by changes in two-year Treasury yields in short windows of...

This paper provides an historical overview of both the evolution of the economic performance of the developing world and the evolution of economic thought on development policy. The 20th century was broadly characterized by divergence between high-income countries and the developing world, with...

This paper analyzes the historical evolution of the international monetary system in the context of the rising role of developing countries in the world economy and the emerging multi-polar growth setting. It evaluates the stability of the current "non-system" and how the global economic context...

One of the two goals of the World Bank Group's new strategy is to promote shared prosperity, defined as the income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population. The simple monitoring indicator then is the income per capita of the bottom 40 percent of the population. The growth of this...