Digital technologies have permeated modern life, and their impact on creative work has been revolutionary. This revolution, as widely noted, has disrupted the making, distribution, and consumption of creative output. On the downside, key concerns include Internet-induced piracy and inequality....

Human capital investments in Pakistan are performing poorly; school enrollment is low, the high school dropout rate is high, and there is a definite gender gap in education. The authors conducted field surveys in 25 Pakistani villages and integrated their field observations, economic theory, and...

Business enterprises and non-agricultural startups in rural economies play crucial roles in ending the vicious cycle of poverty. The propagation of business enterprises are, however, subject to a high degree of institutional frictions and vacuums e.g., information; but mobile infrastructure...

The rapid pace of economic growth in China has been unprecedented since the start of economic reforms in late 1970s. It has delivered higher incomes and made the largest single contribution to global poverty reduction. Measured by international poverty lines, from 1978-2004, the absolute poor...

Most discussions of the digital divide treat it as a "North-South" issue, but the conventional dichotomy doesn't apply to cell phones in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although almost all Sub-Saharan countries are poor by international standards, they exhibit great disparities in coverage by cell telephone...

Policymakers are simultaneously concerned about the consequences of a worsening "digital divide" between rich and poor countries and hopeful that information and computing technologies could increase economic growth in developing countries. But very little research has explored the reasons for...

Rapid growth of Internet use in high-income economies, has raised the specter of a "digital divide" that will marginalize developing countries, because they can neither afford Internet access, nor use it effectively when it is available. Using a new cross-country data set, the authors...

Many observers attributed the rapid productivity growth observed in the United States in the mid- to late 1990s, to the growing use of information, and the Internet. This in turn created concern that developing, and transition economies - where use of information technology, and the Internet was...

Uninsured risk constrains households in their production decisions in many developing countries. Similarly to crop insurance, employment guarantees can support farmers in managing agricultural production risks. Evidence from representative panel data of Andhra Pradesh, India, suggests that the...