Whether demands for bribes for particular government services are associated with expedited or delayed policy implementation underlies debates around the role of corruption in private sector development. The "grease the wheels” hypothesis, which contends that bribes act as speed money, implies...

Data from 121 diverse rural water projects provide strong statistical findings that increasing beneficiary participation directly causes better project outcomes. Three possible econometric objections to these findings are addressed and answered. The subjective nature of the data does not...

This article compares the statutory ad valorem tariff rates (official rates) with the ratio of tariff revenues to import values (collected rates) for Jamaica, Kenya, and Pakistan. It identifies four general features of the tariff codes, considers whether these features apply to all developing...

The historical path of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the United States is, except for the interlude of the Great Depression, well characterized by reasonably stable exponential trend growth with modest cyclical deviations: graphically, it is a modestly sloping, slightly bumpy hill....

Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop--based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. This article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources (those extracted from a narrow...

Cross-national data show no association between increases in human capital attributable to the rising educational attainment of the labor force and the rate of growth of output per worker. This implies that the association of educational capital growth with conventional measures of total factor...

World Bank economists are mostly practical people, people who try to answer the question, 'what exactly should this particular country do right now?' But if they had hoped that the growth regression lessons summarized in William Brock and Steven Durlauf's article would enhance their practical...

How much of the learning crisis can be addressed through inclusion, the equalization of grade attainment and learning outcomes across groups (e.g., girls/boys, rural/urban, poor/rich), and how much of the learning crisis requires improvement in the country's system of basic education to improve...

Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop-based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. This article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources (those extracted from a narrow geographic...