The paper develops a simple model to demonstrate that, paradoxically, greater competition may exacerbate the problem of corruption. Market participants engaging in corrupt practices enjoy lower production costs -- maybe because they pay a bribe to avoid installing the environmental safeguards...

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...

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...

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...

In recent years, the term "middle-income trap" has entered common parlance in the development policy community. The term itself often has not been precisely defined in the incipient literature. This paper discusses in more detail definitional issues on the so-called middle-income trap. The paper...

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...

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...

There has been substantial research in recent years examining the regional evolution of economic growth across states in Mexico -- with a particular focus on the post North American Free Trade Agreement period. There is also a vast literature using cross-country regressions to examine...