Growing concern that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be achieved by 2015 should not obscure the bigger picture that development progress has been occurring at unprecedented levels over the past thirty or more years. At the same time, the MDGs may perhaps create an unnecessary...

The international goal for rich countries to devote 0.7% of their national income to development assistance has become a cause célèbre for aid activists and has been accepted in many official quarters as the legitimate target for aid budgets. The origins of the target, however, raise serious...

What should the World Bank optimally do with the US$10 to $20 billion it can loan each year? Has it, in fact, done what is optimal? These two questions, one theoretical and one empirical, have been around for a long time and remain controversial in both academic and policy circles. This study...

Augmented measures of savings and wealth in the national accounts are critical to conceptualizing and achieving sustainable development. After developing the theory of genuine savings-traditional net savings less the value of resource depletion and environmental degradation plus the value of...

Growing concern that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be achieved by 2015 should not obscure the bigger picture that development progress has been occurring at unprecedented levels over the past thirty or more years. At the same time, the MDGs may perhaps create an unnecessary...

The international goal for rich countries to devote 0.7% of their national income to development assistance has become a cause célèbre for aid activists and has been accepted in many official quarters as the legitimate target for aid budgets. The origins of the target, however, raise serious...

We estimate the "place premium"--the wage gain that accrues to foreign workers who arrive to work in the United States. First, we estimate the predicted, purchasing-power adjusted wages of people inside and outside the United States who are otherwise observably identical--with the same country...

Concern has intensified in recent years that many instrumental variables used in widely-cited growth regressions may be invalid, weak, or both. Attempts to remedy this general problem remain inadequate. We demonstrate that a range of published growth regressions may contain spurious results...

It is easy to learn the average income of a resident of El Salvador or Albania. But there is no systematic source of information on the average income of a Salvadoran or Albanian. We create a first estimate a new statistic: income per natural—the mean annual income of persons born in a given...

Global private capital flows have barely touched the poorest nations; the rich invest mostly with the rich. Confronted with this wealth bias in cross-border investment flows, one of the starkest facts of the global economy, theorists and empiricists have spent roughly the last decade looking for...