Not all foreign direct investment (FDI) is alike as far as its impact on various dimensions of human development is concerned. This paper focuses, in particular, on child labor and it undertakes a cross-country empirical analysis of this issue, using data on 100 countries spanning the period...

This paper presents metrics to estimate the size of political dynasties in the 15th Congress of the Republic of the Philippines and analyze the relationship between political dynasty and socio-economic outcomes. Results show that political dynasties comprise 70 percent of jurisdiction-based...

Graduating from their checkered histories of financial instability and debt-related problems is a key policy objective in many emerging market economies. The global financial turmoil that erupted in 2008 underscores the importance of this issue once again. This article maps out some of the key...

Market failures, government failures and some of the characteristics of both the poor and business actors as well as their environment can act as barriers preventing the poor from participating more actively in markets, both as consumers and as producers. Private actors - including for-profit...

Roughly a little under half of the world's population is mired in poverty, most in the developing world--about 3 billion people constitute the global base of the economic pyramid. Building on earlier work by Banerjee and Duflo (2007), this paper uses survey data from three countries in order to...

Elaborating on the concepts first introduced in Global Public Goods, this book addresses the long overdue issue of how to adjust the concept of public goods to today's economic and political realities. The production of global public goods requires the orchestration of initiatives by a large...

Digging deeper into the self-protection rationale for holding reserves, this paper examines the empirical link between reserve holding patterns and crisis vulnerability, comparing the pre- and post-Asian crisis periods, and across different groups of developing countries. Analyzing data for 51...