This volume presents new insights on marginality, i.e. the situation of people living on the edge of socio-economic and ecological systems. The marginality concept leads to different development policies. While the prevalence of poverty declined by about 50 percent in the past two decades, any...

This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion,...

Using cross-country and panel regressions, we investigate to what extent gender gaps in education and employment (proxied using gender gaps in labor force participation) reduce economic growth. Using most recent data and investigating a long time period (1960-2000), we update the results of...

This paper discusses the recent literature on the role of the state in economic development. It concludes that government incentives to enact sound policies are key to economic success. It also discusses the evidence on what happens after episodes of economic and political liberalizations,...

Interest in biofuels is growing worldwide as concerns about the security of energy supply and climate change are moving into the focus of policy makers. With the exception of bioethanol from Brazil, however, production costs of biofuels are typically much higher than those of fossil fuels.As a...

This paper discusses the difficulties associated with measuring entrepreneurship in developing countries. Three important dichotomies in the research on entrepreneurship are discussed: formal-informal, legal-illegal, and necessity-opportunity. Several common measures of entrepreneurship are...

This paper studies the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis in two areas with strong differences in economic development, sixteen OECD countries and sixteen Latin American economies. Applying panel cointegration and bootstrapping techniques that solve for cross-sectional dependence problems in the data,...