Six randomized control trials were published simultaneously in one issue of the 'American Economic Journal: Applied Economics' in 2015. The studies show no or minimal impact from providing microloans to clients and have led many researchers and policy makers to conclude that microfinance has...

Development accounting literature usually attributes the observed cross-country variation in per capita income to differences in countries' factor endowments and total factor productivity (the Solow residual). While the former can be relatively straightforward interpreted and measured, the...

This paper argues that welfare programs are linked with the destruction of social capital, as measured by interpersonal trust in laboratory games. The paper employs experimental data for representative samples of individuals in four Latin American capital cities (Bogota, Lima, Montevideo, and...

It is often claimed that entrepreneurship is indispensable for economic growth and development. These claims are mostly generated by scholars working in the field of entrepreneurship and management studies. In contrast, development economics scholars seem to be less concerned about...

Chinese real export growth decelerated considerably during the last decade. This paper argues that the slowdown largely resulted from China moving to a more sophisticated mix of exports: China produced more sophisticated goods over which it had pricing power instead of producing greater volumes...

In the late 1970s Paul Samuelson drafted the outline of a paper, never published, with a critical assessment of the theoretical innovations of postwar development economics. He found the subject essentially intractable. The present paper discusses how that assessment fits in Samuelson's...

Richard A. Musgrave (1910-2007) is remembered today as the American economist who established modern foundations for public finance theory in the middle of the twentieth century. His work as a tax expert in developing countries has received little historical scrutiny. Musgrave was the chief...

The origins of "capital fundamentalism' – the notion that physical capital accumulation is the primary determinant of economic growth – have been often ascribed to H arrod's and Domar's proposition that the rate of growth is the product of the saving rate and of the outpu t - capital ratio....