Based on a survey that we designed and that covers a stratified random sample of 12,400 firms in 120 cities in China with firm-level accounting information for 2002-2004, this paper examines the presence of systematic distortions in capital allocation that result in uneven marginal returns to...

Based on a survey that we designed and that covers a stratified random sample of 12,400 firms in 120 cities in China with firm-level accounting information for 2002-2004, this paper examines the presence of systematic distortions in capital allocation that result in uneven marginal returns to...

We suggest that the 'poverty-efficiency' aid allocation is merely a benchmark guide if a donor lacks other information about the country and also the power to change or prevail over government preferences. We argue that in most circumstances donors have only limited scope for the latter and...

A key issue today is the effect of globalisation on inequality and poverty. Well over half the developing world lives in globalising economies that have seen large increases in trade and significant declines in tariffs. They are catching up the rich countries while the rest of the developing...

David Dollar and Edward Wolff look at claims that a deindustrialized United States is on the road to secondrate status in the global marketplace and find them to be both unfounded and simplistic. Their systematic and empirical investigation of the mechanisms through which countries like Japan...

China presents several macroeconomic patterns that appear inconsistent with standard stylized facts about economic development and hence inconsistent with the standard neoclassical growth model. We show that Chinese macroeconomic patterns instead appear consistent with an environment where state...

Social welfare functions that assign weights to individuals based on their income levels can be used to document the relative importance of growth and inequality changes for changes in social welfare. In a large panel of industrial and developing countries over the past 40 years, most of the...