Many of the world.s poorest countries can be described as .fragile states. wherein governments cannot or will not provide an environment for households to reduce, mitigate, or cope with poverty and other risks to wellbeing. Many of these states are in conflict or just emerging from conflict. The...

The first Millennium Development Goal aims to halve the number of people in the world living in extreme poverty. In this Research Brief, emanating from the UNU-WIDER project on .Fragility and Development., the premise is that we should also be concerned about households who are vulnerable to...

The global economic crisis, which erupted about one year ago with the US sub-prime mortgage crisis and the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, painfully reminds us on how vulnerable developing countries can be to external shocks.This short paper provides an overview of recent...

The paper documents the economic development strategies pursued by the Dominican Republic. The study argues that the country’s success results from the implementation of a three-pronged economic development strategy. The first prong relates to diversifying production and the second to...

The paper discusses views on China and India as country role models. In so doing the article recounts the economic and political reforms pursued by the two countries. The paper also outlines the outstanding reforms and the bottlenecks that could jeopardize economic performance and development...

The paper builds a framework for the analysis of research and development (R&D) offshoring and outsourcing that encompasses several strands of the economics literature. It surveys the predictions from key theoretical models advanced in the literature on international trade, foreign direct...

Using a panel of 139 countries over the period 1992-2003, we analyse the links between export productivity, economic growth and financial development indicators. We then investigate whether the links observed in China, India and Brazil systematically differ from those observed in other countries...

This study investigates the effect of trade liberalization on export growth, import growth, the trade balance and the current account of the balance of payments in 17 least developed countries (LDCs) over the period 1970 to 2001. The paper also assesses the marginal relation between capital...

This paper investigates the dynamic relationship between terms of trade shocks and the current account in selected small islands developing states. The findings show that the terms of trade explain a significant proportion of the variation in the current account balances. Also, the current...