A vast literature on locally-managed irrigation systems provides important lessons regarding the experience of irrigators with community management. This review draws upon research in sociology, anthropology, political science, engineering and economic theory to suggest a framework for...

Though widespread, the practice of public subsidies for cultural activity lacks a rigorous and consistent economic rationale. We analyze a canonical market structure that characterizes much cultural activity: the competition of mass-produced goods with heterogeneous non-standardized goods that...

To analyze the effect of asset inequality on cooperation within a group, we consider a two-player noncooperative model of conservation of a common-pool resource (CPR): a fishery. We give necessary and sufficient conditions such that conservation is a Nash equilibrium, and we show that increasing...

Latin America has not neglected fiscal policy. Since the end of the debt crisis of the 1980s, governments in the region have tightened their belts assiduously. Fiscal deficits have fallen from 11 per cent of public revenues in the 1970s and 1980s, to only 8 per cent since 2000. The year-to-year...

This policy insight introduces the Gender, Institutions and Development Data Base: a new tool to determine and analyse obstacles to women's economic development.

In November 2005, Glenys Kinnock, Co-President of the ACP EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly, reported that “there are more nurses from Malawi in Manchester than in Malawi and more doctors from Ethiopia in Chicago than Ethiopia.”1 These Africans had been lured North by work permits targeted at...

The tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean on 26 December 2004, to which more than 225 000 deaths had been attributed by the United Nations’ six-month review in June 2005, elicited a worldwide humanitarian relief effort unprecedented in its scale; individuals, firms, non-governmental...

Aid and trade policies – in OECD countries and in developing countries – might reinforce each other to promote development, or they might be substitutes: the sign of the correlation between trade and aid flows depends on the context. East Asia’s rapid growth demonstrates the important...