We are not seeing faster progress against poverty amongst the poorest developing countries. Yet this is implied by widely accepted "stylized facts" about the development process. The paper tries to explain what is missing from those stylized facts. Consistently with models of economic growth...

May 2000 - Existing methods for assessing latent country or institutional performance can yield deceptive results. There have been many attempts to infer latent performance attributes of governments (or other institutions) from conditional comparisons that control for observed variables. Success...