We use recent immigration data from 195 countries and propose an index of population diversity based on people's birthplaces. This new index is then decomposed into a size (share of foreign born) and a variety (diversity of immigrants) component and is available for 1990 and 2000 disaggregated...

In relation to the concept of governance as defined by the World Bank, this article reviews the mistakes and lessons learned from Nigeria's attempt at economic development over the final three or four decades of the 20th century. Special attention is given to the adverse impact of the several...

We employ the “social conditions of innovative enterprise” framework to analyze the key determinants of China’s development path from the economic reforms of 1978 to the present. First, we focus on how government investments in human capabilities and physical infrastructure provided...

In the past decade, the World Bank has promoted improving business environments as a key strategy for development, which has led to a significant amount of investment in collecting firm-level investment climate surveys across countries. What lessons have emerged from the papers using these new...

Taking off from the self-evident fact that the population variable centrally figures in both labor and product markets, this paper argues that the growth rate of population, its age structure and spatial distribution should be key considerations in a country's development strategy to promote...

In the late 1990s, as economists looked back the development period in Africa since 1970s, they put forward the notion “African growth tragedy” , meaning that Africa's poor growth and resulting low income is associated with low schooling, political instability, underdeveloped financial...

Taking off from the self-evident fact that the population variable centrally figures in both labor and product markets, this paper argues that the growth rate of population, its age structure and spatial distribution should be key considerations in a country’s development strategy to promote...

The effects of ethnic geography, i.e., the distribution of ethnic groups across space, on economic, political and social outcomes are not well understood. We develop a novel index of ethnic segregation that takes both ethnic and spatial distances between individuals into account. Importantly, we...