The international effort to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 has given fresh prominence to the idea of poverty traps, a notion that was widely current in the 1950s. This idea, most actively promoted by economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and...

The 19th century economist Thomas Robert Malthus hypothesized that the long-run supply of labor is completely elastic at a fixed wage-income evel because population growth tends to outstrip real output growth. Dynamic equilibrium with constant income and population is achieved through...

Recent influential studies among development economists claim that aid to developing countries is not nearly as beneficial to recipient nations as had been expected. Are these statistical analyses right? One problem is that total aid, on which most studies are based, includes two distinct kinds...

The paper uses a range of methods to assess changes in income, poverty and income distribution between 2001 and 2002 in Kazakhstan. It is found that outstanding GDP growth has been translated into very modest growth in mean household income. However, both income poverty and inequality have...

This paper is a theoretical and empirical exploration of the connections between sovereignty (or its absence) and growth rates in lagging countries over the period 1870 to 1950. Using a four-fold taxonomy of sovereignty, our estimates of sovereignty differentials for growth rates of per capita...

Using a Global database, stylized evidences are presented to show that Gini coefficient of income inequality varies across skill cohorts in all the regions. Also, starting from a relatively egalitarian income distribution, growth reduces inequality for the relatively unskilled cohorts for which...

This paper examines the link between foreign aid, economic growth, and welfare in a small open economy. External transfers impinge on the recipient's macroeconomic performance by affecting resource allocation decisions and relative prices. The endogeneity of the labor-leisure choice and the...

We analyze the growth impact of official development assistance to developing countries. Our approach is different from that of previous studies in two major ways. First, we disentangle the effects of two kinds of aid: developmental and non-developmental. Second, our specifications allow for the...

This article provides an in-depth analysis of Russia's post-crisis growth, with a view to understanding the prospects for its continuation. It examines in detail the chief drivers of growth, as well as the main developments and policies that have been underlying it. A key finding is that the...

This paper characterizes the optimal path of foreign public debt that can support politically unanimous (Pareto welfare improving) economic growth under uncertainty. The feasibility of the plan depends on whether the maintenance of political consensus in the debtor country requires additional...