We study the importance of the local elite as a determinant of the effectiveness of foreign aid in developing countries. An "extractive" elite will misuse aid flows, an issue that is probably as old as foreign aid itself. We proxy for the existence of an "extractive" elite by using an...

This paper studies the quantitative implications of changes in the composition of taxes for long-run growth and expected lifetime utility in the UK economy over 1970-2005. Our setup is a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model incorporating a detailed fiscal policy structure, and whose...

Using newly collected national and sub-national data, and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...

Governments are resource and bandwidth constrained, and hence need to prioritize productivity-enhancing policies. To do so requires information on the nature and magnitude of market failures on the one hand, and government's capacity to redress them successfully on the other. The paper reviews...

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has made slow but consistent progress addressing the imbalances induced by the pandemic in an international environment that is just now showing signs of stabilizing. Despite favorable macroeconomic management, high interest rates and fiscal imbalances...

The frequent recommendation to exclude the oil sector from economic analysis may be short-sighted, as adverse shocks to the oil industry are likely to affect other sectors through the financial and public sectors, with which the oil sector has many links. There are also significant long-run...

The authors analyze sectoral growth in Ecuador using multivariate cointegration analysis. They find significant long-run relationships between the agricultural industrial and service sectors. Moreover, they are able to derive dynamic sector models that combine the short-run links between the...

The authors analyze sectoral growth in Ecuador, using multivariate co-integration analysis. They find significant long-run relationships between the agricultural, industrial, and service sectors. Moreover, they are able to derive dynamic sector models that combine the short-run links between the...