Social instability is a concept that economists rarely analyse, and yet it can lurk behind much economic policy-making.  China’s leadership has often publicly expressed its concerns to avoid ‘social instability’.  It is viewed as a threat both to the political order and to...

How much does public capital matter for economic growth? How large should it be? This paper attempts to answer these questions, taking the case of SSA countries. It develops and estimates a model that posits a nonlinear relationship between public investment and growth, to determine the...

This paper investigates structural change in Argentina between 1900 and 1973.  It has been argued that trade policy under import-substituting industrialization disfavoured agriculture and led to a "technological lag" in the sector, and that this explains agriculture's relative decline during a...

The paper measures productivity growth in seventeen countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  GDP per worker and capital per worker in 1985 US dollars were estimated for 1820, 1850, 1880, 1913, 1939 by using historical national accounts to back cast Penn World Table data for 1965...

This paper uses the pooled mean group estimator and an extended annual dataset to examine the effectiveness of aid on growth. The results indicate a significant long-run impact of aid on growth, but conditioning aid on `good` policy reduces the long-run growth rate.

Banerjee and Iyer (henceforth, BI) (American Economic Review, 2005) find that districts which the British assigned to landlord revenue systems systematically underperform districts with non-landlord based revenue systems, especially in agricultural investment and productivity and mainly after...

Social mobility is the hope of economic development and the mantra of a good society. There are disagreements about what constitutes social mobility, but there is broad agreement that people should have roughly equal chances of success regardless of their economic status at birth. Concerns about...

The paper investigates the impact of growth on poverty in Ethiopia by analysing panel data covering 1994-97, a period of economic recovery driven by peace, good weather, and much improved macroeconomic management. The analysis of poverty shows land ownership, education, type of crops planted,...