Countries compete with one another for funds distributed by nongovernment organizations (NGOs). We examine the competition over poverty and governance conducted by a NGO in the allocation of its funds among potential recipient countries. The NGO in its decisionmaking process also takes into...

Growth and poverty reduction in Africa are weakly linked. This paper argues that the reason is that Africa has failed to create enough good jobs. Structural transformation - the relative growth of employment in high productivity sectors - has not featured in Africa's post-1995 growth story. As a...

This paper argues that official development assistance (foreign aid) is partly responsible for the lack of structural change in Africa. Africa's development partners have devoted too few resources and too little attention to two critical constraints to private investment, infrastructure and...

Growth and poverty reduction in Africa are weakly linked. This paper argues that the reason is that Africa has failed to create enough good jobs. Structural transformation - the relative growth of employment in high productivity sectors - has not featured in Africa's post-1995 growth story. As a...

Aid providers frequently link supporting small firms to job creation. Small firms create about half of new jobs in Africa, but they also have higher failure rates. Ignoring firm exit exaggerates net employment growth. Using panel data for Ethiopia, we find that small and large enterprises create...

Global modeling has evolved remarkably in the last two decades. Such evolution led it to perform today's role as an experimental laboratory for the social sciences, and particularly for applications to policy planning. Two of the most interesting applications to policy are to resource economics...

Why doesn’t capita flow to developing countries as predicted by the neoclassical model? Is the explanation simply that cross-country marginal productivity of capital (MPK) is equalized, and if so, why? We revisit these issues by unpacking MPK into its public and private components, since there...

This paper investigates the role of aid in mitigating the adverse effects of commodity export price shocks on growth in commodity-dependent countries. Using a large cross-country dataset, we find that negative shocks matter for short-term growth, while the ex ante risk of shocks does not seem to...

This paper investigates the role of aid in mitigating the adverse effects of commodity export price shocks on growth in commodity-dependent countries. Using a large crosscountry dataset, we find that negative shocks matter for short-term growth, while the ex ante risk of shocks does not seem to...

The linkages between trade and resource mobilization are complex and not well defined in theory. To what extent does trade policy affect resource mobilization and what are the mechanisms? We argue that trade policy is a key factor of influencing the domestic fundamental balance between aggregate...