"This paper highlights the difference between secure investor property rights and loosely defined individual property rights. Globalization and fiscal decentralization have intensified this difference. On the one hand, in the presence of mobile foreign direct investments and under the...

"Do the countries which grow share the same features as those which decline? How can some countries achieve such long-term sustainable growth while others fail so badly? This paper builds on the emerging literature on growth asymmetries by examining movement across income categories in the World...

"Fiscal federalism has been argued to intensify regional competition and promote economic growth. This paper is the first, to our knowledge, to empirically assess the patterns and extent of strategic tax competition between geographically neighboring governments in China. Using a panel data set...

Ethiopia’s national development strategy, A Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty for 2005/06 to 2009/10 (PASDEP) places a major emphasis on achieving high rates of agricultural and overall economic growth. Consistent with the PASDEP, Ethiopia is also in the...

In the context of the Ghanaian government’s objective of structural transformation with an emphasis on manufacturing, this paper provides a case study of economic transformation in Ghana, exploring patterns of growth, sectoral transformation, and agglomeration. We document and examine...

The improved performance of the agricultural sector in Africa south of the Sahara during the most recent decade (2000–2010) has raised questions about the drivers behind the growth. Skeptics argue that rising commodity prices, as world markets experience a commodity boom, are the main...

This paper estimates the potential effects of achieving the agricultural goals set out in Iraq’s National Development Plan (NDP) 2013–2017 using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model. The findings suggest that raising agricultural productivity in accordance with the NDP...

Africa’s recent economic growth is at a historical high, the patterns associated with this growth appear to be quite different from the Asian experiences where rapid growth was fueled by labor intensive, export-oriented manufacturing. Because this pattern differs with our typical view of...

Given recent interest in reducing undernutrition–particularly the role of nutrition-sensitive policies–this paper aims to quantitatively understand this surprising success story by analyzing the 2001, 2006, and 2011 rounds of Nepal’s Demographic Health Surveys. To do so, the...

The development debate in Africa south of the Sahara is often cast as “agriculture versus nonagriculture.†Yet this view overlooks the heterogeneity within these broad sectors and the synergies between them. We estimate sectoral poverty–growth elasticities using economywide...