Agriculture is the largest sector in most sub-Saharan economies in terms of employment, and it plays an important role in supplying food and export earnings. Rural poverty rates remain high, and labor productivity is strikingly low. This paper asks how these factors shape the role of agriculture...

Many theories link urbanization with industrialization; in partic- ular, with the production of tradable (and typically manufactured) goods. We document that the expected relationship between urbanization and the levelofindustrializationisnotpresentinasampleofdevelopingeconomies. The breakdown...

Many widely used economic models implicitly assume that income shares should be identical across time and space. Although time-series data from industrial countries appear consistent with this notion, cross-section data generally appear to contradict the assumption. A commonly used calculation...

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that malaria, a parasitic disease transmitted by mosquitoes, causes over 300 million episodes of “acute illness" and more than one million deaths annually. Most of the deaths occur in poor countries of the tropics, and especially sub-Saharan...

The large current account and capital account imbalances among OECD countries continue to attract attention among policy makers and researchers. This paper explores the extent to which migration-related capital flows can explain the movements and magnitudes of current and capital account...

Throughout human history, livestock producers have relied on a vibrant international exchange of genentic resources to achieve improvements in the quality and productivity of their animals. In recent years, however, some observers have argued that changes in the legal, technological, and...

Recent studies argue that cross-country labor productivity differences are much larger in agriculture than in the aggregate. We reexamine the agricultural productivity data underlying this conclusion using new evidence from disaggregate sources. We find that for the world's staple...