Since the beginning of the 1990s Japan has experienced economic stagnation. The economy had been allowed to overheat in the 1980s and a bubble had been built up. When this burst, there was massive asset-deflation, which led to a banking crisis. The bad debts were not faced up to effectively....

This paper investigates dynamics of poverty in urban Ethiopia using both subjective and objective definitions of poverty. The two sets of estimates of persistence and recurrence of poverty are similar, suggesting that consumption-based mobility estimates are not seriously distorted by...

Almost all informal firms in the Kenyan manufacturing sector are managed by Kenyans of African origin. Formal enterprises are run by Kenyans of both African and Asian origin. These three groups are distinct in terms of experience, productivity and access to finance. Asian formal firms are the...

This study is about institution building with limited resources. Through a case study of the establishment of a supreme audit institution (SAI) in Rwanda, we examine the tensions between institutional first-best benchmarks and local operational constraints in a developing country...

This paper reviews recent research dealing with the relationships between economic growth, income distribution, and poverty. This generally fails to find any systematic pattern of change in income distribution during recent decades. Neither does it find any systematic link from fast growth to...

Wage effects of immigration are investigated in a setting with international capital mobility, which eliminates two-thirds of the native wage-effects of immigration. Without international capital mobility, overall gains from migration in the immigration region are only a small fraction of total...