John Quiggin is an Australian economist and professor at the University of Queensland. He has also held academic positions at the Australian National University and James Cook University. Best known for his work on utility theory, Quiggin is among the top 500 economists in the world according to...

When government officials are involved in land transactions the scope for arbitrary decision making and corruption is large, and the land issue can turn into a political football among rival political parties.

Shantayanan Devarajan gave a lunch talk at a recent conference of civil society and technology people organized by the Tech@State folks at the U.S. State Department.

This article questions current empirical practice in the study of growth. It argues that much of the modern empirical growth literature is based on assumptions about regressors, residuals, and parameters that are implausible from the perspective of both economic theory and the historical...

How are resources allocated within extended families in developing economies? This question is investigated using a unique social experiment: the South African pension program. Under that program the elderly receive a cash transfer equal to roughly twice the per capita income of Africans in...

This article is motivated by the remarkable observation that children of land-rich households are often more likely to be in work than the children of land-poor households. The vast majority of working children in developing economies are in agricultural work, predominantly on farms operated by...

Despite recent multilateral efforts to single out child labor in debt bondage as one of the worst forms of child labor, several important questions have yet to be addressed: How pervasive is the phenomenon? Are there systematic correlations between the incidence of children in debt bondage and...

This article analyzes the relationship between trade facilitation and trade flows in the Asia-Pacific region. Country-specific data for port efficiency, customs environment, regulatory environment, and e-business usage are used to construct indicators for measuring trade facilitation. The...