This 2017 PNG Economic Survey is written at the start of Prime Minister O'Neill's second full term, following the June/July 2017 national elections. How can the new government respond both to the current economic difficulties and to longer-term growth and revenue challenges? This Survey examines...

“Crowding out” is a widely accepted claim in migration analysis, evolving from the literature assessing post-Second World War guest-worker labour which helped fuel the economic boom in Europe and other Western countries. Given the costs of regulation, the preference of profit-maximising...

Prominent reform agendas for aid abound. How do they relate to each other? This article tries to organise the aid reform literature by proposing a general framework for thinking about the determinants of aid effectiveness and strategies for improving the same. It presents three schools of...

Labor markets are increasingly global. Overseas work can enrich households but also split them geographically, with ambiguous net effects on decisions about work, investment, and education. These net effects, and their mechanisms, are poorly understood. We study a policy discontinuity in the...

Immigration policy can have important net fiscal effects that vary by immigrants’ skill level. But mainstream methods to estimate these effects are problematic. Methods based on cash-flow accounting offer precision at the cost of bias; methods based on general equilibrium modeling address bias...

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to investigate the risk and return characteristics of dividend investing compared to a passive “market” approach and provide probable explanations for any differences in return and risk. Design/methodology/approach – The research design is a...

The international goal for rich countries to devote 0.7% of their national income to development assistance has become a cause célèbre for aid activists and has been accepted in many official quarters as the legitimate target for aid budgets. The origins of the target, however, raise serious...

What should the World Bank optimally do with the US$10 to $20 billion it can loan each year? Has it, in fact, done what is optimal? These two questions, one theoretical and one empirical, have been around for a long time and remain controversial in both academic and policy circles. This study...

Growing concern that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be achieved by 2015 should not obscure the bigger picture that development progress has been occurring at unprecedented levels over the past thirty or more years. At the same time, the MDGs may perhaps create an unnecessary...

The Millennium Villages Project is a high profile, multi-country development project that has aimed to serve as a model for ending rural poverty in sub- Saharan Africa. The project became the subject of controversy when the methodological basis of early claims of success was questioned. The...