What drives income diversification among rural households in developing countries? A large literature has examined whether household income diversification is a means of survival or a means of accumulation, which has so far remained inconclusive. This paper attempts to evaluate which explanation...

We argue that an understanding of the political drivers of economic growth needs an explanation of the political dynamics around the transition from one growth phase to another, and that the political drivers of early stage growth accelerations are different from that of growth maintenance....

There is a global trend of substituting permanent workers by workers on fixed term contracts, job outsourcing and production subcontracting. Labour institutions and globalisation are often taken to be causally related to this phenomenon, but the evidence remains inconclusive. In India, there has...

Dualism is a pervasive feature of the manufacturing sectors of less-developed countries, with large differences in productivity between the informal and the formal sectors. Policy distortions are viewed as an important factor behind the prevalence of manufacturing dualism. We examine whether...

Economic growth in developing countries is characterized by frequent shifts in growth regimes. Following Pritchett (2000), there is a large empirical literature that has tried to identify the timing of these shifts in economic growth. Two distinct approaches have been developed by this...

This paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa by examining the effect of effective state-business relations on economic growth for a panel of 19 sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1970-2004. We propose a measure that we argue...

An important stylized fact about African economic development is the phenomenon of urbanization without structural transformation. This paper provides a political economy analysis of the lack of structural transformation in African cities, drawing on the Deals and Development framework. It...

This paper investigates gender inequality in vulnerable employment: forms of employment typically featuring high precariousness, inadequate earnings, and lack of decent working conditions. Using a large collection of harmonized household surveys from developing countries, we measure long-term...