MDTFs can enhance aid effectiveness by reducing transaction costs and by mitigating the high risk levels inherent in post-crisis situations.

Over the past two decades, a fundamental transformation has taken place in the global economy caused by the impressive economic growth of developing countries like China, India, Brazil, and South Africa. The economic center of gravity is inexorably moving toward the developing South. The...

New data are presented for a large number of countries on how frequently former high-ranking politicians become bank directors. Politician-banker connections at this level are relatively rare, but their frequency is robustly correlated with many important characteristics of banks and...

Evidence based on firm-level data from 89 countries with updated country-level data on financial structure suggests that in low-income countries, labor growth is more rapid in countries with a higher level of private credit/GDP. This positive relationship with private credit is especially...

The rapid urbanization in many developing countries over the past half century seems to have been accompanied by excessively high levels of concentration of the urban population in very large cities. Some degree of urban concentration may be desirable initially to reduce inter- and intraregional...

This paper summarizes the policy-relevant insights of a generation of research on scale economies. Scale economies in production are of three types: internal economies associated with large plants, localization economies that come from sharing of inputs and infrastructure and from greater...