This paper develops a game-theoretic model of public policy in a developing country in order to explain a number of empirical regularities. It is shown that under certain circumstances, an increase in government revenue will be completely crowded out by increased rent dissipation, leaving the...

Should Swedish used-clothes exports continue to be subsidized as development aid? Theoretical analysis and review of empirical evidence regarding effects of both commercial and charitable (subsidized) used-clothes imports in LDCs. Includes statistics on the world used-clothes trade, including...

This paper reviews the recent literature 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...

Globalisation or market integration in Sub-Saharan Africa is closely linked to the structural adjustment programmes. In this paper we focus on their dependence on politics and institutional characteristics of the countries concerned. In particular, we argue that one important explanation for the...

Why are some countries so much richer than others? Development Accounting is a first-pass attempt at organizing the answer around two proximate determinants: factors of production and efficiency. It answers the question ‘how much of the cross-country income variance can be attributed to...

Most African governments have made considerable progress in pursuing macroeconomic stabilization, usually under the tutelage of the International Monetary Fund. Policy targets for the IMF-supported programs are universally derived from some variation of the standard financial programming...

We augment a Solow-Ramsey growth model by including: i) a labor-leisure choice, ii) social capital entering the production functions, iii) negative externalities affecting social capital and increasing with the level of activity, iv) the possibility for economic agents to substitute social...

This paper analyzes institutionalism’s contributions to development theory, and shows the need for a greater integration for the creation of successful institutional development strategies. It identifies the levels of institutional analysis, highlighting its frequency of change, type of...

Much of development policy has been based on the search for a short to do list that would get countries moving. In this paper I argue that economic activity requires a large and highly interacting set of public policies and services, which constitute inputs into the production process. This is...

Donors have developed new micro-level and local paradigms to address rural development, environmental sustainability, and poverty alleviation to bypass, ignore, and substitute for badly functioning and corrupt states. Yet, states still set the macro-economic, legal, and policy parameters or...