In this paper we examine several dimensions of gender disparity for a sample of 40 countries using micro-level data. We start by documenting the reversal of the gender education gap and ranking countries by the year in which it reversed. Then we turn to an analysis of the state of other gaps...

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...

The main purpose of industrial policy is to speed up the process of structural change towards higher productivity activities. This paper builds on our earlier writings to present an overall design for the conduct of industrial policy in a low- to middle-income country. It is stimulated by the...

As part of the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative (ASGISA), the National Treasury of the Republic of South Africa convened an international panel of economists through Harvard's Center for International Development. This panel spent two years analyzing the South African economy and its...

Countries that are classified as having floating exchange rate systems (or very wide bands) show strikingly different patterns of behavior. They hold very different levels of international reserves and allow very different volatilities to the movements of the exchange rate relative to the...

In the presence of uncertainty about what a country can be good at producing, there can be great social value to discovering costs of domestic activities because such discoveries can be easily imitated. We develop a general-equilibrium framework for a small open economy to clarify the analytical...

Countries that are classified as having floating exchange rate systems (or very wide bands) show strikingly different patterns of behavior. They hold very different levels of international reserves and allow very different volatilities to the movements of the exchange rate relative to the...

This paper investigates the design of an exchange rate policy for an economy where the domestic capital market is segmented from the global financial market, producers rely on credit to finance working capital needs, and the labor market is characterized by nominal contracts. We show that the...