This paper suggests a new approach to analysing the distribution of natural resource revenues and applies it to the case of Mexico. It defines a natural resource entitlement as a citizen’s per capita share of their country’s natural resource rents. The main finding is that, according to...

This paper analyses elite incomes around the world, and how international comparisons of elite incomes vary depending on the exchange rate and income concept used. It is well known that between-country income inequality is higher using market exchange rates than purchasing power parity (PPP)...

This paper investigates structural change in Argentina between 1900 and 1973.  It has been argued that trade policy under import-substituting industrialization disfavoured agriculture and led to a "technological lag" in the sector, and that this explains agriculture's relative decline during a...

This paper examines the impact of oil price shocks and attempts to explain why the rise in oil prices up to 2008 had little impact on the world economy. It makes three main arguments. First, that oil prices have never been as important as is popularly thought. Second, that the most important...

This paper analyses the e¤ect of a resource discovery on an open economy with endogenous directed technical change. Technical progress depends on entrepreneurs who produce (or adopt) technology, and endogenously choose which sector to operate in. The static e¤ect of a resource discovery is de-...

This paper investigates recent advances in our understanding of the global distribution of income, and produces the first estimates of global inequality that take into account data on the incomes of the top one percent within countries.  We discuss conceptual and methodological issues -...

Summary This paper considers the proposal that each country distributes its resource rents directly to citizens as a universal and unconditional cash transfer, or Resource Dividend, and estimates its potential impact on global poverty for the years 2000-06. Using a global dataset on resource...

The international community's commitment to halve global poverty by 2015 has been enshrined in the first Millennium Development Goal. How global poverty is measured is a critical element in assessing progress towards this goal, and different researchers have presented widely-varying estimates....

Natural resource revenues differ from other government revenues both in their time profile, and in their political and legal status: they are volatile and exhaustible, and belong to all citizens of the country in which they are located. This paper discusses the optimal expenditure of natural...