Some authors argue that it is enough to focus on growth to achieve lower poverty and greater shared prosperity. Policy-makers are warned that any effort to make growth more equal would be a distraction at best and could even be detrimental. Achieving the World Bank target of a 3% poverty rate by...

Ghana has experienced a decade of solid and exceptionally high growth. Between 2005 and 2015, income nearly doubled. This paper analyzes the factors driving this impressive growth performance, using tools such as structural change decompositions and growth regressions. For the comparative...

Martin Ravallion ("Why Don't We See Poverty Convergence?" American Economic Review, 102(1): 504-23; 2012) presents evidence against the existence of convergence in global poverty rates despite convergence in household mean income levels and the close linkage between income growth and poverty...

In this paper, we develop financial conditions indices (FCIs) for 3 industrialized (US, Japan, UK) and 5 emerging (China, Brazil, Russia, India, Turkey) economies. The FCIs are formed as the principal component of a range of financial series for each country and are constructed to account for...

This paper discusses the different concepts of measuring multinational corporations' activities to provide empirical researchers helpful guidelines about which measures to use in their work. I discuss which economic relations exist between the measures and show that a tight relationship can be...

This paper investigates the effects of multinational corporations on labor standards. We argue that the previous literature has failed to distinguish the different motives that encourage firms to become multinational. Therefore, we build a stylized model of segmented labor markets with...

This paper examines the impact of industrial robots on jobs. We combine data on robot adoption and occupations by industry in 37 economies for the period 2005–2015. We exploit differences across industries in technical feasibility—defined as the industry’s share of tasks replaceable by...