Jobs are important in maintaining social cohesion. Employment provides income, but also a sense of self-worth and a meeting place for social interactions that weave the social fabric. With over 200 million unemployed globally, the number of jobs created has taken centre stage, especially in...

This paper aims at providing an estimate of the resource envelope required in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on the global level. As widely acknowledged by previous contributors to this literature, modelling the cost of achieving the MDGs poses many data and...

This paper studies the opportunities and barriers for Sovereign Wealth Funds’ (SWFs) investments in Africa. Based on historical databases on SWFs’ transactions, it shows that SWFs can facilitate up to 50% of the investment needs in infrastructure in Africa over the next decade to meet the...

This paper contributes to literature on the process of reform in Latin America. We study political economy aspects and the policy making process of reforms in what we identify as the five critical steps through the "life cycle" of a policy reform: the Planning, Dialogue, Adoption,...

This paper joins the debate on the size of the middle class in Latin America, analysing its structure and characteristics. The paper investigates inter-class mobility potential and its evolution over time in the case of selected countries. As a result of the estimations, we find that Latin...

Is the social contract in Latin America broken? Many authors have suggested this is the case, given the high levels of inequality, the low levels of taxation and the low quality of public services observed in the region. This paper analyses empirically the relationship between fiscal policy,...

Support for regional economic integration in Africa runs high amongst the continent’s international development partners and African elites. However, its expression in European forms of economic integration is not appropriate to regional capacities and in some cases may do more harm than good....

This paper studies sources of technological upgrading in China and India. What is striking about the impressive growth of China and (to a lesser degree) India is that they export products associated with a high productivity level that is much higher than a country at their income level....

Social protection coverage is quite low in Latin America. This situation, irrespective of the type of pension scheme, represents a challenge for public policy since these low levels of affiliation and irregular contribution histories indicate that pensions will be insufficient in the coming...

In this paper we study the macroeconomic effects of large exchange rate appreciations. In a sample of 128 countries since 1960, we identify 25 episodes of large nominal and real appreciations shocks and study their macroeconomic effects in a dummy-augmented panel autoregressive model. Our...