Economic development is a process of continuous industrial and technological upgrading in which any country, regardless of its level of development, can succeed if it develops industries that are consistent with its comparative advantage, determined by its endowment structure. The secret winning...

Empirical evidence suggests that money in the hands of mothers (as opposed to their husbands) benefits children. Does this observation imply that targeting transfers to women is good economic policy? The authors develop a series of noncooperative family bargaining models to understand what kind...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the number of documents required to export and import and the time it takes to complete all procedures to trade. It shows that an increase in the number of documents required for export and import tends to increase the time cost of shipments. However,...

Not only do Africa's fragile states grow more slowly than non-fragile states, but they seem to be caught in a"fragility trap". For instance, the probability that a fragile state in 2001 was still fragile in 2009 was 0.95. This paper presents an economic model where three features -- political...

Middle class values have long been perceived as drivers of social cohesion and growth. This paper investigates the relation between class (measured by position in the income distribution), values, and political orientations using comparable values surveys for six Latin American countries. The...

This paper proposes two new indices of relative deprivation, derived from an extension of the concept of the generalized Gini for the measurement of distributional change. Population- and income-weighted relative deprivation indices are then defined and, using panel data from the Consortium of...