In May 2004 a conference was held at Cornell University entitled “75 Years of Development Research.”.1 Apart from the usual array of theoretical and empirical papers on development, a number of panels took stock of the state of development economics and discussed a range of methodological...

This paper presents an overview of the economics of international aid, highlighting the historical literature and the contemporary debates. It reviews the “trade-theoretic” and the “contract-theoretic” analytical literature, and the empirical and institutional literature. It demonstrates...

This paper attempts to answer the following question: How, in economic terms, was being colonized by Portugal “different” for Lusophone African countries than was being colonized by France or Britain? Gervase Clarence-Smith addressed this question for the period after 1825, and comes to the...

Angola is more dependent on oil than any other country in Sub Saharan Africa and most other countries as well, apart from a handful of OPEC members. Contributing half or more of GDP, oil revenues condition and distort every other macroeconomic variable in the country, a situation that has...

The global International Financial Institutions (IFI’s) increasingly justify their operations in terms of the provision of International Public Goods (IPG’s). This is partly because there appears to be support among the rich countries of the North for expenditures on these IPG’s, in...

How does development economics address the issue of gains and losses from the displacement that inevitably accompanies many development processes? This paper argues that economists have struggled mightily between the core criterion of a “Pareto improvement”, which vests individuals with...

This paper establishes some general principles of the rationale for development assistance in Middle Income Countries and then applies these principles to the operations of the World Bank. It then puts the argument through its paces for the specific case of India, which has just transitioned...

Two decades ago, 93% of the world’s poor lived in countries officially classified as Low Income (LICs). Now, 72% of the world’s poor live in Middle Income Countries (MICs). The dramatic shift has been brought about by fast growth in a number of countries with large populations. On present...

Governance and the “Karnataka Model of Development” Gopal Kadekodi, Ravi Kanbur and Vijayendra Rao; Change in Karnataka Over the Last Generation: Villages and the Wider Context James Manor; The Political Economy of Gram Panchayats in South India Timothy Besley, Rohini Pande and Vijayendra...