There is a large body of research that explores international trade as a source of the dispersion in income levels and growth performances across countries. The trade liberalization policies undertaken between 1950 and 2006 led to an almost 30 fold growth in the volume of international trade....

This research analyzes the success of the infrastructure projects financed by the World Bank, focusing on the causal link between the quality of project implementation and its outcome. The results show that the success of infrastructure projects depends fundamentally on the quality of...

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...

Pension funds have been expected to invest in a wide range of securities and provide liquidity to domestic capital markets since they are the most sophisticated investors, with plenty of resources to gather private information and manage portfolios professionally. However, by analyzing unique,...

Repeated attempts at uncovering the relevance of country size for various economic factors have produced discouraging results. The present paper sheds new light on the relevance of country size using micro or firm-level data on firms'experience with the quality of tax administration, an...

During the past decade, cotton prices remained considerably below other agricultural prices (although they recovered toward the end of 2010). Yet, between 2000-04 and 2005-09 world cotton production increased 13 percent. This paper conjectures that biotechnology-induced productivity improvements...

The World Trade Organization has been until recently an effective framework for cooperation because it has continually adapted to changing economic realities. The current Doha Agenda is an aberration because it does not reflect one of the largest shifts in the international economic and trading...

They are being hailed as the new Holy Grail of economic development. The success of special economic zones (SEZ) in general and specialized ones in particular (industrial and technology parks) in countries as diverse as Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, Japan, the United...

This paper combines firm-level data from 89 countries with updated country-level data on financial structure, and uses two estimation approaches. It finds that in low-income countries, labor growth is swifter in countries with a higher level of private credit/gross domestic product; the positive...

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...