世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

Output per worker varies enormously across countries. Why? On an accounting basis, our analysis shows that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker--we find a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries. At a deeper level, we document that the differences in capital accumulation, productivity, and therefore output per worker are driven by differences in institutions and government policies, which we call social infrastructure. We treat social infrastructure as endogenous, determined historically by location and other factors captured in part by language.

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Why Do Some Countries Produce so Much More Output Per Worker than Others

This paper analyzes a newly assembled data set consisting of subjective indices of corruption, the amount of red tape, the efficiency of the judicial system, and various categories of political stability for a cross section of countries. Corruption is found to lower investment, thereby lowering economic growth. The results are robust to controlling for endogeneity by using an index of ethnolinguistic fractionalization as an instrument.

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Corruption and Growth

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

Does finance affect economic growth? A number of studies have identified a positive correlation between the level of development of a country's financial sector and the rate of growth of its per capita income. As has been noted elsewhere, the observed correlation does not necessarily imply a causal relationship. This paper examines whether financial development facilitates economic growth by scrutinizing one rationale for such a relationship; that financial development reduces the costs of external finance to firms. Specifically, we ask whether industrial sectors that are relatively more in need of external finance develop disproportionately faster in countries with more developed financial markets. We find this to be true in a large sample of countries over the 1980s. We show this result is unlikely to be driven by omitted variables, outliers, or reverse causality.

/pdf/financial-dependence-and-growth-2meheeba1z.pdf

Financial Dependence and Growth

IMF and World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs and Poverty

The traditional aid-to-investment-to-growth linkages are not very robust, especially for African economies. Aid does not necessarily finance investment and investment does not necessarily promote growth. Differences in economic policy, on the other hand, can explain much of the difference in growth performances. Furthermore, domestic politics rather than aid or conditionality has been the main determinant of policy reform. Where societies and governments have succeeded in putting growth-enhancing policies into place, aid has provided useful support. The combination of good policies and aid has created a productive environment for private investment and growth. Copyright 1999 by Oxford University Press.

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The search for the key : aid, investment, and policies in Africa

Structural adjustment, as measured by the number of adjustment loans from the IMF and World Bank, reduces the growth elasticity of poverty reduction. Growth does reduce poverty, but I find no evidence for a direct effect of structural adjustment on growth. Instead, the poor benefit less from output expansion in countries with many adjustment loans than in countries with few adjustment loans. By the same token, the poor suffer less from an output contraction in countries with many adjustment loans than in countries with few adjustment loans. Higher adjustment lending seems to act in a way similar to higher inequality in lowering the stake of the poor in aggregate growth. Why would this be? One hypothesis that adjustment lending is counter-cyclical in ways that smooth consumption for the poor. There is evidence that some policy variables under adjustment lending are counter-cyclical, but there is no evidence that the cyclical component of those policy variables affects poverty. I speculate that the poor may be illplaced to take advantage of new opportunities created by structural adjustment reforms, just as they may suffer less from the loss of old opportunities in sectors that were artificially protected prior to reforms.

/pdf/the-effect-of-imf-and-world-bank-programmes-on-poverty-4y6ptuy7lf.pdf

The effect of IMF and World Bank programmes on poverty

The Burnside and Dollar (2000, AER) finding that aid raises growth in a good policy environment has had an important influence on policy and academic debates. We conduct a data gathering exercise that updates their data from 1970 -93 to 1970 -97, as well as filling in missing data for the original period 1970 -93. We find that the Burnside and Dollar (2002, AER) finding is not robust to the use of this additional data.

New Data, New Doubts: A Comment on Burnside and Dollar's

I document in this paper a puzzle that has not received previous attention in the literature. In 1980-98, median per capita income growth in developing countries was 0.0 percent, as compared to 2.5 percent in 1960-79. Yet I document in this paper that variables that are standard in growth regressions - policies like financial depth and real overvaluation, and initial conditions like health, education, fertility, and infrastructure generally improved from 1960-79 to 1980-98. Developing country growth should have increased instead of decreased according to the standard growth regression determinants of growth. The stagnation seems to represent a disappointing outcome to the movement towards the "Washington Consensus" by developing countries. I speculate that worldwide factors like the increase in world interest rates, the increased debt burden of developing countries, the growth slowdown in the industrial world, and skill-biased technical change may have contributed to the developing countries' stagnation, although I am not able to establish decisive evidence for these hypotheses. I also document that many growth regressions are mis-specified in a way similar to the Jones (1995) critique that a stationary variable (growth) is being regressed on non-stationary variables like policies and initial conditions. It may be that the 1960-79 period was the unusual period for LDC growth, and the 1980-98 stagnation of poor countries represents a return to the historical pattern of divergence between rich and poor countries.

William Easterly

Papers

IMF and World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs and Poverty

The search for the key : aid, investment, and policies in Africa

The effect of IMF and World Bank programmes on poverty

New Data, New Doubts: A Comment on Burnside and Dollar's

The Lost Decades: Explaining Developing Countries' Stagnation in Spite of Policy Reform 1980-1998