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.

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Financial Dependence and Growth

Problems associated with Sub-Saharan Africa's slow growth are low school attainment, political instability, poorly developed financial systems, large black-market exchange-rate premia, large government deficits, and inadequate infrastructure. Improving policies alone boosts growth substantially. But if neighboring countries adopt a policy change together, the effects on growth are more than double what they would have been if one country had acted alone. Africa's economic history since 1960 fits the classical definition of tragedy: potential unfulfilled, with disastrous consequences. Easterly and Levine use one methodology - cross-country regressions - to account for Sub-Saharan Africa's growth performance over the past 30 years and to suggest policies to promote growth over the next 30 years. They statistically quantify the relationship between long-run growth and a wider array of factors than any previous study. They consider such standard variables as initial income to capture convergence effects, schooling, political stability, and indicators of monetary, fiscal, trade, exchange rate, and financial sector policies. They also consider such new measures as infrastructure development, cultural diversity, and economic spillovers from neighbors' growth. Their analysis: - Improves substantially on past attempts to account for the growth experience of Sub-Saharan African countries. - Shows that low school attainment, political instability, poorly developed financial systems, large black-market exchange-rate premia, large government deficits, and inadequate infrastructure are associated with slow growth. - Finds that Africa's ethnic diversity tends to slow growth and reduce the likelihood of adopting good policies. - Identifies spillovers of growth performance between neighboring countries. The spillover effects of growth have implications for policy strategy. Improving policies alone boosts growth substantially, but if neighboring countries act together, the effects on growth are much greater. Specifically, the results suggest that the effect of neighbors' adopting a policy change is 2.2 times greater than if a single country acted alone. This paper - a joint product of the Macroeconomics and Growth Division and the Finance and Private Sector Development Division, Policy Research Department - is part of a larger effort in the department to understand the link between policies and growth. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project Patterns of Growth (RPO 678-26).

Africa's Growth Tragedy: A Retrospective, 1960-89

The World Development Report (WDR) has become such a fixture that it is easy to forget the circumstances under which it was born and the Bank's motivation for producing such a report at that time. In the first chapter of this essay, the authors provide a brief background on the circumstances of newly independent developing countries and summarize some of the main strands of the emerging field of development economics. This backdrop to the genesis of the WDR accounts for the orientation of the earlier reports. The thinking on development in the 1960s and 1970s also provides a baseline from which to view the evolution that has occurred since. From the coverage in the second chapter, the authors isolate a number of key issues common to several or all of the WDRs, and the author examine these issues individually at greater length in third chapter. The discussion in third chapter, which builds on the material in the WDRs, presents some views about how far development thinking and, relatedly, policy making have advanced relative to 30 years ago. It asks whether promoting growth, building institutions, tackling inequality and poverty, making aid effective, and defining the role of the state have been rendered more tractable policy wise by the knowledge encapsulated in the WDRs. Chapter four looks ahead and points to some of the big challenges that the Bank might explore through future WDRs and the value it can add through the knowledge acquired from its cross-country operations and research.

/pdf/development-economics-through-the-decades-a-critical-look-at-pp7u2y8sbf.pdf

Development Economics through the Decades: A Critical Look at Thirty Years of the World Development Report

We are all aware of the extreme hunger and poverty that afflict the world's poor We hear the facts, see the images on television, buy the T-shirt and are moved as individuals and governments to dig deep into our pockets Yet what happens to all this aid? Why after 50 years and $23 trillion are there still children dying for lack of twelve cents medicine? Why are there so many people still living on less than $1 a day without clean water, food, sanitation, shelter, education or medicine? In The White Man's Burden William Easterly, acclaimed author and former economist at the World Bank, addresses these twin tragedies head on While recognising the energy and compassion behind the campaign to make poverty history he argues urgently and powerfully that grand plans and good intentions are a part of the problem not the solution Giving aid is not enough, we must ensure that it reaches the people who need it most and the only way to make this happens is through accountability and by learning from past experiences Without claiming to have all the answers, William Easterly chastises the complacent and patronising attitude of the West that attempts to impose solutions from above In this book, which is by turns angry, moving, irreverent but always rigorous, he calls on each and everyone of us to take responsibility, whether donors, aid workers or ordinary citizens, so that more aid reaches the people it is supposed to help, the mother who cannot feed her children, the little girl who has to collect firewood rather than go to school, the father who cannot work because he has been crippled by war

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill And So Little Good

Public investment and infrastructure spending are often singled out for drastic cuts at times of fiscal retrenchment. Fiscal austerity in Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s was characterized by a sharp contraction in infrastructure spending. In 5 of the 9 major Latin American countries, infrastructure investment cuts contributed half or more of the total fiscal adjustment. However, the compression of infrastructure spending does not guarantee the sustainability of the public sector. Infrastructure spending cuts not only reduce the public deficit (thereby raising the public sector’s net worth) but also leads to a decline in infrastructure stock accumulation and in output growth as well. This in turn implies a reduction in the economy’s debt-servicing capacity, thus weakening the public sector net worth (Easterly, 2001). In the present paper we quantitatively assess the growth cost of public infrastructure compression for major Latin American economies during the fiscal austerity period of the 1980s and 1990s, and examine the effectiveness of infrastructure spending cuts as a device to enhance public sector solvency.

Infrastructure Compression and Public Sector Solvency in Latin America

The worldwide growth slowdown after 1975 was a major negative fiscal shock; lower growth lowers the present value of tax revenues and primary surpluses and thus makes a given level of debt more burdensome. Most countries failed to adjust to the negative fiscal consequences of the growth implosion and so public debt to GDP ratios exploded. The growth slowdown therefore played an important role in the debt crisis of the middle income countries in the 1980s, the crisis of the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) in the 1980s and 1990s, and the increased public debt burden of industrial countries in the 1980s and 1990s. Econometric tests and fiscal solvency accounting confirm the important role of growth in debt crises. In addition, the HIPCs' debt problems were worse because they grew more slowly after 1975 than other low income countries due to worse policies.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID256881_code010119130.pdf?abstractid=256881&mirid=2

William Easterly

Papers

Africa's Growth Tragedy: A Retrospective, 1960-89

Development Economics through the Decades: A Critical Look at Thirty Years of the World Development Report

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill And So Little Good

Infrastructure Compression and Public Sector Solvency in Latin America

Growth Implosions and Debt Explosions: Do Growth Slowdowns Cause Public Debt Crises?