William Easterly

TL;DR: Easterly and Fischer as discussed by the authors found that the poor suffer more from inflation than the rich do, revealing this survey of poor people in 38 countries using polling data for 31,869 households and allowing for country effects.

TL;DR: The authors showed that ethnic diversity helps explain cross-country differences in public policies and other economic indicators in Sub-Saharan Africa, and that high ethnic fragmentation explains a significant part of most of these characteristics.

TL;DR: This paper argued that a series of arbitrary choices made in defining success or failure as achieving numerical targets for the Millennium Development Goals made attainment of the MDGs less likely in Africa than in other regions even when its progress was in line with historical or contemporary experience of other regions.

TL;DR: The environment that created aid bureaucracies led those organizations to define their output as money disbursed rather than service delivered, produce many low-return observable outputs (glossy reports and "frameworks") and few high-return less observable activities like ex-post evaluation, engage in obfuscation, spin control, and amnesia exhibiting little learning from the past, and put enormous demands on scarce administrative skills in poor countries.

TL;DR: This paper showed that the top 20 recipients of repeated adjustment lending over 1980-99 were not able to achieve reasonable growth and contain all policy distortions, and about half of the adjustment loan recipients showed severe macroeconomic distortions regardless of cumulative adjustment loans.