William Easterly

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

TL;DR: This article 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.

TL;DR: The response of economic growth to reforms in Latin America has not been disappointing as discussed by the authors, and despite a global slowdown, Latin America did well to return to its historic growth rate of 2 percent per capita in 1990-93.

TL;DR: In this article, a set of theoretical models predict that countries with unchanged long-run savings preferences will respond to debt relief with a mixture of asset decumulation and new borrowing, and a high-discount-rate government will choose poor policies and impose its inter-temporal preferences on the entire economy.

TL;DR: This paper cast doubt on this claim for strong effects of national policies, pointing out that such effects are inconsistent with several stylized facts and seem to depend on extreme observations in growth regressions, and more modest effects of policy are consistent with theoretical models that feature substitutability between the formal and informal sector, have a large share for the informal sector or stress technological change rather than factor accumulation.