Center for Global Development

About: Center for Global Development is a nonprofit organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Poverty & Population. The organization has 1472 authors who have published 3891 publications receiving 162325 citations.

Addressing the Natural Resource Curse: An Illustration from Nigeria

Abstract: Some natural resources - oil and minerals in particular - exert a negative and nonlinear impact on growth via their deleterious impact on institutional quality. We show this result to be very robust. The Nigerian experience provides telling confirmation of this aspect of natural resources. Waste and poor institutional quality stemming from oil appear to have been primarily responsible for Nigeria's poor long-run economic performance. We propose a solution for addressing this resource curse which involves directly distributing the oil revenues to the public. Even with all the difficulties that will no doubt plague its actual implementation, our proposal will, at the least, be vastly superior to the status quo. At best, however, it could fundamentally improve the quality of public institutions and, as a result, durably raise long-run growth performance.

Fitting Fully Observed Recursive Mixed-process Models with cmp:

Abstract: At the heart of many econometric models are a linear function and a normal error. Examples include the classical small-sample linear regression model and the probit, ordered probit, multinomial pro...

The Impact of Sea Level Rise on Developing Countries: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract: Sea level rise (SLR) due to climate change is a serious global threat. The scientific evidence is now overwhelming. Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions and associated global warming could well promote SLR of 1m-3m in this century, and unexpectedly rapid breakup of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets might produce a 5m SLR. In this paper, the authors have assessed the consequences of continued SLR for 84 developing countries. Geographic Information System (GIS) software has been used to overlay the best available, spatially-disaggregated global data on critical impact elements (land, population, agriculture, urban extent, wetlands, and GDP) with the inundation zones projected for 1-5m SLR. The results reveal that hundreds of millions of people in the developing world are likely to be displaced by SLR within this century, and accompanying economic and ecological damage will be severe for many. At the country level, results are extremely skewed, with severe impacts limited to a relatively small number of countries. For these countries (such as Vietnam, A. R. of Egypt, and The Bahamas), however, the consequences of SLR are potentially catastrophic. For many others, including some of the largest (such as China), the absolute magnitudes of potential impacts are very large. At the other extreme, many developing countries experience limited impacts. Among regions, East Asia and the Middle East and North Africa exhibit the greatest relative impacts. To date, there is little evidence that the international community has seriously considered the implications of SLR for population location and infrastructure planning in developing countries. The authors hope that the information provided in this paper will encourage immediate planning for adaptation.

Aid, Policies, and Growth: Comment

Abstract: In an extraordinarily influential paper, Craig Burnside and David Dollar (2000, p. 847) find that “... aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal, monetary, and trade policies but has little effect in the presence of poor policies.” This finding has enormous policy implications. The Burnside and Dollar (2000, henceforth BD) result provides a role and strategy for foreign aid. If aid stimulates growth only in countries with good policies, this suggests that (1) aid can promote economic growth, and (2) it is crucial that foreign aid be distributed selectively to countries that have adopted sound policies. International aid agencies, public policy makers, and the press quickly recognized the importance of the BD findings. This paper reassesses the links between aid, policy, and growth using more data. The BD data end in 1993. We reconstruct the BD database from original sources and thus (1) add additional countries and observations to the BD data set because new information has become available since they conducted their analyses, and (2) extend the data through 1997. Thus, using the BD methodology, we reexamine whether aid influences growth in the presence of good policies. Given our focus on retesting BD, we do not summarize the vast pre-BD literature on aid and growth. We just note that there was a long and inconclusive literature that was hampered by limited data availability, debates about the mechanisms through which aid would affect growth, and disagreements over econometric specification (see Gustav F. Papanek, 1972; Robert Cassen, 1986; Paul Mosley et al., 1987; Peter Boone, 1994, 1996; and Henrik Hansen and Finn Tarp’s 2000 review). Since BD found that aid boosts growth in good policy environments, there have been a number of other papers reacting to their results, including Paul Collier and Jan Dehn (2001), CarlJohan Dalgaard and Hansen (2001), Patrick Guillaumont and Lisa Chauvet (2001), Hansen and Tarp (2001), Robert Lensink and Howard White (2001), and Collier and Dollar (2002). These papers conduct useful variations and extensions (some of which had already figured in the pre-BD literature), such as introducing additional control variables, using nonlinear specifications, etc. Some of these papers confirm the message that aid only works in a good policy environment, while others drive out the aid policy interaction term with other variables. This literature has the usual limitations of choosing a specification without clear guidance from theory, which often means there are more plausible specifications than there are data points in the sample. We differentiate our paper from these others by NOT deviating from the BD specification. Thus, we do not test the robustness of the results to an unlimited number of variations, but instead maintain the BD methodology. This paper conducts a very simple robustness check by adding new data that were unavailable to BD. Thus, we expand the sample used over their time period and extend the data from 1993 to 1997. * Easterly: Department of Economics, New York University, 269 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10003, Center for Global Development, and National Bureau of Economic Research (e-mail: william.easterly@nyu.edu); Levine: Department of Finance, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, 321 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455, and National Bureau of Economic Research (e-mail: rlevine@csom.umn.edu); Roodman: Center for Global Development, 1776 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036 (e-mail: droodman@cgdev.org). We are grateful to Craig Burnside for supplying data and assisting in the reconstruction of previous results, without holding him responsible in any way for the work in this paper. Thanks also to Francis Ng and Prarthna Dayal for generous assistance with updating the Sachs-Warner openness variable, and to three anonymous referees, Craig Burnside, and Henrik Hansen for helpful comments. 1 See, for instance, the World Bank (1994, 2001, 2002), the U.K. Department for International Development (2000), President George W. Bush’s speech (March 16, 2002), the announcement by the White House on creating the Millennium Challenge Corporation (White House, 2002), as well as a Washington Post editorial (February 9, 2002), a Financial Times column by Alan Beattie (March 11, 2002), and The Economist (March 16, 2002).