World Bank

About: World Bank is a other organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poverty. The organization has 7813 authors who have published 21594 publications receiving 1198361 citations. The organization is also known as: World Bank, WB & The World Bank.

Trade Structure and Growth

Abstract: This paper examines the empirical relationships between trade structure and economic growth, particularly the influence of natural resource abundance, export concentration and intra-industry trade. We test the robustness of these relationships across proxies, control variables, and estimation techniques. We find trade variables to be important determinants of growth, especially natural resource abundance and export concentration. In contrast to much of the recent literature, natural resource abundance appears to have a positive effect on growth whereas export concentration hampers growth.

Public social spending in Africa : do the poor benefit?

Abstract: Education and health care are basic services essential in any effort to combat poverty and are often subsidized with public funds to help achieve that purpose. This paper examines the effectiveness of public social spending on education and health care in several African countries and finds that these programs favor not the poor, but those who are better-off. It concludes that this targeting problem cannot be solved simply by adjusting the subsidy program. The constraints that prevent the poor from taking advantage of these services must also be addressed if the public subsidies are to be effective. Measuring the benefits of publicly provided goods to individuals is a matter of longstanding concern in the economics literature. For market-based goods and services, the prices consumers pay can be taken as reflecting underlying values and can be used to yield measures of welfare that can be compared across individuals and over time.

Pollution and Capital Markets in Developing Countries

Abstract: It is said that firms in developing countries do not have incentives to invest in pollution control because of the weak monitoring and enforcement of the environmental regulations. This argument assumes that the regulator is the only agent that can create incentives for pollution control, and ignores that capital markets, if properly informed, may provide the appropriate financial and reputational incentives. We show that capital markets in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and the Phillipines react positively (increase in firms' market value) to the announcement of rewards and explicit recognition of superior environmental performance, and negatively (decrease in firms' value) to citizens' complaints. An immediate policy implication from the current analysis is that environmental regulators in developing countries may explicitly harness those market forces by introducing structured programs of information release on firms' environmental performance. At the margin, less resources should be devoted to the enforcement of regulations and more to the dissemination of information which allows all stakeholders to make informed decisions.

Do Entry Costs Provide an Empirical Basis for Poverty Traps? Evidence from Mexican Microenterprises

Abstract: Recent theoretical literature in development economics has shown that nonconvex production technologies can result in low‐growth poverty traps. This article uses detailed microenterprise surveys in Mexico to examine the empirical evidence for these nonconvexities at low levels of capital stock. While theory emphasizes nondivisible start‐up costs that exceed the wealth of many potential entrepreneurs, this article shows start‐up costs to be very low in some industries. Semiparametric methods are then used to flexibly estimate returns to capital in microenterprises. Much higher returns are found at low levels of capital stock than at higher levels, and this remains true after controlling for firm characteristics and measures of entrepreneurial ability. Overall, little evidence of production nonconvexities is found at low levels of capital. The absence of nonconvexities is a significant finding because it suggests that access to start‐up capital does not determine the ultimate size of the enterprise.

Limited Access Orders in the Developing World : A New Approach to the Problems of Development

Abstract: The upper-income, advanced industrial countries of the world today all have market economies with open competition, competitive multi-party democratic political systems, and a secure government monopoly over violence. Such open access orders, however, are not the only norm and equilibrium type of society. The middle and low-income developing countries today, like all countries before about 1800, can be understood as limited access orders that maintain their equilibrium in a fundamentally different way. In limited access orders, the state does not have a secure monopoly on violence, and society organizes itself to control violence among the elite factions. A common feature of limited access orders is that political elites divide up control of the economy, each getting some share of the rents. Since outbreaks of violence reduce the rents, the elite factions have incentives to be peaceable most of the time. Adequate stability of the rents and thus of the social order requires limiting access and competition-hence a social order with a fundamentally different logic than the open access order. This paper lays out such a framework and explores some of its implications for the problems of development today.