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.

Growth without Governance

Abstract: Per capita incomes and the quality of governance are strongly positively correlated across countries. We propose an empirical strategy that allows us to separate this correlation into: i) a strong positive causal effect running from better governance to higher per capita incomes, and ii) a weak and even negative causal effect running in the opposite direction from per capita incomes to governance. The first result confirms existing evidence on the importance of good governance for economic development. The second result is new and suggests the absence of “virtuous circles” in which higher incomes lead to further improvements in governance. This motivates our choice of title, “Growth Without Governance”. We document this evidence using a newly-updated set of worldwide governance indicators covering 175 countries for the period 2000/01, and use the results to interpret the relationship between incomes and governance in the Latin America and the Caribbean region. Finally, we speculate as to the potential importance of elite influence and state capture in accounting for the surprising negative effects of per capita incomes on governance, present some evidence on such capture in some Latin American countries, and suggest priorities for actions to improve governance when such pernicious elite influence shapes public policy.

Agricultural Trade Reform and the Doha Development Agenda

Abstract: Agriculture is yet again causing contention in international trade negotiations. It caused long delays to the Uruguay round in the late 1980s and 1990s, and it is again proving to be the major stumbling block in the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations (formally known as the Doha Development Agenda, or DDA). This study builds on numerous recent analyses of the Doha Development Agenda and agricultural trade, including five very helpful books that appeared in 2004. One, edited by Aksoy and Beghin (2004), provides details of trends in global agricultural markets and policies, especially as they affect nine commodities of interest to developing countries. Another, edited by Ingco and Winters (2004), includes a wide range of analyses based on papers revised following a conference held just before the aborted WTO trade ministerial meeting in Seattle in 1999. The third, edited by Ingco and Nash (2004), provides a follow-up to the broad global perspective of the Ingco and winters volume: it explores a wide range of key issues and options in agricultural trade reform from a developing-country perspective. The fourth, edited by Anania, Bowman, Carter, and McCalla (2004), is a comprehensive, tenth-anniversary retrospective on the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture and numerous unilateral trade and subsidy reforms in developed, transition, and developing economies. And the fifth, edited by Jank (2004), focuses on implications for Latin America.

Are Banks Too Big to Fail or Too Big to Save? International Evidence from Equity Prices and CDS Spreads

Abstract: Deteriorating public finances around the world raise doubts about countries’ abilities to bail out their largest banks. For an international sample of banks, this paper investigates the impact of government indebtedness and deficits on bank stock prices and CDS spreads. Overall, bank stock prices reflect a negative capitalization of government debt and they respond negatively to deficits. We present evidence that in 2008 systemically large banks saw a reduction in their market valuation in countries running large fiscal deficits. Furthermore, the change in bank CDS spreads in 2008 relative to 2007 reflects countries’ deterioration of public deficits. Our results suggest that some systemically important banks can increase their value by downsizing or splitting up, as they have become too big to save, potentially reversing the trend to ever larger banks. We also document that a smaller proportion of banks are systemically important - relative to GDP - in 2008 than in the two previous years, which could reflect these private incentives to downsize.

Trust and Growth

Abstract: Why does trust vary so substantially across countries? How does trust affect growth? This paper presents a general equilibrium growth model in which heterogeneous agents transact and face a moral hazard problem. Agents in this world may trust those with whom they transact, but they also have the opportunity to invest resources in verifying the truthfulness of claims made by transactors. We characterize the social, economic and institutional environments in which trust will be high and show that low trust environments reduce the rate of investment and thus the economy's growth rate. Further, we show that very low trust societies can be caught in a poverty trap. The predictions of the model are examined empirically for a cross-section of countries and have substantial support in the data. Trust is higher in more ethnically, socially and economically homogeneous societies and where legal and social mechanisms for constraining opportunism are better developed. High-trust societies, in turn, exhibit higher rates of investment and growth.