Showing papers in "World Development in 2004"

TL;DR: A critical history of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) can be found in this article, where a new generation of decomposition and efficient frontier models can help disentangle the true relations between development and the environment and may lead to the demise of the classic EKC.

TL;DR: This article showed that good health has a positive, sizable, and statistically significant effect on aggregate output, even when controlling for experience of the workforce, and argued that the life expectancy effect in growth regressions appears to be a real labor productivity effect, and is not the result of life expectancy acting as a proxy for worker experience.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide a broad overview of the available evidence on patterns and trends in urban growth in developing countries, highlighting regional differences where appropriate and examine the quality of past urban population projections and find that there has been considerable diversity in their quality by geographic region, level of development, and size of country.

TL;DR: The empirical basis of the neoliberal argument is questioned and the evidence confirms that globalization in the context of the world economic regime in place since the end of Bretton Woods generates more "mutual benefit" than "conflicting interests".

TL;DR: In this paper, the impact of workers' remittances on the real exchange rate using a panel of 13 Latin American and Caribbean countries was analyzed and it was shown that remittance has the potential to inflict economic costs on the export sector of receiving countries by reducing its international competitiveness.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the role of agricultural growth in poverty reduction in poor agrarian economies and discuss its benefits in institutional development, whereas their high costs are much more visible.

TL;DR: The best way to tap into the energy of society is through co-governance as mentioned in this paper, which involves inviting social actors to participate in the core activities of the state, such as poverty reduction, infrastructure provision, school reform, electoral administration, and police reform.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyzed the booming world trade in organic agro-foods such as tropical products, counterseasonal fresh produce, and processed foods and identified key contradictions between mainstream agroindustrial and alternative movement conventions in global organic networks.

TL;DR: In this paper, an analytic framework for tracing three waves of efforts to provide key public services in developing countries is provided, and the authors argue that persistent (though not universal) failure has been the product of the imperatives of large bureaucracies to discount decisions that are inherently both discretionary and transaction-intensive (and thus less able to be codified and controlled).

TL;DR: In this article, the impact of foreign investment in the Polish dairy sector is analyzed. But the authors focus on the impact on small suppliers and show that FDI does not cause a rapid consolidation of the supply base, instead, foreign companies introduce farm assistance programs to overcome market imperfections.

TL;DR: The authors conducted a series of cross-country regression tests using four different corruption datasets and found that corruption slows growth and/or reduces investment in most developing countries, particularly small developing countries but increases growth in the large East Asian newly industrializing economies.

TL;DR: In this article, a new indicator (ArCo) of technological capabilities that aims at accounting for developed and developing countries is proposed. But it does not take into account other variables associated with technological change, such as the creation of technology, the technological infrastructures and the development of human skills.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used a new data set of 126 intervals from 60 developing countries to analyze the growth elasticity of poverty, that is, how much does poverty decline in percentage terms with a given percentage rise in economic growth, and they found that while economic growth does reduce poverty in developing countries, the rate of poverty reduction depends very much on how economic growth is defined.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the dimensions of China's competitive threat in the 1990s, benchmarking competitive performance by technology and market, and find that market share losses are so far mainly in low technology products, with Japan being the most vulnerable market.

TL;DR: The authors examined the allocation of foreign aid by 41 donor agencies, bilateral and multilateral, and found that the same group of multilateral and bilateral aid agencies that are very policy focused are also very poverty focused.

TL;DR: The authors examines a central question about South African unemployment, why the unemployed do not enter the informal sector, as is common in other developing countries, and the data do not support the idea that unemployment is largely voluntary.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the impact of group lending, non-financial services and dynamic incentives on the performance of micro-finance institutions in terms of repayment and use a comparative analysis of the determinants of the repayment performance and of loan size.

TL;DR: In this article, a two-dimensional measure of energy poverty and energy distribution is presented, which combines the elements of access to different energy types and quantity of energy consumed, and is applied to Indian household survey data for 1983-2000.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present empirical information regarding the types and magnitude of corrupt behaviors documented in water supply and sanitation service provision in several South Asian localities and examine the strengths and weaknesses of current strategies to reduce corruption among several public water and sanitation bureaucracies in South Asia, drawing on interviews and focus group discussions with more than 1,400 staff, customers and key informants.

TL;DR: In this paper, a strictly positive probability of migration to a richer country, by raising both the level of human capital formed by optimizing individuals in the home country and the average level of nonmigrants in the country, can enhance welfare and nudge the economy toward the social optimum under a well-controlled restrictive migration policy.

TL;DR: The results show that in poor environments, insurance programs can work: Members of mutuelles de sant e (mutual health organizations) have a higher probability of using hospitalization services than nonmembers and pay substantially less when they need care.

TL;DR: Using primary data from a survey of expert opinion, this paper identified key successes emerging in African agriculture and identified key ingredients that appear necessary for building on these individual cases and expanding them into broad-based agricultural growth.

TL;DR: This article investigated the developmental legacies of British colonial rule and found that indirect colonial rule is strongly and negatively related to several different indicators of postcolonial political development while controlling for other factors, and provided evidence that the present levels of political development among former British colonies have historical roots and have been shaped by the extent to which they were ruled either directly or indirectly during the colonial period.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that both the degree of knowledge integration between an industrial cluster's agents and the scope of their economic activities are key dimensions behind its economic performance, and present a model that incorporates a hypothesized relationship between these three dimensions and argue that a formal test of this hypothesis constitutes a promising area of future empirical research.

TL;DR: This paper measured how working-age adult mortality affects rural households' size and composition, crop production, asset levels, and off-farm income, and found that relatively poor households do not recover quickly from head-of-household adult mortality; effects on crop and nonfarm incomes do not decay at least over the three-year survey interval.

TL;DR: In this paper, a study of 35 north Indian villages shows that 11.1% of 6,376 households in these villages have overcome poverty in the last 25 years, while members of another 7.9% have fallen into poverty.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors estimate the costs in terms of growth, and forgone fertility, mortality, and undernutrition reduction, for the 45 countries that are unlikely to meet the target.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the relationship between investment climate and international integration, focusing primarily on measures of the time or monetary cost of different bottlenecks (e.g., days to clear goods through customs, days to get a telephone line, sales lost to power outages).

TL;DR: The authors showed that China's outstanding export performance is directly linked to its integration in the international segmentation of production processes, which has allowed for a rapid diversification of its manufactured exports, from textiles and clothing to the electric and electronic industries.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the tradeoffs between the level of competition and the degree of coordination achieved between players within a cotton sector in Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.