Browsing HKS Faculty Scholarship by Keyword "Economic Growth"
Now showing items 1-20 of 37
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AGOA Rules: The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Special Fabric Provisions
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)Lesotho and other least developed African countries responded impressively to the preferences they were granted under the African Growth and Opportunities Act with a rapid increase in their clothing exports to the US. But ... -
Are Bilateral Remittances Countercyclical?
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)By putting together a relatively large data set on bilateral remittances of emigrants, this paper is able to shed light on the important hypothesis of smoothing. The smoothing hypothesis is that remittances are countercyclical ... -
Building Social Capital Through Microfinance
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)A number of development assistance programs promote community interaction as a means of building social capital. Yet, despite strong theoretical underpinnings, the role of repeat interactions in sustaining cooperation has ... -
Constructing, Deconstructing, and Reconstructing Career Civil Service Systems in Latin America
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)Patronage—the discretionary allocation of public sector jobs—continues to be a dominant way government is staffed in most Latin American countries and it is proving resistant to the imprecations of public sector reformers. ... -
Country Diversification, Product Ubiquity, and Economic Divergence
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)Countries differ markedly in the diversification of their exports. Products differ in the number of countries that export them, which we define as their ubiquity. We document a new stylized fact in the global pattern of ... -
Deals Versus Rules: Policy Implementation Uncertainty and Why Firms Hate It
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)Firms in Africa report "regulatory and economic policy uncertainty" as a top constraint to their growth. We argue that often firms in Africa do not cope with policy rules, rather they face deals; firm-specific policy actions ... -
Determinants of Agricultural and Mineral Commodity Prices
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)Prices of most agricultural and mineral commodities rose strongly in the past decade, peaking sharply in 2008. Popular explanations included strong global growth (especially from China and India), easy monetary policy (as ... -
Diagnostics Before Prescription
(American Economic Association, 2010)Development economists should stop acting as categorical advocates (or detractors) for specific approaches to development. They should instead be diagnosticians, helping decisionmakers choose the right model (and remedy) ... -
Do Rising Top Incomes Lift All Boats?
(2009)Pooling data for 1905 to 2000, we find no systematic relationship between top income shares and economic growth in a panel of 12 developed nations observed for between 22 and 85 years. After 1960, however, a one percentage ... -
The Dynamics of Nestedness Predicts the Evolution of Industrial Ecosystems
(Public Library of Science, 2012)In economic systems, the mix of products that countries make or export has been shown to be a strong leading indicator of economic growth. Hence, methods to characterize and predict the structure of the network connecting ... -
Empirical Confirmation of Creative Destruction from World Trade Data
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2012)We show that world trade network datasets contain empirical evidence that the dynamics of innovation in the world economy follows indeed the concept of creative destruction, as proposed by J.A. Schumpeter more than half a ... -
Environmental Effects of International Trade
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2009)The report surveys the state of our knowledge regarding the effects of trade on the environment. A central question is whether globalization helps or hurts in achieving the best tradeoff between environmental and economic ... -
Environmental Regulations, Air and Water Pollution, and Infant Mortality in India
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)Using the most comprehensive data file ever compiled on air pollution, water pollution, environmental regulations, and infant mortality from a developing country, the paper examines the effectiveness of India’s environmental ... -
Female Employment and Fertility in Rural China
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)Data on 2,288 married women from the 2006 China Health and Nutrition Survey are deployed to study how off-farm female employment affects fertility. Such employment reduces a married woman’s actual number of children by ... -
Funding Economic Development: A Comparative Study of Financial Sector Reform in Vietnam and China
(United Nations Development Programme and Fulbright Economics Teaching Program, 2009)Although there is considerable debate among economists as to the impact of financial sector development on economic growth, empirical evidence indicates a strong, direct link between the two. A recent comprehensive review ... -
The Future of Convergence
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)Novelists have a better track record than economists at foretelling the future. Consider then Gary Shteyngart’s timely comic novel “Super Sad True Love Story” (Random House, 2010), which provides a rather graphic vision ... -
How Far Have Public Financial Management Reforms Come in Africa?
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)This paper asks how strong African Public Financial Management (PFM) has become, after a decade and more of reform. How well do African PFM systems in place now facilitate effective public financial management? Where are ... -
How Good Politics Results in Bad Policy: The Case of Biofuel Mandates
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)Biofuels have become big policy and big business. Government targets, mandates, and blending quotas have created a growing demand for biofuels. Some say that the U.S. biofuels industry was created by government policies. ... -
International Knowledge Diffusion and the Comparative Advantage of Nations
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2012)In this paper we document that the probability that a product is added to a country’s export basket is, on average, 65% larger if a neighboring country is a successful exporter of that same product. We interpret our result ... -
Is India a Flailing State?: Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2009)India is an emerging global superpower as its rapid growth has transformed its economy and has maintained itself as the world’s largest democracy. But at the same time India lags in many dimensions—its malnutrition rate ...