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FROM STRINGS OF SHELLS in the Solomon Islands to large stone disks on the Micronesian isle of Yap or wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese in Italy, money has taken many forms [...]

THE INTRODUCTION of shiny new euro notes and coins at the beginning of this year was indeed an exciting event. But one has to wonder. Why hasn't paper and metal [...]

AS countries sign on to the Paris Agreement on climate change and strive to become more sustainable, many are considering the environmental impact of their currency as well as its [...]

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HAD Miami Dade College offered a concentration in fashion design, Carmen Reinhart might never have become an economist. Reinhart--the world's most-cited female economist and coauthor of one of the most [...]

December 2015 was a whirlwind month for Angus Deaton. There was the trip to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in economics from King Gustaf of Sweden. And there was [...]

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In 1971, whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg discovered the so-called Pentagon Papers and spent countless nights photocopying over 7,000 pages before delivering them to the New York Times and the Washington Post. [...]

Andres Soilmano, Eduardo Aninat, and Nancy Birdsall (editors) University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2000, x + 206 pp., $49.50 (cloth). IT IS SAID THAT 'timing is everything.' In [...]

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It was just plain luck when Susan Athey glanced out the kitchen window one day last January. A coyote was making off with one of the family's pet chickens clutched [...]

A piece of paper: dog-eared and taped--somewhat haphazardly--to the wall. The makeshift faculty listing at the University of California, Berkeley's Economics Department symbolizes a humility that flies in the face [...]

2015 is a banner year for global development. It marks the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), ambitious targets for global progress set by world leaders at the United Nations at the turn of the 20th century. And while it might come as a surprise to those in Japan, Europe, or North America, the past 15 years may have been the period of greatest progress in humanity's quality of life. Not least, the available data suggest that we have seen the fastest declines in global child mortality and absolute poverty in recorded history. As a result, we have far surpassed the first MDG--to halve the number of people worldwide living on less than $1.25 a day. The year 2015 is also the starting date for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be agreed at the United Nations this fall. These goals outline a vision of progress to 2030 covering poverty, health, education, security, the environment, governance, gender equality, and much more. And a conference in Addis Ababa in July this year will try to finance that new agenda. Finally, at a meeting of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December, countries will pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions, with the hope of setting us on a path away from catastrophic global warming. The next 15 years could be as transformative as the past decade and a half. The draft SDGs reflect a global aspiration for even faster progress. That will take unprecedented effort both within and across countries. The Financing for Development Conference taking place in Addis Ababa was organized to figure out what that effort will look like--and certainly has its work cut out for it. The Paris conference is vital to ensuring that human progress is environmentally sustainable. But perhaps the most important condition for success this year is wider recognition by advanced economies that sustainable development is in their own interest: the worlds economies, health, and well-being are sufficiently intertwined that failure in Addis Ababa or Paris would be as much a tragedy for them as for the developing world. Goals for a new millennium The MDGs emerged from the Millennium Declaration, a statement by leaders gathered at the United Nations in 2000. The document was filled with aspirations for a just and lasting peace, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and regard for nature. But it also included specific targets drawn from a decade of UN conferences: cutting in half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day (later increased to $1.25 in 2005 dollars); universal completion of primary school and gender equality in education enrollment; reduction of maternal mortality by three-quarters and of under-five child mortality by two-thirds; and reversal of the spread of HIV/AIDS, the scourge of malaria, and other major diseases. These targets formed the basis for six millennium goals, joined by a goal on environmental sustainability and one outlining a global partnership for development. There has been immense and heartening progress in development over the past 15 years, including in the areas highlighted in the MDGs. On a number of measures, the rate of improvement is historically unprecedented. Between 1999 and 2011 alone, the proportion of the population in the developing world living on less than $1.25 a day fell from 34 percent to 17 percent--a halving in just 12 years. Chinas spectacular growth performance was a large part of this story (the number of people living under $1.25 fell from 451 million to 84 million in that country), but it was not the only reason. Over that same period, extreme poverty in the developing countries of sub-Saharan Africa fell from 59 to 47 percent of the population. And over those same 12 years, net primary school enrollment in the sub-Saharan region increased from 58 to 77 percent. That means that one-fifth of the school-age children who would not have been in school at the enrollment levels in 2000 were in school just over a decade later. Girls' primary school enrollment in 2011 was 74 percent, reflecting convergence in education access between boys and girls over that period. Perhaps the best news is the dramatic decline in the number of parents who face the pain of burying their child. Between 2000 and 2013, according to the latest World Bank data, the proportion of children born in developing countries who died before their fifth birthday fell from 8.4 to 5.0 percent. In sub-Saharan Africa the decline was from 15.6 to 9.2 percent--more than 40 percent in just 13 years. In Senegal, which has seen a particularly rapid improvement in child health, there was more than a 50:50 chance that a woman who bore the average number of children in 2000 would lose at least one of them before the age of five (56 percent). By 2012 the risk was one in four (26 percent). That is still far too high, but progress has been incredibly rapid. The lion's share of credit for these improvements goes to the people and governments of developing countries. It is the hard work of men and women on farms and in businesses that supports their families' consumption. It is sacrifices by parents that are getting children out of the labor market and into schools and ensuring that children sleep under bed nets and get their shots. And it is the governments of the developing world that are providing the money and public goods necessary to ensure that work and schooling pay off in terms of a better life. Developing countries worked hard to achieve the kind of macroeconomic stability that underpins growth. Between 2000 and 2015, annual government revenues in emerging market and developing economies climbed from about $3.2 trillion to $9.3 trillion according to IMF World Economic Outlook database figures. These revenues are the backbone of the health and education services, roads and electricity lines, and legal systems that allow commerce to flow and lives to improve. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] But global cooperation and exchange--flows of goods, services, people, knowledge, and ideas--played a huge part too. Take Chinas progress against poverty: Chinese companies backed by foreign investors that exported their products worldwide were a large part of that country's economic growth. Foreign-invested enterprises accounted for over half of Chinas exports and imports and provided for 30 percent of Chinese industrial output according to that country's Ministry of Commerce. Between 2000 and 2013, exports accounted on average for 30 percent of the country's GDP, with accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 helping sustain the vitality of the country's export sector. Without international trade and investment, the world's most rapid decline ever in absolute poverty simply wouldn't have happened. Or look at the importance of migration flows to development prospects. Migrants have sent back huge amounts of money to their home countries. Remittances account for 9 percent of Bangladesh's GDP, 10 percent of Guatemala's, and 23 percent of Lesotho's, for example. At least as important, migrant flows lubricate the flow of investment, trade, and ideas (see "A Long Commute," in the March 2015 F&D). In 2000, fully one-third of the high-skilled workers in California's Silicon Valley were foreign born, and Indian expatriates were responsible for founding 13 percent of the region's start-ups. But they also maintained links with innovators and entrepreneurs back home, and those contacts were key to building what is now a $146 billion information technology (IT) and business processing industry in India, employing 3.5 million people and exporting more than two-thirds of its output. When it comes to gains in health, official development assistance has played a significant role. About half the households in sub-Saharan Africa now own a bed net, and the proportion of the population sleeping under a net increased from 2 percent in 2000 to 33 percent in 2011. The majority were financed by aid, and the nets have played an important role in the estimated one-third decline in malaria deaths in Africa since 2000. Most of the funding for vaccines in low-income countries was also made possible through aid, and deaths related to vaccine-preventable conditions have plummeted since 2000: worldwide measles deaths fell from 542,000 to 158,000 between 2000 and 2011. What role did the millennium goals play in the past 15 years of progress and the international cooperation that supported it? The Millennium Declaration and the goals were aspirational and by no means legally binding, but they did help provide a framework for development dialogue, especially around aid. Between 2001 and 2010, aid as a percentage of donor country GDP climbed from 0.21 to 0.32 percent. And more of that aid went to Africa and social sectors--two focuses of the goals. But my investigation with my colleague Sarah Dykstra of the Center for Global Development suggests there is a weak link between overall aid flows and the speed of improvement in health, education, and other MDG indicators. And while improvement was especially rapid over the past 15 years, it is hard to find a speeding up in those rates since 2000 in particular, according to an analysis by Howard Friedman of Columbia University. Aid may have had a slight impact on marginally more rapid progress across MDG indicators since the turn of the 21st century. That may sound like only a minor accomplishment, but at the global level such change can still amount to millions of lives saved or improved. And that is enough to make the goal-setting exercise worth trying again. Sustainable progress? The potential for continued progress over the next 15 years is considerable. There are risks, of course: Lawrence Summers and Lant Pritchett of Harvard University noted in a recent paper that "abnormally rapid growth is rarely persistent," which suggests that the recent strong performance of countries and regions, including China, India, and sub-Saharan Africa, may not continue. If that is true, progress against income poverty would slow dramatically. Dani Rodrik, of the Institute for Advanced Study, notes that the manufacturing sector, a vital part of growth in east Asian "miracle" countries, is no longer the source of employment and output it once was--weakening a key mechanism of income convergence. That is to say nothing of the challenges posed by climate change to agricultural production and coastland infrastructure and by diseases such as swine flu on global health and commerce. On the other hand, developing countries have posted very rapid growth over the past decade despite a declining manufacturing share. New sectors--not least mobile telecommunications--have played an important part in that growth. And most developing countries are entering the era of the SDGs in a considerably stronger fiscal position than at the start of the MDGs. Across developing countries as a whole, debt service as a percentage of GDP, for example, dropped from 5.9 percent in 2000 to 3.1 percent in 2013. And average inflation across developing countries in 2013, at 4.3 percent, was both subdued and lower than in 2000, suggesting a considerably improved macroeconomic situation. If growth is exceptionally strong across the developing world, and all countries sustain the optimistic IMF short-term forecasts for all of the next 15 years, growth could lift all but a few percent of the world's population above an absolute poverty line of $1.25. Or consider health: the recent Lancet Commission on Investing in Health sees the potential for targeted health expenditures to reduce under-five mortality to below 1.6 percent worldwide by 2035 (from a current average of 7.6 percent in low-income countries). Ambitious goals Even such optimistic forecasts as these proved insufficient, however, for the UN Open Working Group, which drafted the SDGs. It called for universal and unprecedented progress across a wide range of development areas. The 17 proposed SDGs and their 169 targets cover everything from nature-friendly tourism to violence against children and from waste management and artisanal fishing to gender inequality, employment, and Internet access. By 2030 the draft goals call for us to have ended extreme poverty and malnutrition; achieved full employment; attained universal health coverage; wiped out AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria; achieved universal secondary education; ensured universal access to water, sanitation, modern energy, and communications-- and much more. And they also call for all that progress to be environmentally sustainable. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If the SDGs are designed to focus the development dialogue, it is hard to see what is excluded from that focus--except civil and political rights. And it is not clear how this massively expanded and extremely ambitious goal-setting agenda will drive actual progress toward development. But if the world is to come even close to meeting the targets set for 2030 there must be an unprecedented domestic effort backed by similarly unprecedented global cooperation across the range of cross-border flows--not only (or even primarily) aid but also trade, finance, migration, and technology. And that makes July's Financing for Development Conference a vital moment. Developing countries wanted the conference to take place before the SDGs were agreed, precisely to emphasize that such an ambitious set of development goals could be accomplished only in the context of a strong global partnership. The good news is that the initial draft of the declaration for the conference, produced in March 2015, is wide ranging and ambitious. The declaration calls for a global package of services to be available to all, covering social and physical infrastructure. It highlights the importance of increasing developing countries' domestic capacity to deliver development--not least by reaching a revenue-to-GDP ratio of 20 percent. And it also calls for reform and policy commitment on improved tax cooperation, greater multilateral financial flows, support for private sector investment, more and better aid, better access to markets for low-income exports, and improved technology sharing. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] But the declaration should offer more specifics: a target for more market-rate financial flows from donor governments and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to support infrastructure rollout; a commitment by donors to fund the costs of the universal package of basic social and infrastructure services that cannot reasonably be met by domestic resources; more information on transparency (including published budget details and government contracts and a public register of ultimate ownership of companies); and a stronger commitment to migration and technology as tools for development. In everyone's interest A strong agreement in Addis Ababa and progress toward the SDGs depend on advanced economies' understanding that the issue is not altruism but naked self-interest. In 2002, when rich countries took part in the Monterey Conference and discussed global cooperation to meet the MDGs, these countries may have asked, "What can we do for them?" This time around the process can only be seen as "What can we do for each other?" Even though developing countries need global ties to make progress, at issue now is not persuading cash-strapped Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development finance ministers to be a little less skinflint but tackling a set of global problems that can be resolved only with the support of the developing world. Take trade: if you look at where the industrialized world is exporting, it is to the developing world. Three-fifths of total U.S. exports go to low--and middle-income countries. U.S. automaker General Motors recovered from the effects of the global financial crisis solely because of exports: in 2009 it sold nearly as many cars in China as in the United States. And what about public finance? In 2000, average external debt in developing countries was about 83 percent of GDP, and two-thirds of those countries still had external-debt-toGDP ratios above 50 percent. By 2011, average external debt had plummeted to 42 percent, and fewer than 1 in 3 had a ratio higher than 50 percent. That improved fiscal situation contributed significantly to the ability of international financial institutions such as the IMF to focus their resources and attention during the crisis on rich countries like Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. Or look at health: if western African nations, including Nigeria and Senegal, had not stopped the spread of Ebola and the outbreak had reached Lagos, Dakar, and beyond, the global cost would have been immense in terms of disrupted trade and travel--in addition to the tragic loss of life. World Bank estimates suggest a severe flu pandemic could cost the world $3 trillion, mostly because of disrupted commerce--and a more deadly disease would cost even more. The only way to stop new pandemics in a globalized world is to tackle them fast when they emerge, and that means strong local health systems. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Then there is migration: growth in the Indian IT sector relied on skills transfer from the United States, but U.S. growth relies on immigrants, who account for about a quarter of the country's patent applications. And U.S. health depends on the rest of the world, not only because of the threat of pandemics, but because one-fifth of the nurses working in the United States were educated abroad. As the industrial world ages, its demand for migrants will only grow. And finally, when it comes to sustainability, the developing world is already the major player: it will soon be responsible for two-thirds of annual carbon dioxide emissions and is home to the great majority of the planet's biodiversity. Far too many children still die of easily prevented illnesses, and many who survive are failed by schools that don't teach, economies that don't provide good jobs, and utilities whose water and power are unreliable. But our global progress against those ills since the turn of the millennium has been incredible. The world would benefit immeasurably if that progress accelerated over the next 15 years--in a way sustainable over the centuries that follow. This is why we all need a strong global financing deal from Addis Ababa this summer, followed by a forceful deal on climate in Paris. Global cooperation is increasingly important to deliver sustainable development progress. Without it, all the fine words spoken and goals for progress set at the General Assembly in New York will be so much hot air and stale ink. ? References: Friedman, Howard, 2013, "Causal Inference and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): Assessing Whether There Was an Acceleration in MDG Development Indicators Following the MDG Declaration," MPRA Paper No. 48793 (Munich: Munich Personal RePEc Archive). Kenny, Charles, with Sarah Dykstra, 2013, "The Global Partnership for Development: A Review of MDG 8 and Proposals for the Post-2015 Development Agenda," CGD Policy Paper 026 (Washington: Center for Global Development). Summers, Lawrence H., and Lant Pritchett, 2014, "Asiaphoria Meets Regression to the Mean," NBER Working Paper No. 20573 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: National Bureau of Economic Research, October). Charles Kenny is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development and author of The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest Is Great for the West.

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Samiha Fawzy (editor) Globalization and Firm Competitiveness in the Middle East and North Africa Region The Mediterranean Development Forum and the World Bank, 2002, 278 pp. $35.00 (paper). THERE is [...]

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Surjit Bhalla Imagine There's No Country--Poverty, inequality and Growth In the Era of Globalization Institute for international Economics, Washington, 2002, xix + 248 pp., $28 (paper). NOTWITHSTANDING Joe Stiglitz's tenure [...]

TRANSLATING strong growth into better living conditions is the holy grail for policymakers in developing economies, many of which have experienced strong economic growth in the past decade. But poverty, inequality, and unemployment indicators remain stubbornly high in many countries. The quality of growth is as important as its level--maybe even more important. High growth alone will not improve social outcomes. There is increasing agreement that inclusive growth--that benefits all members of society--is an important element of so-called good growth. The common denominator of inclusive growth is its quality, which can mean different things to different people. Like beauty, quality growth is in the eye of the beholder. Recent economic and political history has shown that high growth does not necessarily lead to better social outcomes. Likewise, good social outcomes without sound growth are unsustainable (Berg, Ostry, and Zettelmeyer, 2012). Good growth in developing economies must promote the ultimate goals of any development policy--better living standards, lower poverty, and reduced inequality. A mushrooming literature shows that countries with high, durable, and socially friendly growth are more likely to improve living standards and reduce poverty faster (see, for example, Dollar and Kraay, 2002; Sala-i-Martin, 2006). Good growth should, therefore, ensure inclusion of segments of the population that are on the fringes of the growth process. Redistribution of the fruits of growth is less important than ensuring that growth is broad based and leads to better social outcomes. The measure of quality Despite consensus in the economics profession that growth alone does not lead to better social outcomes (Ianchovichina and Gable, 2012), quality growth still lacks a rigorous definition or formal quantification. In a recent paper (Mlachila, Tapsoba, and Tapsoba, 2014), we develop a quality of growth index (QGI) that captures both the intrinsic nature of growth and its social dimension. Our premise is that not all growth produces favorable social outcomes. How growth is generated is critical to its sustainability and ability to create decent jobs, enhance living standards, and reduce poverty. We aim in our design of the QGI to capture these multidimensional features of growth by focusing on its very nature and desired social outcomes. The QGI is a composite index, simple and transparent in its design. The index results from the aggregation of two building blocks: the intrinsic nature of growth--its strength, stability, diversification, and outward orientation--and the social dimension, representing the desired social outputs from growth (see Chart 1). Strong, stable, diversified, and export-oriented growth is necessary to curb poverty (Dollar and Kraay, 2002). Unstable growth worsens poverty and undermines equality because the erosion of poor people's skills during bad times is not remedied when the economy pulls out of a crisis (Ames and others, 2001). Diversified growth reduces variability in economic performance (Papageorgiou and Spatafora, 2012), which helps reduce poverty. And export-oriented growth is more likely to raise productivity growth, including via learning-by-doing, importation of advanced technologies, transfer of knowledge, the discipline of the world market, competition, and foreign direct investment (Diao, Rattso, and Stokke, 2006). Such outward orientation of growth can also increase a country's vulnerability to fluctuations in the external environment, but the QGI addresses this concern to some degree by accounting for growth volatility. In addition, a long and healthy life, along with access to a good education, is an important and well-accepted indicator of poverty reduction (Sen, 2003). The QGI omits other key variables of inclusiveness, such as employment, inequality, and environmental factors, because of data limitations. The index ranges from 0 to 1--with 1 as the highest score for good growth--and covers more than 90 developing economies during 1990-2011. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] What is new about the index? Is it just a rehash of the well-known Human Development Index (HDI) developed by the United Nations (UNDP, 1990) or of other welfare indicators? Not at all: there are notable differences. The QGI goes beyond income levels and focuses on the very nature of growth. The HDI is mostly income based, building as it does on the level of income per capita in a given year. It can be argued that the HDI actually represents millennia of accumulated growth--the level of income at a given date is the sum of growth episodes. The advantage of the QGI is its ability to assess the quality of specific episodes of growth both within and across countries. This feature lets policymakers know whether their growth strategy is yielding good results. Moreover, the QGI has the ability to identify growth and social outcomes actually attributable to current or recent policies. The QGI also differs from the recently developed Social Progress Index (SPI; Stern and others, 2014). The SPI, more than the HDI, focuses on aspects that are close to the social dimension of the QGI but doesn't take into account the fundamental aspects of growth that are at the core of the QGI. QGI findings Several important themes emerge from our empirical investigation of the QGI. The quality of growth has been improving over the past two decades (see Chart 2), thanks to the confluence of a number of factors, including global moderation of external shocks such as terms-of-trade fluctuations; the implementation of generally sound macroeconomic policies; and a gradual shift toward more socially friendly public spending. These have contributed to raising growth, reducing its volatility, improving its composition, and enhancing its potential to deliver better social outcomes. In addition, the convergence of the quality of growth among countries is relatively sluggish. The lowest performers tend to catch up to the best performers over time, but only slowly. This follows the traditional convergence hypothesis found in the growth literature. In other words, once a country's quality of growth is high it becomes increasingly difficult to keep on improving it--just as there are biological limits to the improvement of life expectancy. Conversely, countries with low QGI tend to improve the quality of their growth at a relative faster pace. Lasting improvements in social outcomes call for sustained high-quality growth over a long time--30 to 40 years. Countries such as China and Malaysia have made great strides on this front, though social safety nets have yet to be fully developed. A number of African countries, such as Tanzania and Zambia, have achieved notable improvements in the quality of growth, but they must sustain this momentum over time. [GRAPHIC 2 OMITTED] [GRAPHIC 3 OMITTED] [GRAPHIC 4 OMITTED] There are considerable cross-country variations in income levels and regions (see Chart 3). Unsurprisingly, upper-middle-income countries record the highest scores, followed by lower-middle-income countries and low-income countries. Also unsurprisingly, fragile states are faced with structural impediments to the quality of growth and generally fall behind in this area. From a regional perspective, Latin America, central and eastern Europe, and Asia and the Pacific stand out as the best QGI performers, mostly because of significant improvement in the index's social component. Latin America started from a weak base, suffering from high poverty and income inequality in the early 1990s, and the performance of central and eastern Europe on the QGI was boosted by strong social advances after the transition to market economies in that region. Strong, mostly export-oriented growth that brought substantial productivity gains through technology and innovation transfers was the main driver in Asia and the Pacific. These trailblazers are followed by the Middle East and North Africa region, which is helped by an improvement in the social dimension, coupled with relatively strong growth. Sub-Saharan African countries rank at the bottom despite their recent robust growth, which has yet to translate into better social outcomes. Empirical models indicate that there is considerable scope for policymakers to improve the quality of growth (see Chart 4) by improving macroeconomic and political stability, institutional quality, pro-poor public spending, and financial development. And a more favorable external environment certainly also helps. Increased public resources for social sectors such as health and education help strengthen human capital, which not only raises productivity of the economy as a whole, but also opens the door to equal opportunity for individuals to reap the fruits of higher growth. Greater financial development, which eases access to credit, helps unleash the private sector's potential for creating wealth and good jobs. And external conditions, especially foreign direct investment, fill domestic savings shortfalls for domestic investment and accelerate the transfer of technology and knowledge. Room for improvement Even though the QGI contributes to the ongoing analysis of unequal growth, there are ways to improve the index. It has potential as a timely and cost-effective tool for policymakers to monitor the progress of inclusive growth. But, like all indices, it is only as good as the underlying data. The quality of social data is particularly weak and patchy, so we were forced to make a number of interpolations and use five-year averages in our calculations. The index could be enhanced by including measures of inequality as well as labor market variables. Last but not least, a word of caution: the QGI does not address long-term sustainability. Simply put, the index cannot predict whether a country's current policies--which may improve the quality of growth today--will lead to economic or environmental disaster in the long run. For instance, a country may improve its quality of growth by rapidly depleting its natural resources or running up public debt. The QGI is a useful tool in the quest for better measurement of the quality of growth and could help guide a strategy for successful growth in the developing world. References: Ames, Brian, Ward Brown, Shanta Devarajan, and Alejandro Izquierdo, 2001, "Macroeconomic Policy and Poverty Reduction" (Washington: International Monetary Fund and World Bank). Berg, Andrew, Jonathan D. Ostry, and Jeromin Zettelmeyer, 2012, "What Makes Growth Sustained?" Journal of Development Economics, Vol. 98, No. 2, pp. 149-66. Diao, Xinshen, lorn Rattse, and Hildegunn E. Stokke, 2006, "Learning by Exporting and Structural Change: A Ramsey Growth Model of Thailand," Journal of Policy Modeling, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 293-306. Dollar, David, and Aart Kraay, 2002, "Growth Is Good for the Poor," Journal of Economic Growth, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 195-225. Ianchovichina, Elena, and Susanna Lundstrom Gable, 2012, "What Is Inclusive Growth?" Chapter 8 in Commodity Price Volatility and Inclusive Growth in Low-Income Countries, ed. by Rabah Arezki, Catherine A. Pattillo, Marc Quintyn, and Min Zhu (Washington: International Monetary Fund). Mlachila, Montfort, Rene Tapsoba, and Sampawende Tapsoba, 2014, "A Quality of Growth Index for Developing Countries: A Proposal," IMF Working Paper 14/172 (Washington: International Monetary Fund). Papageorgiou, Chris, and Nikola Spatafora, 2012, "Economic Diversification in LICs: Stylized Facts and Macroeconomic Implications," IMF Staff Discussion Note 12/13 (Washington: International Monetary Fund). Sala-i-Martin, Xavier, 2006, "The World Distribution of Income: Falling Poverty and ... Convergence, Period," Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 121, No. 2, pp. 351-97. Sen, Amartya, 2003, "Concepts of Poverty," Chapter 2 in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online). Stern, Scott, Amy Wares, and Sarah Orzell, with Patrick O'Sullivan, 2014, "Social Progress Index 2014 Methodological Report" (London: Social Progress Imperative). United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 1990, Human Development Report 1990 (New York: Oxford University Press). Montfort Mlachila is an Advisor in the IMF's African Department, and Rene Tapsoba and Sampawende Tapsoba are Economists in the IMF's Fiscal Affairs Department.

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CHINA and, more recently, India are emerging as major trading countries at the same time that a new form of international commerce is taking shape--technologically assisted offshoring of jobs, especially [...]

IDEAS in economics can sometimes prompt policies that promote the greater good. But ideas motivated by idealism and then pursued with intense commitment are rare. Yet these are the qualities [...]

ECONOMICS made Paul Krugman famous. Punditry has made him a celebrity, famous for being famous. But Krugman aspires to be long remembered, and, in this respect, John Maynard Keynes is [...]

National and local governments own a potential gold mine of assets, mostly in the form of real estate and government-owned companies. With better governance, many of these assets--such as outdated [...]

Atypical developing economy collects just 15 percent of GDP in taxes, compared with the 40 percent collected by a typical advanced economy. The ability to collect taxes is central to [...]

Since the 2011 uprisings in many Middle Eastern and North African countries, the role of women in the economy has expanded somewhat--at least on paper. But as the following vignettes [...]

The League of Nations did not have a Facebook page. Its staff didn't Google or order online from Amazon. A century ago foreign direct investment involved tangible things like railways [...]

'WHAT do they know of cricket who only cricket know?' asked C.L.R. James, the renowned Trinidadian historian, essayist, and cricket writer. Rare is the modern day intellectual who has not [...]

'IT IS A CAPITAL MISTAKE to theorize before one has data,' Sherlock Holmes remarks to his friend Dr. Watson in 'A Scandal in Bohemia.' Development economist Esther Duflo would probably [...]

THE DEBATE over the role of institutions in economic development has become dangerously simplified. The vague concept of 'institutions' has become, almost tautologically, the intermediate target for all efforts to [...]

THE POPULATION of the MENA region is one of the fastest growing in the world. It has nearly quadrupled since 1950 and is expected to double over the next 50 [...]

WHAT EXACTLY is a poverty reduction strategy paper (PRSP), the centerpiece of the international community's new assault on poverty? It is essentially a road map prepared by countries themselves to [...]