What contribution can information technology (IT) make to India’s overall economic development? This paper provides an analytical framework centred around the concepts of comparative advantage, complementarities, and innovation. There is strong...

This paper analyses income mobility in Viet Nam from 2004 to 2008. The concept of income mobility is important for developed and developing economies, especially for those, such as Viet Nam, witnessing a stable persistent economic growth and profound...

Competition among governments to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) has grown significantly. This paper investigates the extent to which the size of incentive packages offered to investors by governments is driven by competitive pressure to...

All the world’s cocoa is grown in developing countries — more than half in West Africa — essentially for export. Except in Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia, it is grown by smallholders. In the international cocoa market, prices rose steeply in 1977 but...

This paper analyses the impact of changes in social institutions, i.e. in the informal and formal social security system, on income inequality in China. This study uses an inequality decomposition analysis approach comparing household survey data for...

The main policy implication that emerges from this study is that subsidised education without at the same time provision for the creation of growth-enhancing jobs can be good for the individual but bad for growth (and presumably public finances)....

This paper synthesises the existing literature on human capital formation and foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries. The aim is to take a bird’s eye view of the complex linkages between the activities of multinational enterprises...

Using the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) from the OECD Development Centre, this paper provides evidence of the two-way relationship between gender inequality in social institutions and South-South migration. Discriminatory social...

This paper looks at the incidence of fiscal policy on the income distribution for Chile and Mexico. Notably by broadening the income concept to account for in-kind benefits and taxes, this paper provides a full picture of the effect of fiscal policy...

Globalisation, governance and economic performance affect each other in very complex mutual relationships. In this paper, we establish a clear and well-circumscribed hypothesis: “is there an effect of globalisation on governance?” To test this...

In 1995/96, 47.5 per cent of the population of Bangladesh were still living below the poverty line. While this represents a decline compared to 62.6 per cent in 1983/84, the absolute number of poor people has in fact increased over the same period....

This paper examines the relationship between household structures, the institutions that shape them and physical and human capital accumulation using household and individual data from China, Indonesia, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Household structures...

Aid ineffectiveness, fragmentation, and volatility have already been highlighted by scholars and OECD studies. Far fewer studies have been devoted to another problem of capital flows: herding behaviour. Building upon a methodology applied to...

Poor people lack access to health care with a negative impact on their dignity, human capital formation and their risk-management options. Recently an emerging movement of community-based health insurance schemes has attracted the attention of policy...

This report makes a call for why the digital economy matters for developing countries and what they need to consider when developing a national digital strategy. The world is undergoing a digital revolution with significant implications for global...

This paper presents a new data set on human capital. It is based upon data released at the OECD for a subgroup of 38 member and non-member countries, and an effort performed at the Development Centre to expand this data set to other developing...

This paper is a contribution to the ongoing debate on the relationship between economic growth and the environment. Through a contrast of the experiences of two regional groupings of countries — East Asia and Eastern Europe — that have both...

This paper discusses policy options available to government policy makers in developing countries to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) and influence the behaviour of transnational corporations (TNCs), and it focuses on the effects these...

Implementation of globalisation reforms has been uneven in Africa and the policy response generally inadequate. Except in Mauritius, compensatory measures have not been fully applied, reflecting weak capacity and politicisation of the process, so...

Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia have been touted as models for other developing countries of how liberalisation can bring faster growth and greater equity. In fact their performance has been mixed and often inferior to other Asian economies, notably...