Government spending should be regarded as a social and political phenomenon, not merely as a technical choice. We argue that there is an implicit contract between the organized elites and politicians which often leads to a pro-elite allocation of public resources. A natural and simple taxonomy...

Explicitly accounting for certain basic physical laws governing the “earth” sector dramatically enriches our ability to explain a high degree of diversity in observed patterns of economic growth. We provide a theoretical explanation of why some countries have been able to sustain a more or...

The extent to which food safety standards negatively affect the ability of firms in developing countries to export to the markets of developed countries depends on their approach to compliance. A case study of Guyana’s fish export industry tests this hypothesis. The analysis generally...

The UK Government Chief Scientist takes stock of the enormous challenges facing governments and citizens in balancing the competing pressures and demands on the global food system, not least in providing an adequate and sustainable nutrition for a rapidly-expanding population against the...

This paper introduces a significant new multi-disciplinary collection of studies of poverty dynamics, presenting the reader with the latest thinking by a group of researchers who are leaders in their respective disciplines. It argues that there are three main fronts on which progress must be...

In the last two decades, across a range of countries high growth rates have reduced poverty but have been accompanied by rising inequality. This paper is motivated by this stylized fact, and by the strong distributional concerns that persist among populations and policy makers alike, despite the...