What happened yesterday in the West is today being repeated on a global scale. Industrial society is replacing rural society: millions of peasants in China, India, and elsewhere are leaving the countryside and going to the city. New powers are emerging and rivalries are exacerbated as...

The recent economic crisis--with the plunge in the stock market, numerous bank failures and widespread financial distress, declining output and rising unemployment--has been reminiscent of the Great Depression. The Depression of the 1930s was marked by the spread of protectionist trade policies,...

The microfinance revolution has allowed more than 150 million poor people around the world to receive small loans without collateral, build up assets, and buy insurance. The idea that providing access to reliable and affordable financial services can have powerful economic and social effects has...

The microfinance revolution has allowed more than 150 million poor people around the world to receive small loans without collateral, build up assets, and buy insurance. The idea that providing access to reliable and affordable financial services can have powerful economic and social effects has...

These two volumes of readings attempt to bring some degree of structure to a relatively diffuse field. Because of the sheer volume of high-quality work in development economics research, they are intended as a sampling of work at the frontier of the field, rather than as a comprehensive...

The American government has been both miracle worker and villain in the developing world. From the end of World War II until the 1980s poor countries, including many in Africa and the Middle East, enjoyed a modicum of economic growth. New industries mushroomed and skilled jobs multiplied, thanks...

Virtually all industrialized nations have annual per capita incomes greater than $15,000; meanwhile, over three billion people, more than half the world's population, live in countries with per capita incomes of less than $700. Development economics studies the economies of such countries and the...

Drawing on preliminary results from a massive study conducted by the World Bank to probe the links between stabilization and growth, Cooper examines the experience of developing countries faced by the oil shocks of the 1970s and the debt crisis of the 1980s. He points out that a global slowdown...

Most of the literature on exchange rate regimes has focused on the developed countries. Since the recent crises in emerging markets, however, attention has shifted to the choice of exchange rate regimes for developing countries, especially those that are more integrated into the world capital...

In Market Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa, Marcel Fafchamps synthesizes the results of recent surveys of indigenous market institutions in twelve countries, including Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, and presents findings about economics exchange in Africa that have...