The use of the phrase, ‘political
economy’ originates in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and is
also found in the writings of David Ricardo and Karl Marx.
What is presently understood as ‘economics’ was, at that
time, termed ‘political economy’. This was understood to
mean ‘conditions of production organization in
nation-states’ (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012, Beuran,
Raballand and Kapoor, 2011). Venerable scholars such as

Drawing on a new set of nationally
representative, internationally comparable household
surveys, this paper provides an overview of key features of
structural transformation—labor allocation and labor
productivity—in four African economies. New, micro-based
measures of sector labor allocation and cross-sector
productivity differentials describe the incentives
households face when allocating their labor. These measures

The devastating civil war in Syria is
arguably one of the major civil conflicts in recent times.
The conflict started with protests in March 2011 and soon
after escalated to a violent internal war with no end in
sight to this date. The conflict has by the end of 2014
caused well in excess of 150,000 fatalities, and 6 million
internally displaced people (UN), and led 3 million refugees
to move out of the country (UNHCR). Beyond the human

Firms normally keep certain inventories,
including raw materials, work-in-progress, and finished
goods, to operate seamlessly and not to miss possible
business opportunities. But inventory is costly, and the
optimal firm inventory differs depending on various economic
conditions, including trade and transport costs. The paper
examines firm inventory behavior in East Africa, in which
transport connectivity, especially to the ports, is

Nepal depends entirely on imports for
meeting its demand for petroleum products, which account for
the largest share in total import volume. Diesel is the main
petroleum product consumed in the country and accounts for
38 percent of the total national CO2 emissions from fuel
consumption. There is a general perception that the country
would economically benefit if part of imported diesel is
substituted with domestically produced jatropha-based

This paper provides new empirical
insights on the joint distribution of consumption, income,
and wealth in three of the poorest countries in the world —
Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda — all located in Sub-Saharan
Africa (SSA). The first finding is that while income
inequality is similar to that of the United States (US),
wealth inequality is barely one-third that of the US.
Similarly, while the top of the income distribution (1 and

In May 2005, the Bank adopted a new
policy and new procedures on Additional Financing
(OP/BP13.20) for investment lending, replacing the previous
policy on supplemental financing. This policywas later
revised in March 2012. This learning product assesses the
performance of the AdditionalFinancing (AF) operations
approved since then and draws lessons from their
implementationexperience. The assessment focuses on AF in

Despite widespread agreement among economists that labor-intensive manufacturing has contributed mightily to rapid development in China and other fast-growing economies, most developing countries have had little success in raising the share of manufacturing in production, employment, or exports. Tales from the Development Frontier recounts efforts to establish light manufacturing clusters in several Asian and African countries, looking in particular at China.

This paper uses a stochastic dynamic
programming model to characterize the optimal
savings-consumption decisions and the role of livestock
inventories as a buffer stock in rural Ethiopia. The results
show that relatively land-rich households use accumulation
and liquidation of cattle and other animal inventories for
partial consumption smoothing, while low-income households
appear not to do so. The results highlight the need for

With global food crises and food price volatility in recent years, agricultural subsidies have once
again gained prominence as a policy instrument in many developing countries. In Mongolia too,
subsidies to the agriculture sector mainly through government budgetary transfers, have
increased over time. These gained prominence in 2008 when a global, regional (the drought in
Russia, and Kazakhstan, the two main suppliers to Mongolia), and the national food production

This paper examines spending plans
suggested by the recent literature regarding Dutch disease
and examines their implications to Niger relative to its
expanding mineral sector. The key to the benefits of
significant mineral revenue lies with the productivity and
supply responses of spending. If significant output gain is
ensured, then there is little difference across the spending
plans in their effects on real consumption. The overshooting

Using newly collected national and
sub-national data, and historical case studies, this paper
argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by
the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second
Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present
income differences, and, in particular, the poor performance
of Latin America relative to North America. This remains the
case after controlling for literacy, other higher order