C. Journal articles published externally
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These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.
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Publication
Finance, Growth and Shared Prosperity: Beyond Credit Deepening
(Elsevier, 2016-06-09)Finance might help mobilize greater resources for investment, improve allocation efficiency, and boost economic growth, but since the global economic crisis this relationship has come under increased skepticism. Particularly, the often used indicator of financial depth—private credit to GDP—has been questioned as a robust and reliable contributor to economic growth. Moreover, little research has been undertaken on the broader income distribution effects of finance and economic growth. This paper builds on the literature examining the relationship between finance and growth, inequality, and poverty. It investigates how financial development, broadly defined to include depth, efficiency, stability, and inclusion, influence the growth of aggregate income and the income of people in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution (B40). It also examines how these relationships vary through banking crises. A key contribution of this study is to empirically unpack the multiple effects of financial development on growth across different income groups and finds, interestingly, that firm inclusion is perhaps the most important contributor to B40 long-run income growth. -
Publication
Do Poverty Traps Exist? Assessing the Evidence
(American Economic Association, 2014-07)A "poverty trap" can be understood as a set of self-reinforcing mechanisms whereby countries start poor and remain poor: poverty begets poverty, so that current poverty is itself a direct cause of poverty in the future. The idea of a poverty trap has this striking implication for policy: much poverty is needless, in the sense that a different equilibrium is possible and one-time policy efforts to break the poverty trap may have lasting effects. But what does the modern evidence suggest about the extent to which poverty traps exist in practice and the underlying mechanisms that may be involved? The main mechanisms we examine include S-shaped savings functions at the country level; "big-push" theories of development based on coordination failures; hunger-based traps which rely on physical work capacity rising nonlinearly with food intake at low levels; and occupational poverty traps whereby poor individuals who start businesses that are too small will be trapped earning subsistence returns. We conclude that these types of poverty traps are rare and largely limited to remote or otherwise disadvantaged areas. We discuss behavioral poverty traps as a recent area of research, and geographic poverty traps as the most likely form of a trap. The resulting policy prescriptions are quite different from the calls for a big push in aid or an expansion of microfinance. The more-likely poverty traps call for action in less-traditional policy areas such as promoting more migration. -
Publication
The Return of "Patrimonial Capitalism" : A Review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century
(American Economic Association, 2014-06)Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty provides a unified theory of the functioning of the capitalist economy by linking theories of economic growth and functional and personal income distributions. It argues, based on the long-run historical data series, that the forces of economic divergence (including rising income inequality) tend to dominate in capitalism. It regards the twentieth century as an exception to this rule and proposes policies that would make capitalism sustainable in the twenty-first century. -
Publication
Global Inequality of Opportunity : How Much of Our Income Is Determined By Where We Live?
(MIT Press, 2014-01-07)Suppose that all people in the world are allocated only two characteristics over which they have (almost) no control: country of residence and income distribution within that country. Assume further that there is no migration. We show that more than one-half of variability in income of world population classified according to their household per capita in one-percent income groups (by country) is accounted for by these two characteristics. The role of effort or luck cannot play a large role in explaining global distribution of income. -
Publication
Wage Rigidity and Disinflation in Emerging Countries
(American Economic Association, 2014-01)This paper examines the consequences of rapid disinflation for downward wage rigidities in two emerging countries, Brazil and Uruguay. Although wage rigidities are altered by disinflation, in neither of the two countries does price stability eliminate frictions in wage-setting mechanisms. In a context of individual wage negotiations and weak unions, disinflation in Uruguay puts an end to its history of indexation, but strong resistance to nominal wage cuts emerges. In strongly unionized Brazil, wage indexation is highly persistent, but the introduction of inflation targeting by the Central Bank in 1999 moves the focal point of wage negotiations to expected inflation. -
Publication
Coping with Rising Inequality in Asia : How Effective Are Fiscal Policies?
(MIT Press, 2013-10)This paper discusses the role and effectiveness of redistributive fiscal policies and provides estimates of the effects of taxation and government expenditure on income inequality in Asia. Tax systems around the world tend to be progressive, but government expenditure is generally found to be a more effective tool for redistributing income. In Asia, government spending on social protection has a distinctive differential distributive impact. Social protection spending appears to increase income inequality in Asia, whereas it reduces it in the rest of the world. Government expenditure on housing is also adversely affecting the distribution of income in Asia. Policy options for improving the redistributional effectiveness of fiscal policies in Asia are discussed. -
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School Inputs, Household Substitution, and Test Scores
(American Economic Association, 2013-04)Empirical studies of the relationship between school inputs and test scores typically do not account for household responses to changes in school inputs. Evidence from India and Zambia shows that student test scores are higher when schools receive unanticipated grants, but there is no impact of grants that are anticipated. We show that the most likely mechanism for this result is that households offset their own spending in response to anticipated grants. Our results confirm the importance of optimal household responses and suggest caution when interpreting estimates of school inputs on learning outcomes as parameters of an education production function.