Kraay, Aart

Person:
Kraay, Aart

Development Research Group, The World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Macroeconomics, Debt management, Economic growth, Inequality and shared prosperity

Departments

Development Research Group, The World Bank

Last updated January 31, 2023

Biography

Aart Kraay is Director of Research in the Development Research Group at the World Bank. He joined the World Bank in 1995 after earning a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University (1995), and a B.Sc. in economics from the University of Toronto (1990). His research interests include international capital movements, growth and inequality, governance, and the Chinese economy. His research on these topics has been published in scholarly journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of International Economics, and the Journal of the European Economic Association. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Development Economics, and co-editor of the World Bank Economic Review. He has also held visiting positions at the International Monetary Fund and the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and has taught at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 17

Country Portfolios

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-04) Kraay, Aart ; Loayza, Norman ; Servén, Luis ; Ventura, Jaume

Capital flows to developing countries are small and take mostly the form of loans rather than direct foreign investment. We build a simple model of North-South capital flows that highlights the interplay between diminishing returns, production risk and sovereign risk. This model generates a set of country portfolios and a world distribution of capital stocks that resemble those in the data.
When Is External Debt Sustainable?

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-02) Kraay, Aart ; Nehru, Vikram

This paper examines the determinants of "debt distress," which they define as periods in which countries resort to exceptional finance in any of three forms: (1) significant arrears on external debt, (2) Paris Club rescheduling, and (3) nonconcessional International Monetary Fund lending. Using probit regressions, the authors find that three factors explain a substantial fraction of the cross-country and time-series variation in the incidence of debt distress: the debt burden, the quality of policies and institutions, and shocks. They show that these results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications, and that their core specifications have substantial out-of-sample predictive power. The authors also explore the quantitative implications of these results for the lending strategies of official creditors.
Governance Matters II : Updated Indicators for 2000-01

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2002-02) Kaufmann, Daniel ; Kraay, Aart ; Zoido-Lobaton, Pablo

The authors construct aggregate governance indicators for six dimensions of governance, covering 175 countries in 2000-01. They apply the methodology developed in Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton ("Aggregating Governance Indicators", Policy Research Working Paper 2195, and "Governance Matters", Policy Research Working Paper 2196, October 1999) to newly available data at governance indicators comparable with those constructed for 1997-98. The data is presented I the appendix, and accessible through an interactive Web-interface at http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance/govdata2001.htm.
Growth is Good for the Poor

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2001-04) Dollar, David ; Kraay, Aart

When average income rises, the average incomes of the poorest fifth of society rise proportionately. This is a consequence of the strong empirical regularity that the share of income accruing to the bottom quintile does not vary systematically with average income. The authors document this empirical regularity in a sample of 92 countries spanning the past four decades and show that it holds across regions, periods, income levels, and growth rates. The authors next ask whether the factors that explain cross-country differences in the growth rates of average incomes have differential effects on the poorest fifth of society. They find that several determinants of growth--such as good rule of law, opennness to international trade, and developed financial markets--have little systematic effect on the share of income that accrues to the bottom quintile. Consequently, these factors benefit the poorest fifth of society as much as everyone else. Thee is some weak evidence that stabilization from high inflation and reductions in the overall size of government not only increase growth but also increase the income share of the poorest fifth in society. Finally, the authors examine several factors commonly thought to disproportionately benefit the poorest in society, but find little evidence of their effects. The absence of robust findings emphasizes that relatively little is known about the broad forces that account for the cross-country and intertemporal variation in the share of income accruing to the poorest fifth of society.
Institutions, Trade, and Growth : Revisiting the Evidence

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-03) Dollar, David ; Kraay, Aart

Several recent papers have attempted to identify the partial effects of trade integration and institutional quality on long-run growth using the geographical determinants of trade and the historical determinants of institutions as instruments. The authors show that many of the specifications in these papers are weakly identified despite the apparently good performance of the instruments in first-stage regressions. Consequently, they argue that the cross-country variation in institutions, trade, and their geographical and historical determinants is not very informative about the partial effects of these variables on long-run growth.
Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08) Kaufmann, Daniel ; Kraay, Aart ; Mastruzzi, Massimo

The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.
Does IDA Engage in Defensive Lending?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-08) Geginat, Carolin ; Kraay, Aart

Multilateral development banks are frequently accused of "defensive lending," the practice of extending new loans purely in order to ensure that existing loans are repaid. This paper empirically examine this hypothesis using data on lending by and repayments to the International Development Association (IDA), which is the largest provider of concessional development loans to low-income countries. The authors argue that key institutional features of IDA both (i) potentially create incentives for defensive lending, and (ii) enable particularly sharp tests of the defensive lending hypothesis. The authors find that there is a surprisingly robust partial correlation between disbursements on new IDA loans and repayments on existing loans. However, a closer look at the evidence suggests that defensive lending is unlikely to be a major explanation for this partial correlation.
Governance Indicators : Where Are We, Where Should We Be Going?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-10) Kaufmann, Daniel ; Kraay, Aart

Scholars, policymakers, aid donors, and aid recipients acknowledge the importance of good governance for development. This understanding has spurred an intense interest in more refined, nuanced, and policy-relevant indicators of governance. In this paper we review progress to date in the area of measuring governance, using a simple framework of analysis focusing on two key questions: (i) what do we measure? and, (ii) whose views do we rely on? For the former question, we distinguish between indicators measuring formal laws or rules 'on the books', and indicators that measure the practical application or outcomes of these rules 'on the ground', calling attention to the strengths and weaknesses of both types of indicators as well as the complementarities between them. For the latter question, we distinguish between experts and survey respondents on whose views governance assessments are based, again highlighting their advantages, disadvantages, and complementarities. We also review the merits of aggregate as opposed to individual governance indicators. We conclude with some simple principles to guide the refinement of existing governance indicators and the development of future indicators. We emphasize the need to: transparently disclose and account for the margins of error in all indicators; draw from a diversity of indicators and exploit complementarities among them; submit all indicators to rigorous public and academic scrutiny; and, in light of the lessons of over a decade of existing indicators, to be realistic in the expectations of future indicators.
The Welfare Effects of a Large Depreciation : The Case of Egypt, 2000-05

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-04) Kraay, Aart

The Egyptian pound depreciated sharply between 2000 and 2005, declining by 26 percent in nominal trade-weighted terms. The author investigates the effect of the large depreciation on household welfare operating through exchange rate-induced changes in consumer prices. He estimates exchange rate pass-through regressions using disaggregated monthly consumer price indices to isolate the impact of the exchange rate changes on consumer prices. Then he uses household-level data from the 2000 and 2005 Egyptian household surveys to quantify the welfare effects of these consumer price changes at the household level. The average welfare loss due to exchange rate-induced price increases was equivalent to 7.4 percent of initial expenditure. Stronger estimated exchange rate pass-through for food items imply that this effect disproportionately affected poorer households.
Poverty Traps, Aid, and Growth

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06) Kraay, Aart ; Raddatz, Claudio

The authors examine the empirical evidence in support of the poverty trap view of underdevelopment. They calibrate simple aggregate growth models in which poverty traps can arise due to either low saving or low technology at low levels of development. They then use these models to assess the empirical relevance of poverty traps and their consequences for policy. The authors find little evidence of the existence of poverty traps based on these two broad mechanisms. When put to the task of explaining the persistence of low income in African countries, the models require either unreasonable values for key parameters, or else generate counterfactual predictions regarding the relations between key variables. These results call into question the view that a large scaling-up of aid to the poorest countries is a necessary condition for sharp and sustained increases in growth.