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 22

Good Countries or Good Projects?: Comparing Macro and Micro Correlates of World Bank and Asian Development Bank Project Performance

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-04) Bulman, David ; Kolkma, Walter ; Kraay, Aart

This paper examines the micro and macro correlates of aid project outcomes in a sample of 3,821 World Bank projects and 1,342 Asian Development Bank projects. Project outcomes vary much more within countries than between countries: country-level characteristics explain only 10–25 percent of project outcomes. Among macro variables, country growth and the policy environment are significantly positively correlated with project outcomes. Among micro variables, shorter project duration and the presence of additional financing are significantly correlated with better project outcomes. In addition, the track record of the project manager in delivering successful projects is highly significantly correlated with project outcomes. There are few significant differences between the two institutions in the relationship between these variables and project outcomes.
Sovereign Defaults and Expropriations : Empirical Regularities

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-10) Eden, Maya ; Kraay, Aart ; Qian, Rong

This paper uses a large cross-country dataset to empirically examine factors associated with sovereign defaults on external private creditors and expropriation of foreign direct investments in developing countries since the 1970s. In the long run, sovereign defaults and expropriations are likely to occur in the same countries. In the short run, however, these events are uncorrelated. Defaults are more likely to occur following periods of rapid debt accumulation, when growth is low, and in countries with weak policy performance, and defaults are not strongly persistent over time. In contrast, expropriations are not systematically related to the level of foreign direct investment, to growth, or to policy performance. Expropriations are however less likely under right-wing governments, and are strongly persistent over time. There is also little evidence that a history of recent defaults is associated with expropriations, and vice versa. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for models that emphasize retaliation as means for sustaining sovereign borrowing and foreign investment in equilibrium, as well as the implications for political risk insurance against the two types of events.
Government Spending Multipliers in Developing Countries : Evidence from Lending by Official Creditors

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-06) Kraay, Aart

This paper uses a novel loan-level dataset covering lending by official creditors to developing country governments to construct an instrument for public spending that can be used to estimate government spending multipliers. Loans from official creditors (primarily multilateral development banks and bilateral aid agencies) are a major source of financing for government spending in developing countries. These loans typically finance public spending projects that take several years to implement, with multiple disbursements linked to the stages of project implementation. The long disbursement periods for these loans imply that the bulk of government spending financed by official creditors in a given year reflects loan approval decisions made in many previous years, before current-year macroeconomic shocks are known. Loan-level commitment and disbursement transactions from the World Bank's Debtor Reporting System database are used to isolate a predetermined component of government spending associated with past loan approvals. This can be used as an instrument to estimate spending multipliers for a large sample of 102 developing countries. The one-year government spending multiplier is reasonably-precisely estimated to be around 0.4, and there is some suggestive evidence that multipliers are larger in recessions, in countries less exposed to international trade, and in countries with flexible exchange rate regimes.
Good Countries or Good Projects? Macro and Micro Correlates of World Bank Project Performance

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-05-01) Denizer, Cevdet ; Kaufmann, Daniel ; Kraay, Aart

The authors use data from more than 6,000 World Bank projects evaluated between 1983 and 2009 to investigate macro and micro correlates of project outcomes. They find that country-level "macro" measures of the quality of policies and institutions are very strongly correlated with project outcomes, confirming the importance of country-level performance for the effective use of aid resources. However, a striking feature of the data is that the success of individual development projects varies much more within countries than it does between countries. The authors assemble a large set of project-level "micro" correlates of project outcomes in an effort to explain some of this within-country variation. They find that measures of project size, the extent of project supervision, and evaluation lags are all significantly correlated with project outcomes, as are early-warning indicators that flag problematic projects during the implementation stage. They also find that measures of World Bank project task manager quality matter significantly for the ultimate outcome of projects. They discuss the implications of these findings for donor policies aimed at aid effectiveness.
Does Respondent Reticence Affect the Results of Corruption Surveys? Evidence from the World Bank Enterprise Survey for Nigeria

( 2010-09-01) Clausen, Bianca ; Kraay, Aart ; Murrell, Peter

A potential concern with survey-based data on corruption is that respondents may not be fully candid in their responses to sensitive questions. If reticent respondents are less likely to admit to involvement in corrupt acts, and if the proportion of reticent respondents varies across groups of interest, comparisons of reported corruption across those groups can be misleading. This paper implements a variant on random response techniques that allows for identification of reticent respondents in the World Bank s Enterprise Survey for Nigeria fielded in 2008 and 2009. The authors find that 13.1 percent of respondents are highly likely to be reticent, and that these reticent respondents admit to sensitive acts at a significantly lower rate than possibly candid respondents when survey questions are worded in a way that implies personal wrongdoing on the part of the respondent.
The Worldwide Governance Indicators : Methodology and Analytical Issues

( 2010-09-01) Kaufmann, Daniel ; Kraay, Aart ; Mastruzzi, Massimo

This paper summarizes the methodology of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project, and related analytical issues. The WGI cover over 200 countries and territories, measuring six dimensions of governance starting in 1996: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. The aggregate indicators are based on several hundred individual underlying variables, taken from a wide variety of existing data sources. The data reflect the views on governance of survey respondents and public, private, and NGO sector experts worldwide. The WGI also explicitly report margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. Even after taking these margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country and over-time comparisons. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying source data, are available at www.govindicators.org.
"Crowding in" and the Returns to Government Investment in Low-Income Countries

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-02) Eden, Maya ; Kraay, Aart

This paper estimates the effect of government investment on private investment in a sample of 39 low-income countries. Fluctuations in a predetermined component of disbursements on loans from official creditors to developing country governments are used as an instrument for fluctuations in public investment. The analysis finds evidence of "crowding in": an extra dollar of government investment raises private investment by roughly two dollars, and output by 1.5 dollars. To understand the implications for the return to public investment, a CES production function with public and private capital as inputs is calibrated. For most countries in the sample, the returns to government investment exceed the world interest rate. However, for some countries that already have high government investment rates, the return to further investment is below the world interest rate.
Do Poverty Traps Exist?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-04) Kraay, Aart ; McKenzie, David

This paper reviews the empirical evidence on the existence of poverty traps, understood as self-reinforcing mechanisms through which poor individuals or countries remain poor. Poverty traps have captured the interest of many development policy makers, because poverty traps provide a theoretically coherent explanation for persistent poverty. They also suggest that temporary policy interventions may have long-term effects on poverty. However, a review of the reduced-form empirical evidence suggests that truly stagnant incomes of the sort predicted by standard models of poverty traps are in fact quite rare. Moreover, the empirical evidence regarding several canonical mechanisms underlying models of poverty traps is mixed.
Doing the Survey Two-Step: The Effects of Reticence on Estimates of Corruption in Two-Stage Survey Questions

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05) Karalashvili, Nona ; Kraay, Aart ; Murrell, Peter

This paper develops a structural approach for modeling how respondents answer survey questions and uses it to estimate the proportion of respondents who are reticent in answering corruption questions, as well as the extent to which reticent behavior biases down conventional estimates of corruption. The context is a common two-step survey question, first inquiring whether a government official visited a business, and then asking about bribery if a visit was acknowledged. Reticence is a concern for both steps, since denying a visit sidesteps the bribe question. This paper considers two alternative models of how reticence affects responses to two-step questions, with differing assumptions on how reticence affects the first question about visits. Maximum-likelihood estimates are obtained for seven countries using data on interactions with tax officials. Different models work best in different countries, but cross-country comparisons are still valid because both models use the same structural parameters. On average, 40 percent of corruption questions are answered reticently, with much variation across countries. A statistic reflecting how much standard measures underestimate the proportion of all respondents who had a bribe interaction is developed. The downward bias in standard measures is highly statistically significant in all countries, varying from 12 percent in Nigeria to 90 percent in Turkey. The source of bias varies widely across countries, between denying a visit and denying a bribe after admitting a visit.
Growth in China 1978-2008 : Factor Accumulation, Factor Reallocation, and Improvements in Productivity

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-05-17) Bulman, David ; Kraay, Aart

China's economic success over the past three decades can be decomposed into three broad contributions to growth; accumulation of labor and capital, growth induced by structural transformation (i.e. the reallocation of labor and capital across sectors and ownership units), and growth in total factor productivity. Understanding the evolution of these three growth determinants is important for understanding China s future growth potential. For example, in the neoclassical growth model, rapid growth through factor accumulation eventually slows with the onset of diminishing returns. And growth achieved through the reallocation of factors of production from less efficient to more efficient uses will also eventually peter out as marginal products of factors are equated across units. In this paper we perform a growth accounting exercise for China which allows us to separate these three broad contributions to growth. The main novelty of our exercise lies in our efforts to understand the role of reallocation of both capital and labor across major sectors (agriculture, industry, and services), and across ownership forms (state, collective, and other).