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Growth Trends in the Developing World : Country Forecasts and DeterminantsThe authors present real per capita GDP growth forecasts for all developing countries for the period 2005-14. For 55 of these countries, representing major world regions and accounting for close to 80 percent of the developing world's GDP, they forecast the growth effects of the main forces underpinning growth, assuming that these evolve following past trends. The authors find that for the average developing country the largest growth dividend comes from continued improvement in public infrastructure, followed by the growth contributions of rising secondary school enrollment, trade openness, and financial deepening. The joint contribution of these four growth determinants to average, annual per capita GDP growth in the next decade is estimated to be 1 percentage point. Failure to keep improving public infrastructure alone could reduce this growth dividend by 50 percent. The forecasted growth contributions differ by country qualitatively and quantitatively.
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Development Economics and the
 International Development AssociationPrevailing economic ideas -- and
 fashions -- about development have influenced the
 International Development Association (IDA) since its
 creation in 1960. The creation of the organization itself is
 the result of two contemporaneous facts: an urgent need to
 channel development finance to least-developed countries and
 an increasing pressure on World Bank management to directly
 address the issue of poverty in developing countries.
 Changing views, over time, have been a rationale -- and, at
 times, a justification -- for emphasizing poverty and social
 sectors; for providing grants to particular groups of
 countries; and for strategic choices and sectoral
 priorities. IDA has been influential in development debates
 and been an advocate for specific views about development
 policy. This paper gives an overview of these views and
 documents how they have shaped the activities of the
 organization since its creation. After a brief review of
 development thinking and of the organization of research at
 the World Bank, the paper documents the shifts that have
 taken place in country allocations and in sector emphasis in
 IDA over the past 50 years and highlights the strategic
 themes that have guided its development agenda: toward
 increasing country selectivity; from projects to programs;
 from conditionality to country ownership of reforms; and
 from input-based to results-based performance.
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Globalization, Growth, and DistributionIn the last two decades, across a range
 of countries high growth rates have reduced poverty but have
 been accompanied by rising inequality. This paper is
 motivated by this stylized fact, and by the strong
 distributional concerns that persist among populations and
 policy makers alike, despite the poverty reduction observed
 in official statistics where growth has been sufficiently
 high. This seeming disconnects frames the questions posed in
 this paper. Why the disconnect, and what to do about it? It
 is argued that official poverty statistics may be missing
 key elements of the ground level reality of distributional
 evolution, of which rising inequality may be an indirect
 indicator. Heterogeneity of population means that there may
 be significant numbers of poor losers from technical change,
 economic reform and global integration, even when overall
 measured poverty falls. In terms of actions, attention is
 drawn to the role of safety nets as generalized compensation
 mechanisms, to address the ethical and political economy
 dimensions of such a pattern of distributional evolution.
 Addressing structural inequalities is also a long term
 answer with payoffs in terms of equitable growth. In terms
 of future analysis, diminishing returns have set in to the
 inequality-growth cross-country regressions literature.
 Further work to help policy makers should focus on: (i) new
 information to illuminate the disconnect; (ii) analysis and
 assessment of safety nets as generalized compensation
 mechanisms; and (iii) addressing specific forms of
 structural inequality related to assets, gender, and social
 groupings like caste or ethnicity.