This paper evaluates the impact of access to groundwater on poverty using data from rural India. The estimation exploits the fact that the technology required to access groundwater changes exogenously due to constraints imposed by laws of physics at a depth of eight meters. I find that rural poverty in areas where depth from surface is below the cutoff is 9 to10 percent higher. Using survey dat...

One important determinant of the speed and success of transition will be the efficiency of transformation and development of the infrastructure sectors. A great deal of attention has been paid to issues such as privatisation, restructuring, user prices, and terms of access in these sectors, regarding both developed and developing countries. Some issues regarding vertical restructuring are notab...

Regionalization is a part of globalization and a dynamic process of marching towards globalization. The so-called NADEs (Northeast Asia’s Dynamic Economies) including Japan, Korea and China are expected to lead economic growth in the Asia-Pacific region. This paper analyzes the trade and investment relationships among the three countries, points out the necessity for their technological coopera...

One important determinant of the speed and success of transition will be the efficiency of transformation and development of the infrastructure sectors. A great deal of attention has been paid to issues such as privatisation, restructuring, user prices, and terms of access in these sectors, regarding both developed and developing countries. Some issues regarding vertical restructuring are notab...

This paper builds a model of growth through industrialization, where machines replace workers in a growing number of tasks. This enables the economy to experience long-run growth, as machines become servants of humans, and as their number grows unboundedly. The mechanism that drives growth is feedback between industrialization and wages. High wages provide incentives to use machines, while indu...

Historically, improvements in municipal water quality led to substantial mortality decline today’s wealthy countries. However, disinfection has not consistently produced large benefits lower-income We study this issue by analyzing a large-scale program Mexico that increased chlorination coverage urban areas from 58 percent over 90 within 18 months. estimate the reduced childhood diarrheal disea...

A growing literature relies on natural experiments to establish causal effects in macroeconomics. In diverse applications, natural experiments have been used to verify underlying assumptions of conventional models, quantify specific model parameters, and identify mechanisms that have major effects on macroeconomic quantities but are absent from conventional models. We discuss and compare the us...

Article history: Received 5 August 2009 Available online 23 November 2010 In this paper we apply a model of early industrialization to the case of New Zealand and Uruguay in 1870–1940. We show how differences in agricultural institutions may have produced different development paths in two countries which were similar under many respects. While in New Zealand the active role of the Crown in reg...

South Africa simultaneously lost more than 890,000 jobs and increased the number of skilled workers from 1989 to 1999. We argue this is the consequence of well-documented acute apartheidera distortions which led to a current coordination failure where (i) firms are locked into a mostly skill-intensive technology where they have very little demand for semi-skilled and unskilled labor, and (ii) t...

Many e-government initiatives introduce technology to improve efficiency and avoid potential human bias. Using experimental variation, we examine the impact of electronic tax filing (to replace in-person submission officials) using data from Tajikistan firms. E-filing reduces time firms spend on taxes by 40 percent. Further, among previously more likely evade, e-filing doubles paid. Conversely,...