Malnutrition remains one of the major obstacles to human well-being and economic prosperity in developing countries. There are strong normative and instrumental reasons related to human and economic development to address the burden of malnutrition as an issue of public concern. This calls for governments to prioritize policies and actions and allocate substantial investments in efforts to addr...

To progress toward universal health coverage and promote inclusive social and economic development, it will be necessary to strengthen domestic resource mobilization for health. In this paper, we examine options for increasing domestic government revenue in low- and middle-income countries. We analyze the relationship between level of economic development and levels of government revenue and ex...

Corruption is a hot topic of academic and public policy research. Specifically, corruption is often characterized as directly impacting the economies of developing countries: “Corruption undermines governance, economic growth, and, ultimately, the stability of countries and regions” (Spector, 2005). Of particular concern are areas of the world, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, where corruption is pe...

The paper examines the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy, finding substantial evidence in favor. I summarize the U.S. fiscal record from 1792-2003, critically review sustainability conditions and their testable implications, and apply them to U.S. data. I particularly emphasize the ramifications of economic growth. A “growth dividend” has historically covered the entire interest bill on the ...

Market-oriented economic policies—reflected in limited economic activity by government, protection of private property rights, a sound monetary policy, outward orientation regarding trade and efficient tax and regulatory policy—have been strongly linked to faster rates of economic growth. Foreign aid is often provided in the belief that it encourages liberalizing reforms in these areas. This pa...

It is a known fact that industrialization is critical to economic development. In fact there is hardly any developed nation that is not industrialized. However, industrialization would only take place once there is a focused administration capable of wielding the necessary political will to implement clearly defined policies that can transform the nation’s processes away from primary production...

The conventional view within the endogenous growth literature is that interest income taxes impede economic growth and investment subsidies promote economic growth. The present paper lays out a simple framework to see whether this is still true when non-renewable resources enter the ”growth engine” in an essential way. It is not! The framework allows a rich set of determinants of longrun growth...

Sustainable development aims at addressing economic, social, and environmental concerns, but the current lack of responsive environmental governance hinders progress. Short-term economic development has led to limited actions, unsustainable resource management, and degraded ecosystems. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) may continue to fall short of achieving significant progress witho...

Recent fiscal interventions have raised concerns about US public debt, future fiscal pressure, and long-run economic growth. This paper studies fiscal policy design in an economy in which: (i) the household has recursive preferences and is averse to both shortand long-run uncertainty, and (ii) growth is endogenously sustained through innovations whose market value is sensitive to the tax system...

"This paper provides a one-period normative model that may be used as a guide or benchmark by which the economic planner may develop policies and plans for regional economic development. The model can accomodate a region that could be as large as a small country or as small as a city, provided sufficient relevant data are available." The authors outline "a procedure for modeling and solving ec...