Aart Kraay

Growth is Good for the Poor

Average incomes of the poorest quintile rise proportionately with average incomes in a sample of 92 countries spanning the last four decades. This is because the share of income of the poorest quintile does not vary systematically with average income. It also does not vary with many of the policies and institutions that explain growth rates of average incomes, nor does it vary with measures of policies intended to benefit the poorest in society. This evidence emphasizes the importance of economic growth for poverty reduction.

Governance Matters VII: Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators, 1996-2007

This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.

The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Methodology and Analytical Issues

This paper summarizes the methodology of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project, and related analytical issues. The WGI has covered over two hundred countries and territories, measuring six dimensions of governance starting in 1996: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Eff ectiveness, 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. We also explicitly report margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. We find that even after taking 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 .

Consistent Covariance Matrix Estimation with Spatially Dependent Panel Data

Many panel data sets encountered in macroeconomics, international economics, regional science, and finance are characterized by cross-sectional or spatial dependence. Standard techniques that fail to account for this dependence will result in inconsistently estimated standard errors. In this paper we present conditions under which a simple extension of common nonparametric covariance matrix estimation techniques yields standard error estimates that are robust to very general forms of spatial and temporal dependence as the time dimension becomes large. We illustrate the relevance of this approach using Monte Carlo simulations and a number of empirical examples.

Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002

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.

Governance matters IV: governance indicators for 1996-2004

The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.

Institutions, trade, and growth ☆

Abstract Countries with better institutions and countries that trade more grow faster. Countries with better institutions also tend to trade more. These three stylized facts have been documented extensively. Here we investigate the partial effects of institutions and trade on growth. We argue that cross-country regressions of the log-level of per capita GDP on instrumented measures of trade and institutional quality are uninformative about the relative importance of trade and institutions in the long run, because of the very high correlation between the latter two variables. In contrast, regressions of changes in decadal growth rates on instrumented changes in trade and changes in institutional quality provide evidence of a significant effect of trade on growth, with a smaller role for improvements in institutions. These results are suggestive of an important joint role for both trade and institutions in the very long run, but a relatively larger role for trade over shorter horizons.

Growth Without Governance

Per capita incomes and the quality of governance are strongly positively correlated across countries. We propose an empirical strategy that allows us to separate this correlation into: i) a strong positive causal effect running from better governance to higher per capita incomes, and ii) a weak and even negative causal effect running in the opposite direction from per capita incomes to governance. The first result confirms existing evidence on the importance of good governance for economic development. The second result is new and suggests the absence of “virtuous circles” in which higher incomes lead to further improvements in governance. This motivates our choice of title, “Growth Without Governance”. We document this evidence using a newly-updated set of worldwide governance indicators covering 175 countries for the period 2000/01, and use the results to interpret the relationship between incomes and governance in the Latin America and the Caribbean region. Finally, we speculate as to the potential importance of elite influence and state capture in accounting for the surprising negative effects of per capita incomes on governance, present some evidence on such capture in some Latin American countries, and suggest priorities for actions to improve governance when such pernicious elite influence shapes public policy.

Exports and Economic Performance: Evidence from a Panel of Chinese Enterprises

In twenty years of reform in China, the key development has been the opening-up of the market to foreign trade and international investment. This increased economic openness has been accompanied by profound changes in both economic organisation and regional disparity. This comprehensive book focuses on the link between these economic reforms and the causes – and ultimately the implications – of regional inequalities in the most populous country in the world.

Current Accounts in Debtor and Creditor Countries

The authors reexamine a classic question in international economics: What is the current account response to a transitory income shock such as a temporary improvement in the terms of trade, a transfer from abroad, or unusually high production? To answer this question, they construct a world equilibrium model in which productivity varies across countries and international borrowing and lending take place to exploit good investment opportunities. Despite its conventional ingredients, the model generates the novel prediction that favorable income shocks lead to current account deficits in debtor countries and current account surpluses in creditor countries. Evidence from thirteen OECD countries broadly supports this theoretical prediction.