David Rosenblatt

Shifting Patterns of Economic Growth and Rethinking Development

This paper provides an historical overview of both the evolution of the economic performance of the developing world and the evolution of economic thought on development policy. The 20th century was broadly characterized by divergence between high-income countries and the developing world, with only a limited number (less than 10 percent of the economies in the world) managing to progress out of lower or middle-income status to high-income status. The last decade witnessed a sharp reversal from a pattern of divergence to convergence --particularly for a set of large middle-income countries. The latter phenomenon was also driven by increasing economic ties among developing countries, and on the intellectual scale, increased knowledge generation and sharing among the developing countries. Re-thinking development policy implies confronting these realities: 20th century economic divergence, the experience of the handful of success stories, and the recent rise of the multi-polar growth world. The paper provides descriptive data and a literature survey to document these trends. The paper also provides a brief survey of the role of multilateral institutions -- in particular, the World Bank -- in this changing context and offers suggestions on how they can adapt their strategies to improve development outcomes.

A Note on the Simple Algebra of the Shared Prosperity Indicator

One of the two goals of the World Bank Groups new strategy is to promote shared prosperity, defined as the income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population. The simple monitoring indicator then is the income per capita of the bottom 40 percent of the population. The growth of this indicator can be decomposed into two components: the change in the share of total income accruing to the bottom 40 percent and the growth of the average income of the total population. This paper presents: (i) a brief discussion of the properties of the indicator; (ii) the simple decomposition in algebraic form; (iii) a graphical method for displaying the combinations of the two components of the decomposition; (iv) simulations of the decomposition for hypothetical countries; and (v) some illustrative data.

Global redistribution of income

The actual distribution of world income across countries is extremely unequal, much higher than the within country inequality faced by most countries. The question studied in this paper is: How do international policies on aid, trade, and factor movements affect the international distribution of income? To begin to answer this question, the authors calculate the impact by decile of the actual level of aid flows and the effect on potential income of merchandise trade restrictions by high-income countries. They find that aids distributional impact is equality enhancing. While it is extremely small in terms of changes in standard inequality measures, it is of some importance for the lowest decile of the worlds income distribution. The authors also find that some of this impact is counteracted by lost potential income in the lower deciles from merchandise trade barriers imposed by high-income countries. In brief, there is a contradiction in international policies where aids equality-enhancing effect is somewhat offset by protectionism. They also discuss some of the analytical difficulties with extending this analysis of redistribution to other forms of international factor flows-more specifically, migrant worker and profit remittances. The analysis presented is partial and static and ignores within country distribution. As such, the authors suggest that future research should explore the distributional consequences of the broader general equilibrium effects, dynamic effects, and externalities associated with aid, trade, and factor flows. Future research should also analyze the within country distributional impacts of international policies.

Rules for Stabilizing Intergovernmental Transfers in Latin America

Traditional theory of fiscal federalism assigns the role of macroeconomic stabilization to the federal government (Musgrave 1959; Oates 1972). One fundamental justification is that monetary control is exercised only at the federal level. Even if an economic disturbance is symmetric across regions, then there is the complication of coordinating fiscal responses by subnational jurisdictions. States or provinces represent economic areas with completely open trade and capital accounts within a monetary union.