Documents Dercon, Stefan 3 results

"With serious impacts of climate change looming in a few decades, but current poverty still high in the developing world, we ask how to spend development aid earmarked for the poor. Poverty reduction tends to be strongly linked to economic growth, but growth impacts the environment and increases carbon-dioxide emissions. So can greener growth that is more climate-resilient and less environmentally damaging deliver large-scale poverty reduction? Can aid be used for effective poverty reduction now without affecting carbon emissions substantially? We argue that there are bound to be trade-offs between emissions reductions and a greener growth on the one hand, and growth that is most effective in poverty reduction. We argue that development aid, earmarked for the poorest countries, should only selectively pay attention to climate change, and remain focused on fighting current poverty reduction, including via economic growth, not least as future resilience of these countries and their population will depend on their ability to create wealth and build up human capital now. The only use for development aid within the poorest countries for explicit climate-related investment ought to be when the investments also contribute to poverty reduction now, including for increasing resilience to current impacts of environmental shocks, or when the investments done now have serious intertemporal ‘lock-in' problems so that they have implications also for when climate change bites by 2050. In an annex, we offer a series of concrete principles to judge development spending."

"Many scholarly articles on corruption give the impression that the world is populated by two types of people: the ‘sanders' and the ‘greasers'. The ‘sanders' believe that corruption is an obstacle to development, while the ‘greasers' believe that corruption can (in some cases) foster development. This paper takes a critical look at these positions. It concludes that the evidence supporting the ‘greasing the wheels hypothesis' is very weak and shows that there is no correlation between a new measure of managers' actual experience with corruption and GDP growth. Instead, the paper uncovers a strong negative correlation between growth in genuine wealth per capita—a direct measure of sustainable development—and corruption. While corruption may have little average effect on the growth rate of GDP per capita, it is a likely source of unsustainable development."