Alan Gelb

What's keeping private business from flourishing in Africa? On the basis of unique enterprise surveys, Vijaya Ramachandran and her co-authors identify poor roads and unreliable power as major physical challenges; ethnic segmentation and the economic predominance ethnic minorities further constrain...

This paper surveys the arguments for and against cash-transfer programs in resource-rich states, discusses some of the new biometric identification technologies, and reaches preliminary conclusions about their potentially very large benefits for developing countries.

Uganda has sought to finance its development agenda with oil since discovering the resource in its Albertine Lakes Basin in 2009. This paper considers alternative methods for distributing the rents from oil that mitigate some of the governance risks associated with natural resource revenues.

To inform the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s review of its country selection process, the MCA Monitor has conducted a parallel review and offers five key recommendations.

This paper ties together the macroeconomic and microeconomic evidence on the competitiveness of African manufacturing sectors. The conceptual framework is based on the newer theories that see the evolution of comparative advantage as influenced by the business climate—a key public good—and by...

This paper argues for approaches that increase public understanding of the need for prudent spending of oil revenues in booms, and for comprehensive consideration of a range of options for using rents. Drawing on the experience of a few successful countries, it points to a number of common factors...

This paper offers a proposal to improve performance-based allocation systems of International Development Association (IDA) donors and others to better address the needs of fragile states and better link development allocations with performance.

Why do so many businesses choose to remain informal? Vijaya Ramachandran and co-authors discover that the answer is more nuanced than often believed. In East Africa, for instance, the difference in productivity between formal and informal firms is often indistinguishable, while in Southern Africa...

Many developing countries have found that large deposits of oil or other natural resources are more a curse than a blessing. My guest on this week's Wonkcast is Alan Gelb, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. Together with co-author Sina Grassman, Alan has written a paper that...

The Wonkcast is taking a brief summer vacation. We’ve selected this show from our archives- it was originally posted on January 11, 2011. In developed countries, official identification systems are a fact of life, providing the foundation for a myriad of transactions including elections,...