Welcome to my personal web site.

Immediately below are my most recent papers and presentations and below that more recent papers.

In the menu on the left under "Research papers, by topic"  are my, not surprisingly, my papers with a brief description of each paper, sometime the key graph or table, and an attempt to situate the paper within the broader literature.  Also, since presentations sometimes summarize the content and context of the paper better than the paper itself, I also attach presentations of the paper.

Other relevant web sites:  I remain a non-resident fellow of the new Center for Global Development in Washington DC, and a fellow of the new BREAD (Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis and Development).

On line access to papers is also available by searching on my name (which is conveniently unique) via SSRN and Google Scholar.

 My current email is lant_pritchett@ksg.harvard.edu.

Brand New papers:

The Place Premium: Wage Differences for Identical Workers across the US Border. (July 10, 2008) Abstract: We compare the wages of workers inside the United States to the wages of observably identical workers outside the United States—controlling for country of birth, country of education, years of education, work experience, sex, and rural-urban residence. This is made possible by new and uniquely rich microdata on the wages of over two million individual formal-sector wage-earners in 43 countries. We then use five independent methods to correct these estimates for unobserved differences between the productivity of migrants and non-migrants, as well as for the wage effects of natural barriers to international movement in the absence of policy barriers. We also introduce a selection model to estimate how migrants’ wage gains depend on their position in the distribution of unobserved wage determinants both at the origin and at the destination, as well as the relationship between these positions.  For example, in the median wage gap country, a typical Bolivian-born, Bolivian-educated, prime-age urban male formal-sector wage worker with moderate schooling makes 4 times as much in the US as in Bolivia.  Following all adjustments for selectivity and compensating differentials we estimate that the wages of a Bolivian worker of equal intrinsic productivity, willing to move, would be higher by a factor of 2.7 solely by working in the United States. While this is the median, this ratio is as high as 8.4 (for Nigeria). We document that (1) for many countries, the wage gaps caused by barriers to movement across international borders are among the largest known forms of wage discrimination; (2) these gaps represent one of the largest remaining price distortions in any global market; and (3) these gaps imply that simply allowing labor mobility can reduce a given household’s poverty to a much greater degree than most known in situ antipoverty interventions.

The State, Socialization, and Private Schooling: When Will Governments Support Alternative Producers? This paper continues the examination of the impact of the socialization objectives of basic education on educational policy, in particular focused on which combinations of governmental objectives and governance competence will be compatible will large scale adoption of public support to private (either for-profit or non-profit) schooling.

Is India a Flailing State? Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization. (May 2008) This is a paper arguing that India, while it is making great strides economically and has maintained a vibrant democracy is "flailing" in that the head no longer effectively controls the limbs of the state(s) and hence its ability to act effectively to deliver services of any kind--from policing to education to social safety nets--is weak and weakening. This was prepared for a publication Rule and Reform in the Giants: India and China Compared.

The Policy Irrelevance of the Economics of Education: Is "Normative as Positive" Useless--Or Worse? New paper (presented at a Brookings conference May 30, 2008, forthcoming in a Brookings book) arguing that economists do not have a coherent general model of educational policy (in particular for developnig countries) and that without such a model there is not way to claim that this or that research agenda is "policy relevant." I argue that economists reliance on "normative as positive" has perhaps been worse that useless as it has directed the reseach agenda in particularly unproductive ways.

 Income per natural:  Measuring development as if people mattered more than places. (with Michael Clemens). This paper estimates instead of the income of people in Jamaica or Albania or Nepal the income per Jamaican or Albanian or Nepali--no matter where they are in the world. We combine data about the pattern of out-migration to OECD countries with an estimate of the income of naturals who are living in those countries. We find that income per natural is often substantially higher than national income per capita. This is another version of the same paper that has been revised for submission to the Population and Development Review that is less technical (details in a technical appendix) and focuses more on the policy implications.

Recent Presentations

Various Topics

Swimming? Smoking? Solving? Intellectual History of the Population Control Movement. Presentation at the Population Association of America Meetings, New Orleans, April 18, 2008.

"Normative as Positive" Is a Useless Theory of Education: But is it Worse?Presentation at the Harvard Kennedy School Lunch on Economic Policy, March 3, 2008.

Is the Future Robots or Rosalie? Presentation about global migration issues, given at Williams College November 2, 2007.

Globalization: The Path to Justice? Presentation at Google.org course on Poverty and Development (video of the presentation, with introduction by Joshua Cohen, available on You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBFXM8HSKwU).

On India

On Economic Growth/Development Strategy

Everything I Know in Less than an Hour presentation to the Millenium Challenge Corporation, October 17, 2007.

Does Learning to add-up add-up? presentation to Growth Commission meetings, October 19, 2007.

Other stuff:

Slate article about Income per Natural paper by Tim Harford (author of Undercover Economist).

Radio interview with Doug Fabrizio on Radio West, March 24, 2008.

Interview in Reason Magazine by Kerry Howley based on my book Let Their People Come.

Article in New York Times Magazine on migration by Jason DeParle (now doing a series for the Times called Border Crossings).

Article on Google.org launch in New York Times.

Less Recent Papers on Various Topics  

Building on Success: Service Delivery and Inclusive Growth (World Bank's Development Policy Review for India).  This is a report, which I produced together with Rinku Murgai and Marina Wes that examines the key development issues facing India in the medium run.  You can download either the synthesis or the full report or a powerpoint summary (used at the media launch on July 26th).   This is also featured on the World Bank's South Asia external web site.

Making Primary Education Work For India's Rural Poor:  A Proposal for Effective Decentralization.  This paper, written together with Varad Pande, examines how to structure the allocation of funds, functions, and functionaries across the tiers of the Panchayat Raj Insitutions (districts, blocks, Gram Panchayats) in order to use decentralization as a means to improve primary education in India.  This is part of the World Bank's Social Development working paper series. 

Teacher Compensation: Can Decentralization to Local Bodies Take India From Perfect Storm Through Troubled Waters to Clear Sailing?  This very preliminary draft paper (to be presented at the India Policy Forum) examines the question of whether the process of decentralization can lead to reform of the system of teacher compensation in India in ways that improve education.  In particular, currently India has a "high pay/zero accountability" compensation that leads to high costs, low performance, and dissatisfaction among students, parents and even teachers.  We discuss both how a more desirable system of compensation consistent with high performance public education might be politically and economically feasible as part of an overall decentralizing reform.

Let Their People Come:  Breaking the Policy Deadlock on International Labor Mobility  This is a book, forthcoming from Brookings Institution Press sponsored by the Center for Global Development, that argues that the "development community" should be much more active in putting labor mobility--particularly the temporary movement (non-permanent migration) of unskilled labor on the international agenda along side trade, aid and debt.  The link directs you to the introduction, the full book will be available in August.  

Who is not poor?  Dreaming of a World Truly Free of Poverty.  This paper, forthcoming in the World Bank Research Observer, argues that the World Bank should measure global poverty using its traditional poverty line of a 'dollar a day' as a lower bound (perhaps labeled "destitution') but also use an upper bound poverty line of roughly 'ten dollars a day' to measure "global poverty."  This would imply poverty, measured on a consistent basis globally, is a much more pervasive phenomena--including 2-3 billion people as poor by a global standard.

The quest continues.  This is a brief article for the IMF's magazine Finance and Development that reviews the connection between growth research in the economics profession and the needs of policy makers--with particular emphasis on the mis-match in the experie

Scenes from a Marriage: World Bank Economists and Social Capital.  This is a chapter from a book edited by Tony Bebbington, Michael Woolcock, and Scott Guggenheim, and E. Ostrom titled  The Search for Empowerment:  Social Capital As Idea and Practice at the World Bank now published by Kumarian press.  The chapter was written jointly with Jeffrey Hammer and examines the reaction of economists to the idea of social capital.  The link takes you to the publisher web site.

Economic Growth in the 1990s:  Learning from a Decade of Reforms. 

This project, led by Roberto Zagha, produced a World Bank volume to which I contributed.

Chapter 2:  Grist and the Mill for the Lessons of the 1990s.  This reviews the basic facts of the 1990s, both disappointments and pleasant surprises.

Chapter 8:  Policy Reform and Growth:  What have we learned?  This is the overview chapter that draws lessons across trade, financial sector, privatization. 

(in the context of this, see Dani Rodrik's review of this book for the Journal of Economic Literature)

(this is a paper coming out of this project):

Reform is like a box of chocolates: Understanding the growth disappointments and surprises.  This paper addresses the question of why some countries have done a great deal of reform and had little to show for it--a particularly pressing issue in Latin America--while other, seemingly more modest, reformers have enjoyed rapid growth.

Growth Accelerations (with Dani Rodrik and Ricardo Hausmann).  This paper examines episodes of growth acceleration and their determinants. (This is now in journal of economic growth and available as NBER working paper 10566).  

A magazine summary of this article is in Development Outreach March 2005 as Initiating a Growth Boom.

The Varieties of the Resource Experience (with Michael Woolcock and Jon Isham) an empirical paper demonstrating a link between resource export composition and poor governance--this distinguishes not just manufactures from "natural resource" but among natural resource exports between "point source" (e.g. oil, diamonds) and "diffuse" (e.g. wheat).  The argument is, that for a variety of reasons concentrated natural resources are bad for "institutions" (similar to the arguments of Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson and Sokoloff).

The Political Economy of Targeted Safety Nets.  This is a paper for the "Safety Nets" course organized by the World Bank (principally by Margaret Grosh) and is also available as Social Protection Discussion Paper #501. 

Globalization and Inequality.  These were comments on a paper at at Brookings conference on Globalization, Poverty, and Inequality.  The original Power Point presentation is also attached (more figures, less words). 

Towards a New Consensus for Addressing the Global Challenge of the Lack of Education.  This was part of the Copenhagen Consensus process (http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com) which brought together experts on ten key challenges facing the world and asked them to assess potential solutions.  The results are now available in a book published by Cambridge University Press Global Crises, Global Solutions.

Boomtowns and Ghost Countries:  Geography, Agglomeration and Population Mobility (November 2003).  This paper suggests that the combination of negative geographic shocks and forces of agglomeration could lead to 'ghost countries' in the world.  By analogy with "ghost towns" these are countries in which the current desired population is a small faction of its previous peak. (This is also available as Center for Global Development Working Paper #36)

Does learning to add up add up?  The returns to schooling in aggregate data.  This is forthcoming in the Handbook of Education Economics and addresses the question of whether the cross national data on the growth of output (GDP per worker) are consistent with the microeconomic (Mincer regression) data on the returns to schooling. (This is now BREAD working paper #53)

Chapter 3:  Analytical Framework in the World Development Report 2004. 

Chapter 7:  Education, in the World Development Report 2004.

Educational Quality and Costs: A Big Puzzle and Five Possible Pieces.  (June 2003) This is a "think piece" on the explanation for why all of the OECD countries have had dramatic increases in spending per student with very modest (if any) increase in measured learning. 

Voice Lessons: Local Government Organizations, Social Organizations, and the Quality of Local Governance with Vivi Alatas and Anna Wetterberg. October 2002.  An empirical examination of the connection between household's social activities and their perceived quality of local (village) government in Indonesia.  

Targeted Programs in an Economic Crisis: Empirical Findings from the Experience of Indonesia with Asep Suryahadi and Sudarno Sumarto, September 2002 (see also the SMERU Research Institute and Center for International Development Working Papers).  A comprehensive empirical assessment, using a combination of cross section and panel data, of the targeting of the "Social Safety Net" programs launched to mitigate the impacts of the crises in Indonesia 1998-2000.  

"When will they ever learn":  Why all Governments Produce Schooling.  February 2002.  Solves the puzzle of why all governments produce (as opposed to "provide") basic education--because they care about socialization and direct production is the only way to control it.

What's the Big Idea? with David Lindauer.  June 2002.  Charts the changing strategies for growth and how they have grown naturally out of the obvious "lessons" of experience--but failed. (now published in Economia 2002).