Since the end of World War II, economists have tried to figure out how poor countries in the tropics could attain standards of living approaching those of countries in Europe and North America....

An informed and excoriating attack on the tragic waste, futility, and hubris of the West\'s efforts to date to improve the lot of the so-called developing world, with constructive suggestions on how to move forward. William Easterly\'s The White Man\'s Burden is about what its author calls the twin tragedies of global poverty....

Latin America?s macroeconomic crises of the 1980s and ?90s forced a severe fiscal adjustment across the region. More often than not, fiscal stability was achieved at the cost of a drastic compression of public infrastructure spending, accompanied by the hope that the private sector would take the leading role in infrastructure provision....