Drawing upon crosscountry panel data for developing countries, the present study examines the role of agricultural growth in reducing inequality and poverty by modelling the dynamic linkage between agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. For this purpose, we have compared the role of agricultural growth and that of non-agricultural growth and have found that agricultural growth is more important in reducing poverty, while the negative effect of agricultural growth on inequality is found in a few models where specific definitions of inequality are adopted. Our analysis generally reinforces the case for revival of agriculture in the post-2015 discourse, contrary to the much emphasised roles of rural-urban migration and urbanisation as main drivers of growth and elimination of extreme poverty.

The transition from Millennium Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals has substantially shifted the policy debate from development to inclusive development. Using interactive quantile regressions, we examine the correlations between mobile banking and inclusive development (quality of growth, inequality and poverty) among individuals in 93 developing countries for the year 2011. Mobile banking entails: 'mobile used to pay bills' and 'mobile used to receive/send money'. The findings broadly show that increasing mobile banking dynamics to certain thresholds would increase (decrease) quality of growth (inequality) in quantiles at the high-end of inclusive development distributions for the most part. The study is original in that it explores the relationship between mobile banking and inclusive development using three measurements of inclusive development, namely: quality of growth, inequality and poverty. As a main policy implication, encouraging mobile banking applications would play a substantial role in responding to the challenges of immiserizing growth, inequality and poverty in developing countries.

This article studies the multicultural experience of students who completed a group project in an undergraduate economics course. Students were required to work in groups of four consisting of at least two nationalities. Feedback on this multicultural experience was gathered through a questionnaire. The results show strong support for intervention by academic staff to promote multicultural interactions on campus, identify many benefits and highlight potential challenges. We found evidence that students interacted on topics wider than the project topic itself, such as differences in culture, university life, and leisure activities, and that almost half of them agreed that their quality of work improved when they worked in mixed groups. Cultural diversity in group work should be built into the early years of degree programmes to help students develop multicultural competency.

We model firm adaptation to local factor markets in which firms care about both the price and availability of inputs. The model is estimated by combining firm and population census data, and quantifies the role of factor markets in input use, productivity and welfare. Considering China's diverse factor markets, we find that within an industry interquartile labor costs vary by 30-80%, leading to 3-12% interquartile differences in TFP. In general equilibrium, homogenization of labor markets would increase real income by 1.33%. Favorably endowed regions attract more economic activity, providing new insights into within-country comparative advantage and specialization. * We thank