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This dissertation is comprised of four essays which use cross-country analysis to analyze the sources of economic growth in less developed countries (LDCs) over the post independence era. These common features aside, each essay aims to answer a reasonably distinct research objective. The Principal Components of Growth seeks to test alternative determinants of growth in LDCs using a robust empirical methodology which combines factor analysis, crosssectional growth regressions, growth accounting, and several techniques which limit the influence of outliers. This approach permits the author to better identify the principal determinants of growth in LDCs, as well as the limitations of cross-country growth regressions. The identified determinants of growth are highly varied, but jointly explain a large proportion of the variation in long run growth rates. Moreover, these determinants provide plausible explanations of growth rates in real developing countries, such as in the East Asian ‘Miracles’. But the limitation of growth regressions is that in many contexts the identified factors can only be interpreted at a highly general theoretical level, so that cross-sectional growth regressions yield very few inferences of immediate policy relevance. Geopolitics, Foreign Aid and Economic Growth investigates whether foreign aid has been effective at increasing growth rates from 1970 to 2001. But in contrast to most of the existing research on aid effectiveness the author indirectly tests the influence of geopolitical factors on aid effectiveness, specifically distinguishing between bilateral and multilateral aid effectiveness during and after the Cold War. The author reaches some important conclusions regarding the effectiveness of foreign aid in recent decades. Under reasonable assumptions there is evidence that improving the methodology of aidgrowth regressions - in terms of aid measurement, regression specification and the estimators used - consistently increases the observed effect of aid on growth. Moreover, the author presents evidence that aid effectiveness has not been constant either across time or across donor types. Bilateral aid appears to have been much less effective than multilateral aid on average over 1970-2001, but the observed ineffectiveness of bilateral aid appears to be due to the low effect of bilateral aid during the Cold War. In contrast, evidence from the post Cold War era suggests that both multilateral and bilateral aid flows have had reasonably large and significant effects on economic growth. Dualism, National Policies and Economic Growth gauges the implications of incorporating dualism into cross-country growth analysis. Specifically, the author defines dualism in this context as a situation in which production in the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors respond differently to ‘national’ growth determinants, especially national economic policies. Importantly, the author finds that whilst national factors from the conventional growth literature still explain nonagricultural growth in a similar fashion to the aggregate GDP growth results, growth in the agricultural sector responds differently to most national economic policies. ‘Market-friendly’ economic policies, in particular, do not appear to have any positive effect on growth in low income countries, except in the case of fewer price controls, although here too the evidence is by no means robust. And contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the so called ‘Washington Consensus’, larger government seems to be associated with faster growth rates in agriculture. The author concludes with a discussion of whether methodological problems might explain these results, but generally concludes that such problems do not obviously impact on the majority of the above findings in nay substantial fashion. Agriculture, Development and Urban Bias explores whether LDC governments and aid donors have continued to discriminate against the agricultural sector, despite the importance of State-led agricultural growth for overall development, and despite an earlier literature on the prevalence of urban bias in development strategies. The essay begins by verifying the case for State-led agricultural development as an engine of growth and poverty reduction both inside and outside the agricultural sector. The paper then proceeds to demonstrate that urban biases have persisted within LDC policy regimes, largely as a result of domestic political economy factors. But the essay also identifies increasing bias against agricultural development in foreign aid allocations, World Bank research, and in the international trade regime. The chapter then concludes with an in-depth analysis of why agricultural development was increasingly neglected in the Washington Consensus development strategy, and stresses the need to reincorporate State-led agricultural growth as a vital component of post-Washington growth strategies. And finally, several research objectives cut across more than one chapter, thus providing some unifying themes. Obviously, the main unifying objective for all chapters was to better understand what it is diverse international experiences teach us about the process of development. The role of agriculture in development is also the focus of more than one chapter (Chapters 4 and 5). And finally, a key objective of the more statistically oriented chapters (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) was to assess the validity of crosscountry econometric techniques as a means of investigating growth in developing countries. All these issues are touched on to some extent in both the introductory chapter (Chapter 1) and in the concluding chapter (Chapter 6).

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