This paper studies the potential effects of national development on macroeconomic performance through international comparison. The macroeconomic performance is usually characterized by output growth and economic volatility \(real and nominal volatility\), yet there is no consensus on the measurement of national development. National development has to do with many factors such as institutional arrangements, governance quality, financial depth, management competence, human capital, etc. This paper selects inflation variability as a proxy for national development to elucidate the impacts of cross-country development differences on macroeconomic performance. We use a large sample of countries over several decades to examine how the relationship between growth and volatility is affected by inflation variability. We find that this relationship is nonlinearly negative but does not statistically significantly depend on inflation variability. An inverse proportional model is found to be a better model than other specifications in estimating the relationship when volatility is normalized by mean growth. Such relationship is empirically robust regardless of whether inflation is included in regression.