Modeling Growth (and Liberalization) Using Smooth Transitions Analysis.

Economic liberalization has been a pervasive phenomenon over the last twenty years. Programs have been initiated on the assumption that liberalization promotes economic growth but the empirical evidence for this is limited. This paper takes a novel approach to modeling growth and structural change as smooth transitions. This allows the authors to model deterministic change without imposing discrete changes. They use smooth transition analysis to reappraise the time-series properties of long-run growth rates in a number of developing countries which have undertaken liberalization. The authors' results challenge conventional wisdom on both methodological and empirical grounds. Copyright 1997 by Oxford University Press.