If an economy runs a current account (CA) deficit and finances it via a corresponding net inflow of equity capital the external debt (ED) does not change, i.e.: the CA deficit does not add to ED. This is no paradox. It simply comes from the definition of CA deficit and ED and points to different...

We work with a panel of bilateral trade flows from 1988 to 2002, exploring the influence of infrastructure, institutional quality, colonial and geographic context, and trade preferences on the pattern of bilateral trade. We are interested in threshold effects, and so emphasize those cases where...

It is commonly believed that accumulation of human capital (HC) and availability of physical and financial capitals are among the major determinants of economic growth. In a globalised world, where factors of production are increasingly mobile, the process of domestic accumulation of HC might be...

The role of migrants’ networks in promoting cross border investments has been stressed in the literature, possibly making migration and FDI complements rather than substitutes in the long run. In this paper, we estimate the magnitude of such business network externalities in dynamic empirical...

This paper analyzes welfare-state determinants of individual attitudes towards immigrants - within and across countries - and their interaction with labor-market drivers of preferences. We consider two different mechanisms through which a redistributive welfare system might adjust as a result of...

This paper examines the trade policy response of Latin American governments to the rapid growth of China and India in world markets. To explain higher protection in sectors where a large share is imported from these countries, we extend the `protection for sale\' model to allow for di®erent...

This paper studies the issue of the efficient taxation of capital income in intertemporal optimizing models with infinite horizons and endogenous population growth. We discover that, in the steady state, the optimal capital income tax is negative when the economy is closed. Instead, in a small...

Technological change was unskilled-labor-biased during the early Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but is skill-biased today. This fact is not embedded in extant unified growth models. We develop a model of the transition to sustained economic growth...

This work provides an empirical assessment of the ’sophistication’ of the Italian international specialization pattern and of its evolution during the period 1980−2000. In particular we discuss the Italian ’anomaly’, i.e. the evidence that Italy displays a specialization pattern more...