The international goal for rich countries to devote 0.7% of their national income to development assistance has become a cause célèbre for aid activists and has been accepted in many official quarters as the legitimate target for aid budgets. The origins of the target, however, raise serious...

This research suggests that favorable geographical conditions, that were inherently associated with inequality in the distribution of land ownership, adversely affected the implementation of human capital promoting institutions (e.g., public schooling and child labor regulations), and thus the...

In order for Jamaica to transition from a Developing Country to a Developed Country it will be highly necessary to create a Knowledge based society, the inability to seriously overcome this challenge will mean Jamaica will be in transition to a developed country for an infinite number of years....

Estimates of child poverty are based on the percentage of children living in poor households, which ignores the issue of intrahousehold allocation. It is commonly argued that the fact that data are collected at the household level means it is not possible to report figures relating to the number...

There has been an increasing awareness within the developed world that the cultural industries may play an important role in economic development. The fact that most of the commercial cultural industries have relatively low distribution costs, and that the gains from the mass production of a...

Views of the future China vary widely. While some believe that the collapse of China is inevitable, others see the emergence of a new superpower that increasingly poses a threat to the U.S. This paper examines the economic growth prospects of China over the next two decades. Extrapolating past...

We analyze slave redemption programs—the buying of slaves to give them their freedom--in a simple matching model, i.e., under the assumption that it takes time to find slaves to buy or sell. Unlike in a supply and demand framework, where sufficiently large and effective redemption programs...

The Austrian social scientist Arno Tausch, back in 1998, already foresaw the present waning of the 'European social model' in his freely available electronic publication at the World Systems Archive at the University of Colorado (now at the University of California, Riverside). Table of...

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Romanian rural economy has undergone massive changes. Increased urban unemployment has stimulated migration from towns to rural areas. Meanwhile, rural industries that were subsidised under communism have collapsed, causing rural unemployment....