This paper investigates the consumption behaviour of borrowers of two major microcredit institutions in Bangladesh and compares that with non-borrowers. Primary data has been collected from borrowers of the Grameen Bank and Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) operating in three major...

The objective of this study is to analyze and explain the factors influencing the value added growth in Turkish public and private manufacturing sectors during 1980–2001. With this aim in view, a Two-Deflator Growth Accounting (TDA) method is applied in the study. It is revealed that...

Microfinance promises to trim down poverty. To achieve this noble objective microfinance institutions (MFIs) have to become steady profitable because donor constancy is not a given. Thus important question is: what factors drive the financial sustainability of MFIs? Using data on 217 MFIs in 101...

This paper tests the validity of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) doctrine for Ghana using the conventional relative PPP equation. We conducted a univariate Augmented Dickey-Fuller unit root test on the model variables. Exchange rate and CPI data for Ghana and the USA were collected on annual basis...

This study investigates the relationship between openness and growth for a sample of 34 African countries over the period 1960-2003. Unlike previous research on the subject we use novel time series techniques concentrated around panel unit root, panel cointegration and panel causality tests,...

The main goal of this study is to investigate the role of the urban bias in the Brazilian development on the educational attainment process. Theories of educational inequality and socioeconomic development and modernization are considered to construct the hypotheses. The study is based on a...

This paper investigates stationarity of four South Asian real exchange rates. In addition to the unit root tests that assume linearity in real exchange rate series, we apply tests to check stationarity that assume nonlinearity in a particular time series. Results from linear unit root tests...

Apartheid in South Africa ensured whites received more and better-quality schooling relative to Africans, coloreds, and Asians. It is hence conceivable, consistent with human-capital theory whites would receive relatively higher prices to their measured human-capital skills and would have higher...

This paper examines the individual effects of primary, secondary and higher education on income distribution, using different measures of investment rates in education: enrollment rates, public expenditures and public expenditures per student, in each education stage. The panel data method is...

This paper examines why different countries export different qualities of products. While previous studies have attributed quality differences to differences in physical capital endowments, there is a dearth of empirical work focusing on the effect of technology on the quality of exports. Using...