This paper employs a political economy approach to model the joint determination of national and subnational sectoral protection in an open federal economy. Political interactions between special interest groups and policymakers as well as economic interrelationships between federal and state...

In growth theory, foreign investment places a small open economy in the international steady state. In applied growth theory, foreign investment is assumed to shift technology. The present growth model separates foreign from domestic capital and develops the steady state where both capital/labor...

The authors propose a new panel data methodology to test real convergence in a non-linear framework. This extends the existing methods by combining three approaches: the threshold model, the panel data unit root tests, and the computation of critical values by bootstrap simulation. The authors...

This paper examines the convergence process across countries for the period 1980-2000, giving special attention to the role of human capital as a conditioning factor. The originality of the study is in the use of new proxies for human capital, such as publications and patents ratio and the...

This paper analyzes how major external shocks and policy reforms affect Bolivia's ability to achieve pro-poor growth. Employing a recursive-dynamic CGE model, it considers three different scenarios: an optimistic baseline scenario; a more realistic scenario that accounts for two important...

This paper examines the role of outsourced intermediate goods, together with capital, labor, and insourced intermediate products, as inputs in Spain's motor vehicle production. Its findings are consistent with statistically significant economies of scale. Capital and labor are found to be...

Most Latin American economies ended the twentieth century further behind the United States (in terms of productivity) than they had been in 1950. We investigate whether this reflects the effect of occasional economic setbacks or a systematic tendency to fall behind the United States. This is...

In this paper we highlight aspects related to the links among unemployment, international capital mobility, and tax policies in a small open developing economy. Without international capital mobility, the joint optimal trade and environmental policies require a zero tariff and an emission tax...

The authors examine the degree of employer and employee ignorance about reservation and offer wages in Trinidad and Tobago and find this to be considerable. On average employers pay more than 26% above workers' reservation wages, while employees earn 22% less than the maximum wage on offer,...

The author investigates the conditions under which environmental protection and trade liberalization might improve urban unemployment and welfare in a small open Harris-Todaro model with polluting urban manufacturing. While a tariff reduction decreases manufacturing employment, a rise in the...