The paper examines the real per-capita growth effects of the quality of democracy, the rule of law, and capital flows in developing countries. The direct growth effects of democracy are positive and often statistically significant. Moreover, the estimates from a three-stage least-squares...

The impact of trade liberalization on productivity growth is still an empirical issue; the theoretical literature is as yet unclear on the direction of any such association. This paper develops an analytical framework and employs it to empirically test whether trade liberalization in Indian...

The paper introduces differences in production and transaction conditions between countries into a model of monopolistic competition. It applies inframarginal analysis to show that, as transaction conditions are improved, the general equilibrium may jump discontinuously across different patterns...

Privatization in Estonia has produced varied ownership configurations. This enables hypotheses on the productivity effects of different ownership forms to be tested. Findings are based on fixed-effects production function models and are estimated using a large, random sample of firms. Depending...

The paper presents a model of social and economic development which relaxes some of the assumptions made in existing papers on the determinants of growth. In particular, the model allows for multidirectional causality between social and economic indicators. The model indicates that there are...

Advanced human capital requires "basic" human capital as an input. Physical capital does not, in general, have such hierarchical structure. This paper models optimal investment in hierarchical human capital as well as nonhierarchical physical capital. The authors analyze the steady state,...

A North-South model is developed which incorporates an endogenous rate of equilibrium unemployment in the North in the context of long-run growth. It is shown how increases in the size of public debt and unemployment compensation financed by payroll taxation, all measured relative to...

The South African apartheid system formally ended with the election of the African National Congress at the first all-race elections held in 1994. As a result, racist policies such as color barring, that particularly hindered the advancement of black workers throughout the apartheid period, are...

The paper studies the Walrasian equilibrium theory of division of labor for large economies with weakly convex production techniques and with the presence of transaction costs. Earlier results published by Wen are revised and generalized so that the new versions can be applied to a much larger...

The paper dissects the hypothesis that democracy is inimical to economic development. The historical origin of this perspective is presented and its key theoretical and empirical assumptions are examined and assessed. The chief conclusion is that there is no necessary tradeoff between democracy...