I maintain that fatalistic tendencies are the output of the interaction between cultural factors (and in particular of religious beliefs) and historical Institutional experience. Using WVS data this idea has been tested against two well known sociological theories on the origin of fatalism:...

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

The reduction of the existing global distortions to agricultural incentives is sometimes stated as a priority to fight poverty worldwide. But the impacts of global trade policy and domestic development policy reforms are rarely, if ever, compared. Despite technical limitations hindering rigorous...

Annotated remarks made at the 50th Anniversary Conference “Fortalecimiento institucional de los bancos centrales y efectividad de la política monetaria”, of the Central Bank of Nicaragua, February 2010. The paper lays out the importance of institutional strenthening (governance) as an...

This paper takes into account the dynamic feedback between government expenditures and output in a model that separates the effects of expected and unexpected government expenditures on output. We allow for standard determinants based on Solow’s growth model, as well as financial globalization...

Education is a powerful catalyst for the change of a society and plays a crucial role in the development of a nation. In recent years, education has been included as a key component of Human Development Index. As a result, social and regional disparities in educational achievement drag back...

Central banks can play an important role in facilitating and promoting regional economic and monetary integration. Examples are the European monetary union and a more recent initiative by a group of Asian central banks to boost liquidity in local bond markets in Asia through the “Asian Bond...

This research seeks to detect the institutional and regulatory constraints that limit the development of informal units in Djibouti by both the macroeconomic and microeconomic analysis. The review shows that institutional habits (corruption, going right) in regulation created transaction costs...

This paper investigates the impact of urban agglomeration on urban economic growth, using static and dynamic panel data approach, based on data of 52 large cities in India for the period 2000 to 2009. The results shows that agglomeration has a strong positive effect on urban economic growth and...

This study investigates the relationship between foreign direct investment and economic growth by using seven years average annual data of 129 countries from the period of 2003 to 2009. Results indicate the significant positive relationships between foreign direct investment and economic growth...