"Empirical explorations of the growth and productivity impacts of infrastructure have been characterized by ambiguous (countervailing signs) results with little robustness. A number of explanations of the contradictory findings have been proposed. These range from the crowd-out of private by...

This paper presents an analysis of the interaction of human capital investment and the development of social and political institutions. We find that human capital matters—for growth through its quality dimension; for distributional conflict by raising political aspirations. But human capital...

This paper presents a joint analysis of labor market flexibility and product market structure. Our investigation confirms earlier results of imperfect competition in South African manufacturing where we find an average mark-up of 50% for the period 1970 to 2004 that is without consistent trend...

Foreign capital inflows are an important source of funds to finance investment in developing economies. International finance literature is therefore concerned with how institutional factors like property rights and corruption affect foreign capital inflows. We investigate the determinants of...

"The paper provides a first, systematic benchmarking of infrastructure performance in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) countries (South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland) in four major sectors-electricity, water and sanitation, information and communication technology,...