This paper focuses on one possible explanation for the empirical evidence of: (a) income convergence among the world’s poorest countries and among its wealthiest countries; and (b) income divergence among most of the remaining countries. The model incorporates the assumption of subsistence...

This paper evaluates relations between industrial activity and the structure of countries' financial, ownership and legal systems. Using data on 27 industries in 14 OECD countries over the period 1970 to 1995, we evaluate whether the structure of countries' systems is associated with different...

A quantitative investigation of financial intermediation in the U.S. over the past 130 years yields the following results : (i) the finance industry’s share of GDP is high in the 1920s, low in the 1950s and 1960s, and high again in the 1990s and 2000s; (ii) most of these variations can be...

This paper estimates the impact of public investment on regional economic growth and convergence at the NUTS III level in Greece. Using a new database of public expenditure per region for the period 1978-2007, it proposes a model which captures not just the impact of public investment in Greek...

Investment in research and development (R&D) affects a country's total factor productivity. Recently new theories of economic growth have emphasized this link and have also identified a number of channels through which a country's R&D affects total factor productivity of its trade partners....

Societies typically have three objectives for work and welfare: sustained income/economic growth per capita, employment growth (and job security?), a just distribution of income along with access to certain basic services. There may be tensions between these objectives. This paper tries to...

This research explores the origins of the distribution of time preference across regions. It advances the hypothesis, and establishes empirically, that geographical variations in natural land productivity and their impact on the return to agricultural investment have had a persistent effect on...

The majority of microfinance impact studies focus on finding their effect on a specific group of beneficiaries, in contrast we aim to identify the impact on whole economies (economic growth, and financial sector development and reductions in income inequalities), which is an important policy...

Growth and structural transformation of the manufacturing sector in developing countries are generally considered to be the result of the expansion of the `modern' (large-scale) sector relative to the `traditional' (small-scale) sector. Examining the sources of labour productivity growth in...

This is an attempt to derive broad, strategic lessons from the diverse experience with economic growth in last 50 years. The paper revolves around two key arguments. One is that neo-classical economic analysis is a lot more flexible than its practitioners in the policy domain have generally...