This paper proposes a new method for measuring the degree to which the domestic capital stock is self-financed. The main idea is to use the national accounts to construct a self-financing ratio, indicating what would have been the autarky stock of tangible capital supported by actual past...

The empirical relationship between capital controls and the financial development of credit and equity markets is examined. We extend the literature on this subject along a number of dimensions. Specifically, we (1) investigate a substantially broader set of proxy measures of financial...

Countries' geographic characteristics have important effects on their trade, and are plausibly uncorrelated with other determinants of their incomes. This paper therefore constructs measures of the geographic component of countries' trade and uses those measures to obtain instrumental variables...

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

We examine the effects of aid on growth in cross-sectional and panel data—after correcting for the possible bias that poorer (or stronger) growth may draw aid contributions to recipient countries. Even after this correction, we find little robust evidence of a positive (or negative)...

It has been widely believed that resource abundant economies grow less than other economies. In a very influential paper, Sachs and Warner (1997), point out that there is a negative relationship between resource abundance and growth. Two important econometric problems are present in the...

The Burnside and Dollar (2000, AER) finding that aid raises growth in a good policy environment has had an important influence on policy and academic debates. We conduct a data gathering exercise that updates their data from 1970 -93 to 1970 -97, as well as filling in missing data for the...

This paper focuses on three unresolved issues with regard to the impact of trade reform. First, many studies linking trade reform to long run growth are surprisingly fragile. To illustrate the problems with this literature, we examine a popular measure of openness recently introduced by Sachs...

The paper attempts to account for the differential growth performance of the industrial countries and the middle income developing countries in the 1970s in terms of economic theory and some international cross-section comparisons. The theory of adjustment to supply price shocks in an individual...

This paper shows that the effect of capital account liberalization on growth depends upon the environment in which that policy occurs. A theoretical model demonstrates the possibility of an inverted-U shaped relationship between the responsiveness of growth to capital account liberalization and...