This paper explores the forces that shaped China’s interprovincial inequality in the last five decades of communist rule. In so far as the change in interprovincial inequality is the result of differential growth in the provincial GDP per capita and provincial economic growth may be decomposed...

Success in international trade depends, amongst other things, on distance from markets. Most new economic geography models focus on the distance between countries. In contrast much less theorizing and empirical analysis have focused on how distances within a country for instance due to the...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the location of export-oriented manufacturing firms in Africa (South Africa), and on how the patterns of location has changed over the past decade after the country embarked on trade liberalization. It is found that (a) the proximity to a port is an...

This article aims to contribute to the discussion about how to make development interventions more effective by analyzing the factors contributing to the success or failure of rural development projects. We made an aggregate level analysis of 46 projects in the field of agricultural research...

This paper proposes a structural VAR model which extends the frameworks of Hoffmaister and Roldós (2001) and Prasad (1999). The model is then used to analyse the sources of China’s trade balance fluctuations in the period of 1985–2000. Efforts are made to distinguish the forces which...

Official balance sheet estimates for the household sector are not currently available in South Africa, yet, with the country’s well developed financial sector and deep capital markets, asset market channels are likely to be important determinants of aggregate consumer spending and saving,...

During the 1950-70s Norway had relatively low GDP per capita compared to the OECD average and even more so compared to Denmark and Sweden. During the 1970s there was a significant catch-up in incomes and from the early 1990s a take-off in relative income. Norway is currently ranked among the...

In this paper, I discuss the reasons for Costa Rica's economic performance over the last quarter of a century. Three complementary sets of policies (investments in human capital, careful stabilization, and an intelligent and aggressive integration into the world economy) explain the successful...

This paper examines different explanations - initial conditions, openness to trade and FDI, and institutions - of the Mauritian growth experience since the mid-1970s. We show that arguments based on openness to trade and FDI are either misleading or incomplete. Even when correctly articulated,...

We examine how institutional and policy reforms affect the relationship between entrepreneurship and growth. We perform Arellano-Bond GMM estimations on annual data (over the period 1990-2002) from a large group of developing countries and focus in particular on the interplay between policy and...