Several recent papers suggest that the negative association between natural resource intensity and economic growth can be reversed if institutional quality is high enough. We try to understand this result in more detail by decomposing the resource measure, using alternative measures of both...

Azerbaijan's economy is extractive industry-led and not well-diversified. A comprehensive understanding of the role of the oil industry in the Azerbaijani economy is still a desideratum. Azerbaijan's national economy was a popular case study for the theories such as the natural resource curse...

Early states like China, India, Italy and Greece have been experiencing more rapid economic growth in recent decades than have later-comers to agriculture and statehood like New Guinea, the Congo, and Uruguay. We show that more rapid growth by early starters has been the norm in economic...

This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion,...

Paper reviews India's growth performance since independence. Phrases suchas "Hindu Rate of Growth," sometimes make a telling comment and expose obscureeconomic data to a wider audience, but they can just as readily obscure reality byfocussing attention on the wrong issue. There is nothing in the...

Comparisons of India and China have been made for over 50 years. This paper focuses on purchasing power estimates in China and India in the 2005 round of the UN International Comparison Programme (ICP) that was coordinated by the World Bank, the Regional Banks and Economic Commissions. The 2005...

This paper revises the traditional view of Spain as a predatorycolonial state that extracted revenue from natural resources andpopulations in the Americas while offering little in return. Using 18thcentury Spanish American treasury accounts we show that localelites not only exerted important...

[Introduction] We live in a time of transformational change, with society, economy, ecology and politics in a state of flux the world over. Of particular focus in this Working Paper are the implications for mineral-dependent economies of living in an increasingly resource-constrained world. Both...

Latin America`s enormous endowment of natural resources impacts many countries of the region. Economic liberalization in several countries was followed by rapid growth of foreign investment and exports of natural resource-intensive products. Growth of labor-intensive manufacturing industries was...

This paper explores the institutional determinants of economic growth in Latin America by taking advantage of recent empirical research that employs subjective and objective measures to test for a possible Northian explanation that links institutional quality and economic growth. I provide a...