What do China, Estonia, Germany, India, Chile, South Korea and Slovakia all have in common? They have all enacted free-market reforms, and have seen their inhabitants’ living standards soar as a result. This essay describes how free-market policies have improved economic performance in these...

This paper examines the trajectory of economic development in Botswana between the years 1820 and 1966, when it achieved independence. First, I review the historical trends in the country’s economic and social development indicators. I then proceed to analyze what factors have encouraged or...

Although in the post-World War II period as a whole, developing countries have made substantial economic and industrial progress, during the last decade or so, many of them, particularly in Latin America and Africa, have been in an acute economic crisis . As a consequence, these countries have...

Abstract Two principal analytical and practical policy issues in economic development today are: a) the degree and kind of openness to the world economy a developing country should seek; b) what should the government do, or not do, in order to promote fast economic and industrial development....

Abstract The East Asian countries achieved extraordinarily fast economic growth during the last four decades. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that they represented the most successful case of rapid industrialisation and sustained economic growth in the history of mankind. This paper...

The African economies, particularly those in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) stand today at an important crossroads. During the 1980s, for the average African country, GDP per capita fell at a rate of 0.5 percent per annum; in the 1990s it rose slightly at a rate of 0.3 percent per annum. However, in...

ABSTRACT Although the concept of national competitiveness is widely used by policy makers at both the national and international levels, it has been the object of trenchant criticism in a series of influential contributions by Professor Krugman. He regards it as a meaningless concept and in the...

This chapter reviews economic growth, its causes and consequences in the Pacific-rim countries. The chapter is in three parts. The first part (Sections 2 - 8) is concerned with the question of fast economic growth in a group of East and South East Asian developing countries. It reviews the...

Abstract In a famous passage in chapter 12 of the General Theory, Keynes observed: As the organisation of investment markets improves, the risk of the predominance of speculation does, however, increase. In one of the greatest investment markets in the world, namely, New York, the influence of...

We estimate the growth and utility effects of switching from a graduated-rate federal income tax to a flat tax along the lines of Hall-Rabushka (1995). We, furthermore, calculate the post-reform transition dynamics for a number of variables, including the economic growth rate, the representative...