The paper proposes a technique to jointly tests for groupings of unknown size in the cross sectional dimension of a panel and estimates the parameters of each group, and applies it to identifying convergence clubs in income per-capita. The approach uses the predictive density of the data,...

Trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that wereharming agriculture in developing countries, yet global trade in farm products continues to befar more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods. Those distortions reduce some forms ofpoverty and inequality but...

Since the highest income groups have tremendous influence over economic policy by virtue of money, position, and connection, it is important to identify the interest of these groups with regard to economic conditions. Recently, annual time series data on the shares of the very highest income...

Singapore industrialised rapidly with continuously high growth rates since its independence in 1965 and its population during the same period of time almost tripled. With development at this scale, Singapore had to grow in number of industrial and residential buildings as well as in size through...

This paper is concerned with the recent history of microfinance, both for itself and as a case study of the evolution of development ideas and activities. Doing justice to this history, and to all those involved in it will not be easy. Rather than aiming for a full narrative this paper asks what...

This paper presents a simple framework in which the location and the growth rate of economic activities are endogenous and interact. We show that the nature of the equilibrium and of the relation between growth and location depends fundamentally on whether capital is assumed to be mobile (in...

The paper bases itself on recent theoretical writings in growth economics that emphasize the effects of both own R&D efforts and of interregional technology spillovers on regions´ productivity. We propose robust estimation techniques to evaluate the R&D spillovers across West German functional...

This paper discusses a large-scale factor model for the German economy. Following the recent literature, a data set of 121 time series is used via principal component analysis to determine the factors, which enter a dynamic model for German GDP. The model is compared with alternative univariate...

This is a study of 42 developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America in which we first examine the impact of trade liberalisation on economic growth, investment share of GDP, openness, trade balance and current accounts (as percentages of GDP). Both panel data and country by country data...

Free trading is considered as index of global economy and factor economic growth in many countries. In this study along with recognition of growth resources, those factors such as surplus value, Labour, capital, energy, government planning and expenditure which playing the main role in economic...