Recent empirical studies find that the direct effect of corruption on growth is statistically insignificant. However, there exists a discrepancy between these results and the intuition that corruption reduces over-all productivity, because total factor productivity also depends on the quality of...

According to Paolo Sylos Labini (1920-2005), it is vital for an economist to be acutely conscious of the responsibility to study society for the sake of promoting progress—the economic, social and civil progress of society—and not for personal interest. In his last book, Ahi serva Italia...

This paper constructs a model of growth based on Adam Smith's notions of specialization and extent of the market. We seek to explain the following stylized facts. 1) The share of household production in total output has fallen over time as the economy has grown. 2) Services as a percent of GDP...

In a recent paper, we studied economic growth and inflation at different levels of government and external debt. The public discussion of our empirical strategy and results has been somewhat muddled. Here, we attempt to clarify matters, particularly with respect sample coverage (our evidence...

In this paper I consider the 1991 Grossman-Helpman model which analyses the role of innovation on growth. The model assumes constant returns to scale. I intend to show what happen in this model if I assume strong increasing returns. In particular, under the assumption of increasing returns of...

This paper makes the case that the growth trajectory of the Indian economy in the post-1991 liberalization period is characterised by an inherent source of instability in manufacturing and industrial growth that distinguishes this period from the 1980s. This instability is a result of an...

The paper reviews studies analysing the relationship between infrastructures and economic performance. Four different approaches are separately considered along an ideal path from theory-based to data-oriented models: the production function approach, the cost function approach, growth-models,...

The aim of this paper is to explore the link between credit and output in the context of a developed transition economy. Salient credit market features of these economies are (i) credit market imperfections leading to constraints on growth and (ii) the rapidly growing importance during...

This paper investigates a possible impact of education corruption on economic growth in Russia. It argues that high levels of education corruption may harm total factor productivity in the long run, primarily through lowering the level of human capital and slowing down the pace of its...

This paper compares more direct measures of the institutional environment with both the instability proxies used by Barro (1991) and the Gastil indices, by comparing their effects both on growth and private investment. The results provide substantial support for the position that the...