This study examines the World Values Survey data to determine the relative happiness of people in 52 countries. The countries are ranked. Comparisons are also made of per capita GDP and religion to determine whether there was a strong correlation. The study found that the correlation between...

Though many theories have been advanced to account for global differences in economic prosperity, little attention has been paid to the oldest and most fundamental of human institutions: kin-based institutions---the set of social norms governing descent, marriage, clan membership, post-marital...

Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop-based economies experienced a substantial deceleration of growth since the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. Rodrik (1999) has demonstrated that the magnitude of a country's growth deceleration since the 1970s is a function of both the...

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the causal nexus connecting social capital's diverse aspects to the "quality" of economic development in Italy. The analysis accounts for three main social capital dimensions (i.e., bonding, bridging and linking social capital) and measures them...

This paper investigates the channels through which the middle class may matter for consumption growth and development. Determinants of the size and the growth of the middle class are also examined. Using several different middle class measures and a panel of 72 developing countries spanning the...

This paper provides a broad empirical analysis of the determinants of post-conflict economic transitions across the world during the period 1960–2010, using a dynamic panel estimation approach based on the system-generalized method of moments. In addition to an array of demographic,...

This paper examines the impact of financial depth on macroeconomic volatility using a dynamic panel analysis for 110 advanced and developing countries. We find that financial depth plays a significant role in dampening the volatility of output, consumption, and investment growth, but only up to...

The “middle-income trap” is the phenomenon of hitherto rapidly growing economies stagnating at middle-income levels and failing to graduate into the ranks of high-income countries. In this study we examine the middle-income trap as a special case of growth slowdowns, which are identified as...

The paper reviews the “stylized facts” on economic growth gathered by Easterly and Levine in their 2001 joint paper and illustrates some of the points made on the basis of data from the IMF’s World Economic Outlook on real growth and per capita GDP since 1970. The data show that the growth...