Maintaining today’s global imbalances would help to overcome the major disproportion of our times – income gap between developed and developing countries. This gap was widening for 500 years and only now, in the recent 50 years, there are some signs that this gap is starting to decrease. The...

We suggest a dynamic game theoretic model to explain why resource abundance may lead to instability of democracy. Stationary Markov perfect equilibria of this game with four players – Politician, Oligarch, Autocrat and Public (voters) – are analyzed. Choosing a rate of resource rent tax,...

This paper examines the trajectory of growth in the Global South. Before the 1500s all countries were roughly at the same level of development, but from the 1500s Western countries started to grow faster than the rest of the world and PPP GDP per capita by 1950 in the US, the richest Western...

This paper summarizes theoretical arguments, empirical evidence, and econometric findings to support the statement that rational economic policies depend qualitatively on stages of development that are defined by productivity and institutional indicators of a country. We consider the impact of...

Cross-country regressions, reported in this paper for 1960-99 period, seem to suggest that the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves (FER) contributes to economic growth of a developing economy by increasing both the investment/GDP ratio and capital productivity. We offer the following...