Following Max Weber, many theories have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With its religious heterogeneity, the Holy Roman Empire presents an ideal testing ground for this hypothesis. Using population figures of 272 cities in the years 1300–1900, I find...

This paper explores the non-linear relationship between financial development and economic growth. It mainly relies on the Panel Smooth Transition Regression (PSTR) model of Gonzalés et al. (2005) and three metrics of financial development to endogenously assess the impact of financial...

In this book the author analyses three very important aspects of transition: human resources, foreign investments and financial sector. At the beginning there is an analysis of investments in human resources. It starts by definition and types of human resources, and continues with definition of...

Foreign aid has evolved considerably over the last five decades in response to a dramatically changing global political and economic context. This paper takes a retrospective look at this process and discusses whether aid has been effective in furthering economic growth and development. The...

The aim of this paper is to empirically examine the relationship between Oil revenues, government spending and GDP growth in the kingdom of Bahrain. Oil revenues are the main source of financing government expenditures and imports of products. Increasing oil prices in the recent years have...

Our goal in this paper is to explore the validity of Wagner’s Law in Saudi Arabia during the period (1970-2012) for real oil GDP and Non-oil GDP. Wagner’s Law investigated that fundamental economic growth is validity to the public sector growth. In the previous studies have been tested the...

The latest current of classic school has put emphasis on central bank credibility and therefore monetary policy credibility as factor of efficiency of the monetary policy in terms of realisation of final objective. That is how in CEMAC zone, we have seen monetary reforms which going implicitly...

I maintain that fatalistic tendencies are the output of the interaction between cultural factors (and in particular of religious beliefs) and historical Institutional experience. Using WVS data this idea has been tested against two well known sociological theories on the origin of fatalism:...

We extend the Okada & Samreth (2012, EL) and Asongu (2012, EB) debate on ‘the effect of foreign aid on corruption’ by: not partially negating the former’s methodological underpinning (as in the latter’s approach) with a unifying empirical framework and; broadening the horizon of inquiry...

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....