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...

Assuming that J. S. Mill and others are correct in their belief that trust matters for the economic performance of nations, the determinants of trust become important. Section 2 discusses the sources of trust and briefly summarizes empirical evidence. Section 3 builds on Fukuyama’s concept of...

This paper describes the gradual accumulation of indicators and evidence of the links between governance and growth, focusing on broad cross-country analyses. While each governance indicator developed thus far is in some way imperfect, the faults of some measures are entirely independent from...

Zak & Knack (2001) demonstrate that interpersonal trust substantially impacts economic growth, and that sufficient interpersonal trust is necessary for economic development. To investigate the ability of policy-makers to affect trust levels, this paper builds a formal model characterizing public...

We reconstruct a dataset used by Persson and Tabellini (AER, 1994) to test the robustness of their finding that inequality reduces income growth, but only in democracies. We find that their result is highly sensitive to the use of data sources on both democracy and inequality. When we substitute...

This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, it introduces a new, easily accessed and objective measure of the enforceability of contracts and the security of property rights. Second, it uses this measure to provide additional and more direct evidence about the importance of...

According to Kaldor (1970), regional growth patterns arise from a cumulative causation process as broadly combining two substantial mechanisms i.e. a productivity regime, known as the “Kaldor-Verdoorn” law, and a demand regime due to the expansion of exportations. This paper attempts to...

Indeed, it has been asserted that the most fundamental resource in the modern economy is knowledge while the most important process of economic development is learning. Therefore, e-commerce is an important contributor to the learning process which shapes economic performance. In fact, it...

The principal contribution of this article is that it provides evidence of recent trends of inequality in Guyana, but the article goes beyond this and describes the evolution of inequality since 1974 to 2013. This is done within a Kaleckian framework to derive profit and wage rates, since recent...

In our previous paper “Can Trust Explain Social Capital Effect on Property Rights and Growth?” (Hall & Ahmad, 2013) we show that generalized trust data by the World Value Survey (WVS) are unable to yield sufficiently robust results in panel estimation due to missing observations problem. In...