Existing studies analyzing the so-called ‘resource curse’ hypothesis regress growth in gross domestic product (GDP) on some measure of resource-intensity. This is problematic as GDP counts natural and other capital depreciation as income. Deducting depreciation from GDP to arrive at genuine...

There is an established theoretical and empirical case-study literature arguing that environmental pressure groups have a real impact on pollution levels. Our original contribution to this literature is to provide the first systematic quantitative test of the strength of environmental...

Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have become the most important legal mechanism for the encouragement of foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries. Yet practically no systematic evidence exists on what motivates capital-exporting developed countries to sign BITs earlier with...

Nation-states employ visa restrictions to manage the complex trade-off between facilitating the entrance to their territory by passport holders from certain countries for economic and political reasons and deterring individuals from other countries for reasons of perceived security and...

This study addresses state militarization under conditions of ethnic and other diversity. Recent scholarship in economics finds that high diversity leads to lower provision of public goods. At the same time, conflict studies find that highly diverse societies face a lower risk of civil war...

After the non-binding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, many global and regional human rights treaties have been concluded. Critics argue that these are unlikely to have made any actual difference in reality. Others contend that international regimes can improve respect for human rights in...

A number of recent studies have illustrated the link between health and growth (Gallup and Sachs 2000, McCarthy et al. 2000, Bhargava et al. 2000). This paper argues that a key mechanism through which health affects growth is via total factor productivity (TFP). We first estimate TFP based on a...

While democracy’s effect on economic growth has come under intense empirical scrutiny, its effect on economic sustainability has been noticeably neglected. We assess the effects of regime type and democratic institutional design on economic, or “weak” sustainability. Sustainability...

This article analyzes the impact of HIV/AIDS on the global convergence in life expectancy as well as infant and child survival rates by comparing two scenarios. One is based on actual estimated and extrapolated values given the existence of the epidemic (‘AIDS- scenario’). The other is based...