IMF lending practices respond to economic conditions but are also sensitive to political-economy variables. Specifically, the sizes and frequencies of loans are influenced by a country's presence at the Fund, as measured by the country's share of quotas and professional staff. IMF lending is...

This paper presents an endogenous growth model of an open economy in which the growth rate of income is higher if foreign capital goods are used relatively more than domestic capital goods for the production of capital stock. Empirical results, using cross country data for the period 1960-85,...

For 116 countries from 1965 to 1985, the lowest quintile had an average growth rate of real per capita GDP of -1.3%, whereas the highest quintile had an average of 4.8%. We isolate five influences that discriminate reasonably well between the slow and fast-growers: a conditional convergence...