Major changes have occurred in the structure of former centrally planned economies, including a sharp rise in the share of services in GDP, employment and international transactions. However, large differences exist across transition economies with respect to services intensity and services...

We analyse an economy that lacks a strong legal-political institutional infrastructure and is populated by multiple powerful groups. Powerful groups dynamically interact via a fiscal process that effectively allows open access to the aggregate capital stock. In equilibrium, this leads to slow...

The World Bank's The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy makes official what East Asian specialists had long known: most of the high-performing Asian economies have had extensive government intervention, and some of these interventions, in the areas of credit and exports, have...

This paper integrates in a unified and tractable framework some of the key insights of the field of international trade and economic growth. It examines a sequence of theoretical models that share a common description of technology and preferences but differ on their assumptions about trade...

What is the relationship between economic growth and its volatility? Does political instability affect growth directly or indirectly, through volatility? This paper tries to answer such questions using a power-ARCH framework with annual time series data for Argentina from 1896 to 2000. We show...

We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions 'trumps' everything else. Once institutions are...

We analyse an economy where managers engage both in the adoption of technologies from the world frontier and in innovation activities. The selection of high-skill managers is more important for innovation activities. As the economy approaches the technology frontier, selection becomes more...

This paper argues that domestic social conflicts are a key to understanding why growth rates lack persistence and why so many countries have experienced a growth collapse after the mid-1970s. It emphasizes, in particular, the manner in which social conflicts interact with external shocks on the...

Analysis of the contribution of education to growth through its role in promoting a common culture indicates that when different cultural groups separately determine the social content of their school curricula excessive polarization can result, with less than optimal growth. The optimal...

Industrialization allowed the industrialized world of today to escape from a regime characterized by low economic and population growth and to enter a regime of high economic and population growth. To explain this transition, we construct a two-sector growth model with endogenous fertility and...