This study examines the impact of two dimensions of the government, namely, size and quality, on two dimensions of the financial sector, size and efficiency, in a cross section of 71 economies. The study finds that while increased quality of the government as measured by governance and legal...

This article investigates whether female political representation affects economic growth. Panel estimates for 119 democracies using fixed effects specifications and a system generalized method of moments approach suggest that, over recent decades, countries with higher shares of women in...

This study shows that despite a strong empirical association between gender differentials in enrolment ratios and democracy, that democracy alone does not explain gender differentials in education in Africa and Asia. The results indicate that income, employment in agriculture, religious...

We investigate the partial effects of institutions and human capital on growth. We find that cross-country regressions of the log-level of per capita GDP on instrumented measures of institutions and schooling are uninformative about the relative importance of institutions and human capital in...

This paper presents long-term estimates of gross fixed capital formation for 1951-2007 that are disaggregated by categories of productive assets. These data, combined with approximations of probable average asset lives and a feasible asset retirement method are used in a Perpetual Inventory...

This paper revisits the discussion about the contribution of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth to Indonesia’s economic growth during 1970-2007. It re-estimates the contribution of TFP to economic growth during this period on the basis of new estimates of GDP, capital stock,...

This paper examines the determinants of economic growth in developing countries within the standard growth regression framework, with special attention being paid to the experience of landlocked countries. The results confirm the findings of previous studies that landlockedness hampers economic...

Productivity growth is carefully scrutinized by macroeconomists because it plays key roles in understanding private savings behaviour, the sources of macroeconomic shocks, the evolution of international competitiveness and the solvency of public pension systems, among other things. However,...

This paper considers the implications of the conceptual difference between the rental price of capital, embedded in the neoclassical cost identity (output equals the cost of labour plus the cost of capital), and used in growth accounting studies; and the profit rate, which can be derived from...

This paper shows that unit labor costs (ulcs), the most widely used measure of competitiveness, can be interpreted as the labor share in output multiplied by a price-adjustment factor. This has three main implications. First, ulcs are not just a technical concept since they embody the social...