This paper extends and modifies the Keynesian critique of inflation targeting with reference to stabilisation policy in emerging market economies. The IMF `basic monetary programming framework` for developing countries uses government borrowing and the exchange rate as policy instruments in...

In his Nobel lecture, Friedman built on his earlier argument for a 'natural rate of unemployment' by painting a picture of an economics profession which, as a result of foolish mistakes, had accepted the Phillips curve as offering a lasting trade-off between inflation and unemployment and were...

How much does public capital matter for economic growth? How large should it be? This paper attempts to answer these questions, taking the case of SSA countries. It develops and estimates a model that posits a nonlinear relationship between public investment and growth, to determine the...

The paper uses the Lewis model as a framework for examining the labour market progress of two labour-abundant countries, China and South Africa, towards labour shortage and generally rising labour real incomes. In the acuteness of their rural-urban divides, forms of migrant labour, rapid...

This paper is a preliminary draft of a chapter for the new Handbook of Labour Economics edited by Orley Ashenfelter and David Card and Published by North Holland.

This paper explores whether the patent law and intellectual property rights (IPR) system have resulted in innovation in China during the reform period. It appears that the patent laws have produced a stock of patents, where the success rates of patent applications are fairly uniform across the...

This paper analyzes regime shifts in the stochastic process of economic growth of six major OECD countries over three decades. For the statistical measurement of the underlying global business cycle, we generalize Hamilton's model of the US business cycle to a Markov-switching vector...

This paper examines the relation between financial, corporate and legal systems, and economic performance in different countries. It reviews international comparisons that undertake detailed analyses of individual, developed countries and studies that use large, cross-country data banks,...

The paper extends existing work on inequality and economic development by estimating a cross-country structural model that identifies bi-directional relationships between income inequality and other indicators of social and economic development. Overall, lower inequality is associated with...

This paper evaluates relations between industrial activity and the structure of countries’ financial, ownership and legal systems. Using data on 27 industries in 14 OECD countries over the period 1970 to 1995, we evaluate whether the structure of countries` systems is associated with...