This paper analyses the impact of cost competitiveness and technology on export performance using a very rich panel datset of 12 manufacturing industries in 14 OECD countries for the period between 1970 and 1992.

Panel data on 54 developing countries between 1960 and 2000 are used to investigate how the impact of opening to trade on economic growth is affected by wealth inequality.  The results suggest (a) that opening to trade tends to accelerate growth but (b) that the addition to growth depends...

What is the impact of modern transportation technology on long-run economic change in poor countries with high trade costs?  Rail construction in colonial Sub-Saharan Africa provides a natural experiment: 90% of African rail-road lines were built before independence, in a context where...

Expansion in mobile phone coverage has improved access to information throughout the developing world, particularly within sub-Saharan Africa.  The existing evidence suggests that information technology has improved market efficiency and reduced consumer prices for certain commodities.  There...

We report the short-term results from a randomized evaluation of a mobile phone literacy and numeracy program (Project ABC) in Niger, in which adult literacy students learned how to use mobile phones as part of a literacy and numeracy class.  Students in ABC villages showed substantial gains in...

UK inflation varied greatly over 1865-1990, in response to many policy and exchange-rate regimes, two world wars and oil crises, and major legislative, and technological changes. It is modelled as responding to excess demands from all sectors of the economy: goods and services, factors of...

This paper studies the distributional impact of commodity price shocks over both the short and very long run.  Using a GARCH model, we find that Australia experienced more volatility than many commodity exporting developing countries over the periods 1865-1940 and 1960-2007.  A single equation...

Many previous studies of the role of trade during the British Industrial Revolution have found little or no role for trade in explaining British living standards or growth rates.  We construct a three-region model of the world in which Britain trades with North America and the rest of the...

Why do so many African governments consistently impose high tax rates and make little investment in productive public goods when alternative policies could yield greater tax revenues and higher national income? We posit and test an intertemporal political economy model in which the government...

Do openness to trade and higher levels of human capital promote faster productivity growth? That they do is a key implication of several versions of endogenous growth theory. To answer the question we use panel data on 93 countries spanning the 1970-2000 period. Controlling for fixed effects as...