Most emerging market economies (EMEs) which have implemented inflation targeting (IT) have continued to experience large, frequent and sometimes persistent inflation target misses. At the same time these countries had reformed their institutional structures when implementing IT. In this paper we...

This paper aims to construct a new set of institutional indicators for Malawi. Our political freedom index correlates strongly with the Freedom House political rights and civil liberties indices, but consists of a far longer time series, which can be used to examine long-run issues with greater...

This paper investigates the channels through which colonial origin affects economic outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It focuses on four key channels of transmission namely, human capital, trade openness, market distortion and selection bias. In contrast with previous studies where only...

Natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from a bad reputation. Oil and diamonds, particularly, have been blamed for a number of Africa’s illnesses such as poverty, corruption, dictatorship and war. This paper outlines the different areas and transmission channels of how this so-called...

We use a set of established growth models, which simultaneously include human capital and R&D, to show that the effect of mortality rate in human capital accumulation is quantitatively more important than the effect of perfectly guaranteed patents on research. First, we show that the effect of...