The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of recent attention. Yet empirical analyses of public capital productivity have generally been limited to the official capital stock estimates available in a small sample of countries. Alternatively, many researchers...

This paper analyzes a simple model that captures the relationship between institutional quality, the shadow economy and corruption. It shows that an improvement in institutional quality reduces the shadow economy and affects the corruption market. The exact relationship between corruption and...

We estimate output growth rate spectra for 58 countries. The spectra exhibit diverse shapes. To study the sources of this diversity, we estimate the short-run, business cycle, and long-run frequency components of the sampled series. For most OECD countries the bulk of the spectral mass is in the...

The purpose of this paper is to compare the different levels of tax rates on the use of the labour force in a range of OECD countries, using the methodology of effective marginal tax rates. Results for the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Japan, the United...

While economists continue to debate whether individual economic policies, such as those contained in Willliamsons (1993) Washington Consensus, can help to spur growth in developing countries, this paper demonstrates that it is groups of policies that are more critical for growth. Policy...

Following up on a previous paper by the same author on the contribution of ICT capital to growth and labor productivity in Poland 1995-2000, this paper extends the study to eight transition economies: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Slovakia and Slovenia. The paper shows that...

There is large evidence on a positive impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on economic growth and productivity in a number of developed countries in the 1990’s. There are however no studies, which would estimate the contribution of ICT to growth and productivity in...

This paper proposes a “before-and-after” approach to empirical examination of the relationship between democracy and growth. Rather than the commonly used cross-country regression method, this paper compares the economic performances of forty countries before and after they became...

Views of the future China vary widely. While some believe that the collapse of China is inevitable, others see the emergence of a new superpower that increasingly poses a threat to the U.S. This paper examines the economic growth prospects of China over the next two decades. Extrapolating past...

This research develops a theory about the role of within-country income inequality leading to overtaking in economic performance among countries. The theory captures two opposing effects of inequality on factor accumulation and suggests that the qualitative change in their combined effect is a...