An unstable macroeconomic environment is often regarded as detrimental to economic growth. Among the sources contributing to such instability, much of the blame has been assigned to political issues. This paper empirically tests for a causal and negative long-run relationship between political...

The recent financial crisis in East Asia generated a revival of interest in the merits of financial openness. The ensuing debate on the benefits of openness has focused more on short and medium run issues than on the long run effects. Within the empirical literature on economic growth, little or...

Economic growth and development is a complicated process that falls into the domain of many disciplines in social sciences and humanities. It is natural then to study fundamental aspects of economic growth synthesizing research in relevant fields. In this short paper, we argue that this has...

Although recet research has repeatedly found a negative association between investment and socio-political instability (SPI), the existence and direction of causality between these two variables has not yet been investigated. We construct an index of SPI for non-overlaping five-years periods...

This paper explores the quantitative implications of a class of endogenous growth models for cross-country income differences. These models exhibit international spillovers, no scale effects and conditional convergence, and thus they overcome some difficulties faced by the early generation of...

The paper explores the impacts of heterogeneity in degree of relative risk aversion on the balance on current account in a two-country endogenous growth model. It concludes that, like the heterogeneity of demographic changes, the heterogeneity in degree of relative risk aversion generates...

This short paper analyzes Namibia's data from 1968 to 1992 in order to determine the role of exports in economic growth. The analysis confirms the general importance of exports, but finds no discernible sign of accelerated growth because of it. There is some evidence supporting the political...

The proposition that trade causes economic growth has enriched international economic theory. Even so, how best to estimate and test for the effects of trade on economic growth remains a challenge to-date, mainly because of the joint determination of the empirical measures of both trade and...

This paper proposes a two-country 'economic' model (in the sense that it contains utility and profit maximization motives), in which a low-income economy enjoys a high growth rate relative to a high-income economy, thanks to importing technologies (or 'machines') invented in the high- income...

This paper develops a growth theory that accounts for the evolution of trade policy, underlying internal class conflicts, and global income divergence over the last few centuries. By analyzing political responses to the distributional effects of international trade, this paper finds a prominent...