Is tourism an opportunity for lagging countries in the elusive quest for growth (Easterly, 2002)? Recent empirical evidence suggests that the answer is a cautious yes. Aggregate cross-country data show that tourism specialization is likely to be associated with higher per capita GDP growth rates...

In order to activate the cycle of wealth production, promote social justice and eliminate poverty and inequality, developing countries are currently faced with a multiplicity of structural problems. According to some economic theories, this is mainly due to inefficient or lack of access to...

Using data on a panel of 56 democratic countries in the period 1975-2004, we find evidence of a negative association between political stability and economic growth which is stronger and empirically more robust in countries with high bureaucratic costs. Motivated by these results, which contrast...

We develop an endogenous growth model to study the long run consequences of offshoring with firm heterogeneity and incomplete contracts. In so doing, we model offshoring as the geographical fragmentation of a firm’s production chain between a home upstream division and a foreign downstream...

This paper addresses two hot topics of the contemporary debate, social capital and economic growth. Our theoretical analysis sheds light on decisive but so far neglected issues: how does social capital accumulate over time? Which is the relationship between social capital, technical progress and...

Over the past century, all OECD countries have been characterized by a dramatic increase in economic conditions, life expectancy and educational attainment. This paper provides a positive theory that explains how an economy might evolve when the longevity of its citizens both influences and is...

The objective of this study is to investigate the validity of the Kaldor-Verdoorn’s Law in explaining the long run determinants of the labor productivity growth for the manufacturing sector of some developed economies (Western European Countries, Australia, Canada, Japan and United States). We...

This study examines whether today’s technical change depends on yesterday’s technical change. We propose to investigate this feedback effect by using the technical-change component of the Malmquist productivity index. This approach can overcome some problems in alternative patent-citation...

This paper proposes a fixed-effect panel methodology that enables us to simultaneously take into account both TFP convergence and the traditional neoclassical-type of convergence. We analyse a sample of Italian regions between 1963 and 1993 and find strong evidence that both mechanisms were at...

Do intermediate goods help explain relative and aggregate productivity differences across countries? Three observations suggest they do: (i) intermediates are relatively expensive in poor countries; (ii) goods industries demand intermediates more intensively than service industries; (iii) goods...