Financial crisis has connected Europe with an obvious common pattern which consists the rapidly rise of protest parties that challenge the established political systems. The basic and new feature of these schemes is the intense war rhetoric against the European Union and the vehement rejection...

The world’s financial crisis happened in 2008, but the U.S. individual households’ income and savings crisis happened before that: the latter one was already at crisis point in 2005 and 2006. The key of any analysis about the households’ income and savings crisis should start with the...

Annotated remarks made at the 50th Anniversary Conference “Fortalecimiento institucional de los bancos centrales y efectividad de la política monetaria”, of the Central Bank of Nicaragua, February 2010. The paper lays out the importance of institutional strenthening (governance) as an...

The aim of this survey is to explain the real impact of aid on governance in the developing countries: including the subsahara and the MENA region during the period 1990-2004 by using the “threshold theory”. Stephen Knack proved that foreign aid had a harmful impact on the governance of the...

Corruption is a symptom and outcome of institutional deficiency, with potentially adverse effects on economic growth. This paper aims to provide a synthesis of the existing evidence on the relationship between corruption and economic growth - controlling for effect type, data sources, and...

This paper compares more direct measures of the institutional environment with both the instability proxies used by Barro (1991) and the Gastil indices, by comparing their effects both on growth and private investment. The results provide substantial support for the position that the...