Economic theory has identified a number of channels through which openness to international financial flows could raise productivity growth. However, while there is a vast empirical literature analyzing the impact of financial openness on output growth, far less attention has been paid to its...

We use recent immigration data from 195 countries and propose an index of population diversity based on people's birthplaces. This new index is then decomposed into a size (share of foreign born) and a variety (diversity of immigrants) component and is available for 1990 and 2000 disaggregated...

This paper argues that openness to goods trade in combination with an unequal distribution of political power has been a major determinant of the comparatively slow development of resource- or land-abundant regions like South America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. We develop a...

This paper investigates the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and its causal relationships with economic growth and openness by using time series data (1971-2006) from China (an emerging market), Korea (a newly industrialized country), and...

This paper presents new estimates of the economic benefits from economic and political integration. Using the synthetic counterfactuals method, we estimate how GDP per capita and labour productivity would have behaved for the countries that joined the European Union (EU) in the 1973, 1980s, 1995...

In this paper we develop a new empirical approach to uncovering the impact of social attitudes on economic development. We first show that trust of second-generation Americans is significantly influenced by the country of origin of their forebears. In the spirit of the epidemiology literature,...

International trade, as a major factor of openness, has made an increasingly significant contribution to economic growth. Chinese international trade has experienced rapid expansion together with its dramatic economic growth which has made the country to target the world as its market. This...

We examine the trajectories of the real unit labour costs (RULCs) in a selection of Eurozone economies. Strong asymmetries in the convergence process of the RULCs and its components – real wages, capital intensity, and technology – are uncovered through decomposition and cluster analyses. In...

According to recent UN projections more than 50 percent of the growth in world population over the next half century will be due to population growth in Africa. Given this, any policy that influences African demography will have a significant impact on the world distribution of income. In this...

This paper develops a long-run growth model for a major oil exporting economy and derives conditions under which oil revenues are likely to have a lasting impact. This approach contrasts with the standard literature on the "Dutch disease" and the "resource curse", which primarily focuses on...