This thesis examines the impact of institutions, especially the financial institutions, on international trade and foreign direct investments. The first four chapters study the financial institutions and their impact on trade and international specialization. Specifically, the first chapter...

This paper studies the determinants of poverty dynamics in several rural areas from Madagascar. A particular attention is devoted to testing if rural poverty persistence in Madagascar could be explained by a vicious circle leading to a poverty trap. Annual poverty transitions retrieved from an...

Hospital heterogeneity is a major issue in defining a reimbursement system. If hospitals are heterogeneous, it is difficult to distinguish which part of the differences in costs is due to cost containment efforts and which part cannot be reduced, because it is due to other unobserved sources of...

In this paper, we implement Granger causalty tests using panel data as methodology perfected by Hurlin (2004, 2005) and Hurlin and Venet(2004). We consider the bilateral trade patterns of the European Union with 17 countries over the period 1976-2000. We show that for the whole sample, there are...

This article analyses an individual microcredit program developed in Rio’s shantytowns. We study its selection criteria and the determinants of borrowers’ repayment performance. More specifically, this work aims to study the link between informality and credit discipline. First, we question...

Using panel data from Argentina during the 1990’s, this paper concludes that, in Argentina, income ‘mobiles’ did change over time. Among the household variables with a structural relation with income dynamics, we find university education, protecting from income declines though not...

In many poor countries, the problem is not that governments do not invest, but that these investments do not create productive capital. So, the cost of public investments does not correspond to the value of the capital stocks. In this paper, we propose an original non parametric approach to...

Periods for european convergence Real convergence of european economies is disputed in recent studies which suggest an opposition between real and nominal convergence. This paper enlarges the perspective and considers real convergence over différents periods covering twelve decades. Results for...

The authors provide various estimates of the government net capital stocks for a panel of 26 developing countries over the period 1970-2001. Two kinds of internationally comparable series of public capital stocks are presented. The first estimates are based on the standard perpetual inventory...