While high fertility persists in the poorest countries and fertility declines with per capita income in developing countries, fertility and per capita income are now positively associated across most developed countries. This paper presents a model where a Ushaped relationship between overall...

Many scholars have argued that once “basic needs” have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing...

We investigate if greater electricity availability helps countries ascend to faster economic growth trajectories. This is an important question for many developing countries that are currently prioritizing infrastructure investments. Using cross-sectional and panel regressions with...

The recent environmental challenges in Africa emanated from global warming, human activity, limited access to electricity, and over exploitation of natural resources, have contributed to the growth of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the region. This paper empirically investigates the...

We present estimates of the relationship between the share of income accruing to the middle class and GDP per capita of ASEAN economies. The increase in GDP per capita that ASEAN economies experienced during 1970-2010 significantly contributed to a higher share of income accruing to the middle...

Global uncertainty shocks are associated with a sharp decline in global inflation, global growth and in the global interest rate. Over 1981 to 2014 global financial uncertainty forecasts 18.26% and 14.95% of the variation in global growth and global inflation respectively. Global uncertainty...

Larry Summers' re-use of the phrase appears justified in the present global economic climate since many factors contribute to comparatively poor OECD economic performance and weakening macroeconomic policy instruments. Some are measurement issues and others might be seen as the downsides of...

In this paper we examine the empirical relationship between economic openness and nationalism. We replicate and extend the cross-country analysis of Lan and Li (2015) using additional measures of nationalism and additional years of data from the World Values Survey. We fail to find the negative...

This paper uses per capita data for 132 countries over 1960–2010 to estimate elasticities of sectoral energy use with respect to national gross domestic product (GDP). We estimate models in both levels and growth rates and use our estimates to sectorally decompose the aggregate energy-GDP...

This paper extends Piketty's analysis of the wealth-income ratio used as a proxy for wealth inequality, to allow for innovation. Drawing on a Schumpeterian (R&D-based) growth model that incorporates both tangible and intangible capital and using historical data for 21 OECD countries, we find the...