This article offers a critical review of recent literature on Chinese legal tradition and argues that some subtle but fundamental differences between the Western and Chinese legal traditions are highly relevant to our explanation of the economic divergence in the modern era. This paper seeks to...

In a two-country Schumpeterian growth model, we study the incentives for basic research investments by governments in a globalized world. We find that a country's basic research investments increase with the country's level of human capital and decline with its own market size. This may explain...

Much more than comparative advantage and free markets have been at play in shaping China's export success. Government policies have helped nurture domestic capabilities in consumer electronics and other advanced areas that would most likely not have developed in their absence. As a result, China...

This paper investigates the effects of financial development and political instability on economic growth in a power-ARCH framework with data for Argentina from 1896 to 2000. Our findings suggest that (i) informal or unanticipated political instability (e.g., guerrilla warfare) has a direct...

Although the theoretical literature has identified various sizeable benefits from foreign direct investment inflows (FDI), the empirical literature has been unable to establish a positive and significant impact of FDI on the rates of economic growth of host countries. One reason for this...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model of North-South trade and economic growth. Both innovation and imitation rates are endogenously determined as well as the degree of wage inequality between Northern and Southern workers. Northern firms devote resources to innovative R&D to...

The aim of this paper is to identify possibilities for guiding policy in the area of basic research. We provide an extended review of basic research and offer new insights on its linkages to key economic variables and economic growth. After defining what basic research is, we identify and...

This paper looks at the economic impact of secession through the lens of the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. It uses an econometric analysis covering the period between 1956 and 2011 – including a series of factors linked to the independence process, socioeconomic and structural...

We investigate the effects of short-term political motivations on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Donor countries’ political motives might reduce the effectiveness of conditionality, channel aid to inferior projects, reduce the aid bureaucracy’s effort, and change the power structure in...

A quantitative investigation of financial intermediation in the U.S. over the past 130 years yields the following results : (i) the finance industry’s share of GDP is high in the 1920s, low in the 1950s and 1960s, and high again in the 1990s and 2000s; (ii) most of these variations can be...