This paper investigates how telecommunications infrastructure affects economic growth. This issue is important and has received considerable attention in the popular press concerning the creation of the 'information superhighway' and its potential impacts on the economy. We use evidence from 21...

Do reduced costs of factor mobility mitigate ‘Dutch Disease’ symptoms? The case of federations provides an indication for this. By investigating ‘Resource Curse’ effects in all federations for which complete data is available at the regional level it is observed that within federations...

Natural resource abundance is a blessing for some countries, yet is a curse for others. The degree of fiscal decentralization may account for this divergent outcome. Resources tend to locate in remote, non-agglomerated, and sparsely populated areas; a high degree of fiscal decentralization gives...

In this article, long term data is analysed for the total growth of the world economy and the growth of developed (G7) and of the rapid developing economies. The total population of BRICS and MATIK countries generate 49,16% of the the world’s population, and their economic size generates...

Even though, there are so many so long discussions on the relation between population increase and economic growth, today, general opinion tends to believe that there is a direct relation between population increase and economic growth. This opinion is supported by some empirical studies....

This study evaluates the impact of public external debt on long term economic growth of forty least developed countries (LDCs). Arellano-Bond SGMM method is used on unbalanced panel data spanning from 1975 to 2010. A comparative analysis based on different debt specifications and samples is...

This paper extends the standard growth regression model by adding an assumption that a country follows the global technology frontier either fully or partially. This additional assumption changes significantly the growth regression model and its results in three main ways. First, it shows that...

Do countries with lower policy-induced barriers to international trade grow faster, once other relevant country characteristics are controlled for? There exists a large empirical literature providing an affirmative answer to this question. We argue that methodological problems with the empirical...

This article explains the peculiarities of institutional effects on growth rates in post-communist countries. By proposing a certain dependence of the institution-growth nexus on the nature of institutional emergence, the distinction between revolutionary and evolutionary processes of...

Looking at economic trends in industrialized countries during the time frame 1965 to 1995, there has been an upward trend in unemployment, which appears to be related to the slowdown of economic growth. However, the relation between unemployment and a slowing growth pattern stems from an...