Utilizing panel data for 19 OECD countries we find suppor t for the hypothesis that a greater degree of product variety relative to the US helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels. The empirical work relies upon some direct measures of product variety calculated from 6-digit OECD export...

Using a new specification, we reanalyze the data on worldwide environmental quality investigated by Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger in a well-known paper on the environmental Kuznets curve (which postulates an inverse U shaped relationship between income level and pollution). The new...

The positive association between trade openness and income has been debated over years due to serious estimation flaws prevailing in the cross-country empirical trade literature. The present paper contributes to this debate by re-examining the long-run relationship between trade openness and...

This paper examines the relationship between the logarithms of CO2 emissions and real GDP in China by applying fractional integration and cointegration methods. The univariate results indicate that the two series are highly persistent, their orders of integration being around 2, whilst the...

We construct the world's centers of gravity for human population, GDP and CO2 emissions by taking the best out of five recognized data sources covering the last two centuries. On the basis of a novel distorsion-free representation of these centers of gravity, we find a radical Western shift of...

Economic research has considered Private Debt a determinant of GDP growth for years. By keeping this perspective, the objective of this work is to understand how much of the GDP response to a monetary shock is due to the variation of private debt. This is the marginal contribution of private...

This paper explores a new theoretical and empirical approach to the assessment of human wellbeing, relevant to current challenges of social fragmentation in the presence of globalization and technological advance. We present two indexes of well-being - solidarity (S) and agency (A) - to be...

This paper revisits the hypothesis that landlocked regions are systematically poorer than regions with ocean access, using panel data for 1,527 subnational regions in 83 nations from 1950-2014. This data structure allows us to exploit within-country-time variation only (e.g., regional variation...

The paper contributes to the growing global VAR (GVAR) literature by showing how global and national shocks can be identified within a GVAR framework. The usefulness of the proposed approach is illustrated in an application to the analysis of the interactions between public debt and real output...

The study examined the causal linkage between oil price change and economic growth. The study made use of secondary data that were extracted from World Development Indicators and International Financial Statistics. Descriptive statistics, unit root test, Johansen cointegration test and Granger...