As it approached the end of the 20th Century the multilateral trading system appeared to be on a high point. The WTO was in operation for five years, 50 years after the GATT had provided a stop-gap measure for the ill-fated ITO. With the failure of Seattle, the WTO begins the 21st Century with...

The relationship between openness and economic growth in developing countries has been fully analysed by a large number of empirical papers. Primary attention has been given to the advantages of an outward-oriented strategy and to the role of exports in economic performance. Nevertheless, the...

This paper argues that SSA has derived a minimal growth benefit from trade because of what it exports and that the detrimental effect of primary commodity export dependence on SSA growth can be captured by two structural variables, natural barriers to trade (NBT, trade costs) and natural...

Night-time light emissions are a popular proxy for growth in circumstances where official data are deemed unreliable. We show that the underlying relationship varies substantially across countries, undermining the imposition of a single slope common in the literature. We propose a two-step...

We expand Hanushek and Kimko’s (2000) analysis of the relationship between schooling quality, as measured by scores in international tests, and growth. We take account of another fifteen years of growth and approximately twice as many test score results. We treat the data first as a panel,...

Using data from 1980 to 2004, we show that greater fiscal policy volatility acts as a transmission mechanism for the "resource curse". Resource exports dominate political and institutional variables as determinants of fiscal policy volatility, with fiscal policy volatility being a significant...