By studying the interaction between social capital and decentralization, we show that political decentralization can be a source of divergence across heterogeneous regions. In particular, we claim that since the local endowments of social capital display their effect on the economy mainly...

Is tourism an opportunity for lagging countries in the elusive quest for growth (Easterly, 2002)‘ Recent empirical evidence suggests that the answer is a cautious yes. Aggregate cross-country data show that tourism specialization is likely to be associated with higher per capita GDP growth...

We analyze the empirical relationship between growth, country size and tourism specialization by using a dataset covering the period 1980-2003. We find that small tourism countries grow significantly faster than all the other sub-groups considered in our analysis. The reason for this is neither...